We all need to be nurtured. In fact, we humans are born exceptionally helpless. It takes many months, no years, before a newborn can acquire all the skills necessary to survive.
This photo which I took at Lake Annecy this year, shows an adult bird feeding a fish to a young bird. Watching them reminded me of watching the Hoopoes in the garden. You know what a Hoopoe looks like?
The Department where I live in France, the Charente Maritime, has the Hoopoe as its symbol, or mascot. You can see the silhouette of it on information boards and roadsigns, but before I came to live in this part of the world I’d never seen this particular species of bird. It still looks incredibly exotic to me. Often it seems African I feel, and just visiting here. I don’t know enough about its lifestyle to know if it does spend part of every year in Africa, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Anyway, these Hoopoes have long curved beaks which they use to drill down below the grass and come up with a grub or a worm. I have no idea how it does that. How on earth does it know where to dig? More than once I’ve watched a young Hoopoe hopping along near one of its parents, and every time the parent finds some food they feed it to the youngster. Then one day the youngster was there all by itself. It drilled its beak down into the grass and came up with nothing. So it tried somewhere else and still came up with nothing. This went on all morning. I began to think, oh no, how on earth is this little bird going to survive? It doesn’t know how to find food, and nobody is teaching it. A couple of days later I saw it again, and, somehow, something had clicked. Just like its parents, it would drill its beak down and come up with a grub or a worm….almost as often as one of the adults would do.
OK, so for this bird, that learning how to find food and nourish itself took a few days. How long does it take we humans?
I’ve read that it’s this long, long period of dependency which creates, or at least, develops, the human capacity for relationships. If a baby can’t form relationships which nurture them, they won’t survive. And here’s the thing. I don’t know about birds, but certainly for we humans, nurture can’t be reduced to nutrition. The mind needs to be nurtured. The heart needs to be nurtured. We need to noticed, cared for, cared about, loved. People will wither and die without nurture.
We have a tendency to think of ourselves as completely separate beings. Our current societies privilege the idea of a “self made man”, of “independence”, of “individual responsibility”. But, it’s absolutely true that “no man is an island”. We are not “sufficient unto ourselves”. We are probably THE most highly developed creatures on the planet in terms of our sociability. We can empathise, imagine what another life might be like. We can love, and care, and delight in others. We are moved by the pain and suffering of others. Indeed, when we see war, violence and abuse, we can only make sense of it by postulating a pathological inability of the aggressor to imagine the lives of the others?
How different would the world be if we never forgot that? If we could never ignore our empathic imagination? If we KNEW every single day that we only exist because of our intricate web of relationships, past, present and future? We are not completely separate. We never were.
Heroes Not Zombies 