I don't think you can have too many enthusiasms. Curiosity, wonder, pleasure, admiration, intellectual and emotional satisfaction, aesthetic insight, the joy of looking, gazing, seeing, taking in, revelling in - there is probably a thesaurus of descriptors for that human responsiveness to that which is beyond ourselves, and draws us towards it to be touched, enriched, made to pay attention, and somewhere out of our depths comes gratitude and the awareness that what we are encountering is blessing.
That's how I feel about the snow leopard. When Peter Matthiessen's book was published 30 something years ago, about his journey to Nepal to try to see the snow leopard in the wilds, I read it and discovered a world of which I knew nothing. It's the story of his journey towards a healing of the heart after the loss of his wife - the seeking of the snow leopard almost a parallel search for the one he had lost. It is in my own canon of books, a great book.
So the other day when aol posted this picture of snow leopard cubs, I was taken back to the summer I read Matthiessen's book for the first time. And the picture shows why that first paragraph of this post is struggling to define and articulate adequately, the wild beauty that inhabits this world of ours.
I listened to that book on tape, and was enthralled. I also loved the movie, "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," based on a Matthiessen book, though it takes a sardonic view of misguided missionaries!
Posted by: Anita | September 03, 2011 at 11:19 PM