All Flesh Is Grass

When the old tree's time was come the winds were there to clear the giant cumberer from the sky. Nature is wise, wiser than eagles or rats or men; and if sometimes cruel, never in the long, dear light of things is she blind. Young shellbarks are growing. Life, and calm, and order triumph. This is the large abiding truth of Nature upon which men and eagles build, whereon faith and peace and effort rest. Eagles know that. But wisdom is the use of knowledge, and eagles are wise with the wisdom of all life, for after a week of mourning about the woods they began to build again, in a tree about five hundred feet from their former site.

The work required a week, and in the course of the spring the young were safely launched into their new world. That was in 1925. By March eighteenth, 1926, the eggs had been laid and incubation begun, and high in the air, looking into the nest, had risen a new steel tower at the hands of their human friends. April twenty-second the eggs hatched, producing three eaglets. By the middle of May they had changed to gray down and then to real feathers—great brown-black birds now nearly ready for the clouds.

Life in the towering eyrie was at its peak. "During the night of May 19th," wrote one of the builders of the tower, "I was awakened by a fierce hail and wind storm, and I wondered about our tent on the tower by the eagles' tree. Early the next morning I went out in the dark, the rain and wind still raging, and over to the woods. I had always looked up as I approached the tower to see how the old birds were faring, and I did so now. What was my horror to find the top of the tree gone! I thought I was crazy. But there on the ground at the base of the tree lay the nest, a sodden mass of debris. Out from under the mess I retrieved the bodies of the three young eagles, while overhead the old birds circled, crying at me as if I had done the terrible deed."

I cannot put my finger on the Master Word in that throbbing paragraph but I know that the Word is there. "We be of one blood" is there. "All flesh is grass" is there. I wish he had cried it aloud to the wounded birds. I wish I could publish it to every wounded thing in the entire world. There is no escaping from pain, and no solving of the problem of it. It ushers life in, and thrusts life out, a companion more or less on the journey, less companion than attendant generally, who is always within swift summons. I am not attempting to reason about pain, but only to acknowledge it, the common heritage of all flesh, as a common bond in the strong world of Nature.