What do the willows say?

A week or so earlier, I went into the willows on the side of the reservoir as I had heard a kingfisher. Once of the side of the water, I took a vantage point and waited.

Eventually, I saw one fly across along the water's edge on the other side.

Then I turned around and realised that for far too long I have overlooked willows.

So, I returned to this spot and climbed to a place about eight feet up. I sat still and silent. A squirrel ran up the trunk to within a few feet of me then turned onto another branch and scarpered. Some time later, a flock of tits flew into the branches above and around me. So close I could hear their wingbeats. They made contact calls to each other. One gave an alarm call and they all took off, but I didn't move and they returned to forage in the tree. I was inside a bell jar of birds.

"This," said the willow, "is what it is like not to be human."

That was something, but I was also thinking of the "cruelty" of nature. Orcas eating just the livers of sharks and leaving the body to rot. Attacking blue whales, who take days and days to die, just to eat their tongues. I considered fear and suffering and cold and drought.

The tree was just telling me all this was irrelevant. That it is just our interpretation.

"But nothing wants to die," I replied, "or to suffer."

"Dying is the other side of the same thing that is living; suffering is the other side of pleasure. These things cannot be unbound because they are not separate. They are one thing. Because you are born you die. Because you have pleasure you can also have pain. There are no morals here. No justice. No rules or balancing out. No accounting of what makes a life worth living. It is the is. Humans are the only creatures who rail against what is.

"Yes, all beings struggle to live and to avoid suffering. And anything any one of them does limits the options for another being, or harms that other being, or kills that other being. There is no living without dying, no living without suffering. It is the is."

I find this hard. And yet I also find it trying that humans think cuckoos are "bad" for laying their eggs in other birds' nests; or hyenas are "bad" for eating an animal who is still alive.

If I cannot condemn the cuckoo and the hyena - which I do not do - then how do I condemn the captive lion breeders? Come to that, how are they worse than captive cow, sheep, pig, turkey, chicken breeders?? But if the orca can do what she likes with the sharks, then...

I can only offer two arguments:

1) It's about power and numbers and scale. How many sharks do orcas kill per annum compared to us? Orcas won't threaten sharks with extinction; we do.

2) It's about the ability to choose not to. To care and to choose not to. Maybe orcas could choose not to, but could they care? Mind you, many do not care about domesticated animals enough to choose differently.

I am not sure that there is a philosophically sound argument for not harming other species, that is not ultimately bound up in our interests (we need bees to pollinate and beavers to do whatever and wolves to stop turning pretty national parks into wastelands). I don't think there is.

Maybe one could argue that all living beings should be able to live....as they have evolved to...and as their cultures have evolved to.... and that we threaten that... except the philosopher could say, well, our culture has evolved to take over the world and destroy everything. So there.

Then we have to argue that all the other living beings have an equal right and that we are jeopardising them. But then you get people shooting man-eating tigers or field-stomping elephants because they jeopardise us. Or you get people saying, does that me the mosquito has a right to bite my child?

We can't parse it with our reason. That's what the willow said. The tools we have are too small and too self-centred.

I think the only argument rests on love. But the willow is not sympathetic to that, either.

As well as the squirrels, I saw a muntjac and heard another. There was a juvenile rabbit in the wood. The Merlin app picked up great crested grebe and kingfisher as well as robin, wren, great, blue and coal tits, crow, jay and maybe more.

As I walked back, the squirrels scampered in the crowns of the trees above me, leaping from tree to tree and spiraling up the trunks.

The place had never felt more alive.