Animals being animals - Meditations in an Emergency

Rosecrans Baldwin's Meditations in an Emergency is a newsletter of short weekly essays about beautiful things. 

A week ago, I was making dinner and it started snowing feathers. Outside the window, white and gray feathers on the wind. We live near a monastery. Maybe one of the nuns tossed a pillow out a window and it got hit by a truck? I heard a screech. Up in a tree, a large bird had pinned a smaller bird against one of the branches. I forgot that birds eat birds, but of course they do. It was mesmerizing. The same night, I read some of John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra. “We see that everything in Nature called destruction must be creation,—a change from beauty to beauty.” An hour later, feathers were still falling. 

Image: American Sparrow Hawk, John J. Audubon’s Birds of America