Henry Beston was an accomplished American writer, educator, and naturalist. The following was sent to us by one of our beloved supporters and taken from Beston’s most famous work, “The Outermost House”, published in the 1920s.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
Such a beautifully written passage that captures how we should co-exist and appreciate the wonderful creatures that we live alongside. This really touched us…