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I loooooove people — lol. Of all that is unfortunate in human behavior, I would say that our most tragic behavioral tendency as a species is to over-persistently detect differences amongst ourselves, and then to find in those differences always something to hate. If we have developed this tendency over time because there has always been something to fear, then it may already be in our blood, and it will be hard to get it out. Our children are born with fear, in effect. To cure them, we should have to remove them from fear’s influence for several generations. That sounds a lot like a science fiction movie plot, doesn’t it?

If human life without fear is a hopeless fantasy, then let us LAUGH, as HARD as possible, and at EVERY opportunity!

I took the above picture earlier this year during a trip to Australia. I was hosted by some wonderful people who did their best to make me and Lauren “feel not the aliens” in a strange land. The picture is supposed to be goofy. The beetle is poised, but not elegant. The ramp is make-shift. The circumstances of his arrival are filled with excitement, and the dramatic sky echoes (comically) the drama the scene does not otherwise contain.

I think we are all of us tripping and blundering and arriving all the time. If we have any courage at all, some of the arrivals we make will be into territories we have not previously explored. Hooray the explorer, but let us who travel take manners with us wherever we go. And to those who may be called to receive the occasional alien to his house, I would suggest: “Just smile whene’er a stranger calls, and laugh out loud whene’er he falls.”

The simple desire to “get across”, to make it from A to B, to progress, to evolve… is centrally human. We all consider many challenges of different magnitude at many different moments of our lives. We pray we are sufficient to the task. We pray our struggles and our difficulties will be rewarded in some way… if only with greater understanding than we had before.

I really like bridges. Sometimes we build them just for ourselves. Sometimes we build them for others to use. Sometimes a bridge, once built, endures for a very long time. I know for a fact that some bridges have changed the course of history, as much for the traffic they permitted to flow as for what they inspired in the people who looked upon them.

I really like this bridge because it seems to so little disturb its gorgeous surroundings. There is clearly human work in evidence. But one must wonder, did the tree fall? Or was it felled, in order to provide this needful passage?

more gorgeous scenes from nature and the wilderness | san francisco bay bridge