heron in moonlight

It’s so simple at times that I forget.

Things are as they are, and rarely as we imagine them to be.

This monkey brain of ours always wants to explain explain explain. To find connections. To create meaning.

Sometimes a heron flies in the moonlight because it flies in the moonlight. Any meaning ascribed to the act is all us, and nothing of the heron. The problem is, we forget that our meanings are not necessarily the heron’s meaning. And, even when we are correct, can we not just accept that “a heron flies in the moonlight” without worrying about meaning?

These thoughts are not standalone thoughts — I was actually thinking last night and today about how certain educated people have used modern thought processes to explain the actions of people who lived millennia ago. We are often so certain of what they were doing and thinking, but we miss the bias of our own actions and thinking being applied to people so long gone that only disjointed fragments remain. We really have no clue what their motives might have been. And does it really matter?

Maybe that figurine was heron worship. Perhaps.

Or maybe it was celebration of a heron flying in moonlight.

Who can really say for certain?