This post is an homage to variety in nature. The links below will lead you to amazing stories about wonderful oddities in nature, such as a spotless cheetah in Kenya, a white killer whale off the coast of Russia, and a strawberry-coloured leopard in South Africa. Together, they remind me of one of my favourite poems (under the links), by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit from the Victorian era in England, who, like me, loved the richness and diversity of nature. It all makes one wonder: why are humans so conservative, so intolerant of difference, when nature teaches us that dissimilarity is the name of the game -- that it is the source of health and evolution?
Pied Beauty
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of
couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all
in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted
and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5
And áll trádes,
their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle,
freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow;
sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10
Praise him.
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