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 I stood by the window looking at the bird feeder we had set up outside. It was a big square thing about 8 Inches on each side at the bottom. The  sides were about a foot high, wider at the top which was maybe a foot square. The top then peaked and the sides were glass which slid up and down so we could pour bird feed into the feeder. The bottom was surrounded by rails for the birds to sit on as they ate. The feeder was on a pole six feet high, about twenty feet from the windows on the west side of the house. A woods began about ten feet further west. There was lots of food for lots of birds which flew around constantly. It was a beautiful sight.

But the really beautiful sight was the sight of the birds that flew away from the feeder right into the woods. They would flash in to the feeder, eat a seed or two, and then flash away into the woods. But how could that be? Those birds don’t go in a straight line, like a bullet of a golf ball. They weave and dodge, up and down. But how do they do that? Do they make choices? Decisions? Think to themselves; “Careful. There’s a big oak there. I need to go left, eighteen inches. And then up a foot to miss that branch.” That bird has to go every direction in a moment. But how? What guides that bird? One would think the woods was a trap, and that no bird could get more than a few feet into that intricate trap. But they get in—and out.

I’m sure we agree that the bird does not think as we do, but does it think at all? And how does one define thinking anyway? A bird has a brain that directs the nervous system. Anything else? Does an eagle look down, see a fish and then decide to dive for his dinner? Is that a choice?  Instinct, you say, but you have said nothing. You have said nothing because we know nothing!  We say it is instinct, but we do not understand instinct. It is a mystery. Animal life is a mystery. The life of the woods is a mystery. A sliver of a branch is as much of a mystery as a Sequoia. All life is a mystery. From sparrow to eagle. We may only observe from the outside, and that is the case with our lives also. Mystery. All life is a mystery. From a molecule to the universe. All is mystery. 

There is a view that holds that if you reduce something to its smallest unit, an atom, you are beginning to understand it. You are beginning to understand nothing. If you think you know all the parts of a machine, your body, say, all the molecules, all the atoms, you still don’t know where they came from, or why they are working together. Whence those parts? Whence those forces? We understand nothing. From the biggest to the smallest. Nothing. We are curious about this mystery. We cannot choose not to be, but why are we curious? The curiosity, the object of the curiosity, the whole thing is all one grand mystery as Tennyson knew.                           

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand—

But if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

                       —Alfred, Lord Tennyson