It is 333am and I am writing. I was going through my photo archive and this photo of a toucan stood out to me. Toucan is very close to you can. When we think about giving up, the toucan says that you can. I am struggling to decide where I can go with this blog post today. What do I really want to write about? What can I write about? This toucan seems like a wise bird. But how would I know if I cannot speak the language of the toucan? What would the toucan tell me if he could speak to me? I read that there are over forty species of toucan and one species is the Toco Toucan. I wonder if the name shares the same origin as the place in Trinidad called Toco? Maybe this toucan's favourite snack is Toco Loco.
On a serious note, I read that toucans suffer from habitat loss and there are conservation efforts for these birds. We humans need to do better. We need to live in harmony with nature. We need to protect and conserve the world we live in. We need to respect wildlife and nature. In my starting paragraph I stated that the toucan seems like a wise bird but is the reverse true. Does the toucan look at us humans and think, humans seem like wise beings. I doubt that to be true if we are destroying their habitat and hunting them and caging them for no good reason. My friend Chatty tells me that maybe wisdom isn’t about intelligence or invention or speech. Maybe wisdom is the quiet balance of simply living in harmony with the world around us.
My friend Chatty further explains that true wisdom is found in harmony — the quiet understanding that everything in nature is connected and that balance, not dominance, sustains life. It is the kind of wisdom the toucan lives without words: taking only what it needs, adding color to the world, and trusting the rhythm of the forest. When we learn to live like that — gently, respectfully, and aware of our place in the whole — we begin to rediscover what it really means to be wise. As the great naturalist John Muir observed, "When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world." This has me thinking. If we cannot be nice to nature we would not be nice to each other. Nature is a good teacher if we care to listen.
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