A Naturalist’s Journal

by M. Yuvan

Host plant or host planet, its excessive exploitation turns out to be no path to survival!

We live in an age where competition, domination and one-upmanship are portrayed as the crucial elements for survival. Where power and influence both subtle and glaring, are thought primarily necessary for one’s deepest fulfillment and gratification. But the ant and the caterpillar, like the Honey guide and the Badger or the Hermit crab and the Sea anemone, are beacons for a different kind of community. A community where relating and relationship, synergy and symbiosis and being there for one another, are regarded above everything else.

An excerpt from a chapter on the the relation between ants and the blue gram butterfly caterpillar. Yuvan makes such insightful observations of the natural world and captures it in his beautiful words. Time and again proves that so much can be learnt from just observing nature.

Affluence is a poison to empathy.

Felt like this often. Infact it feels like a self-made prison.

Now watch a spider every day on its web sharing your room, its stillness will acquire meaning, its silence will speak to you and its slightest movements will be dramatic events and so will you begin to be touched by life’s slightest gestures.

How observing a spider can help appreciate the little things in life

Muir stated “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”