No one to rock the cradle (Nazim Hikmet: You must live with great seriousness, like a squirrel)

Living is no laughing matter:
...you must live with great seriousness
......like a squirrel, for example --
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
......I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Squirrel: photo by Prof Alex O Chevtchenko, 22 December 2012



Cape Ground Squirrels (Xerus inauris), near Solitaire in the Namib desert, Namibia: photo by Hans Hillewaert, 2007

Common squirrel in oak leaves. Protective coloration allows it to merge with the oak leaves. Kharkov Forest Park, Ukraine: photo by Dennis Markov, 9 May 2007

Grey squirrel searching for nuts. 'These shots are from a university project based on squirrels. The photos are displaying a grey squirrel's caching behaviour. I set up a remote timer and baited the area with nuts, and waited for the squirrels to come. Once the squirrels were consistent and knew where the food was, I made it a little harder for them to retrieve the nuts. This meant that they had to dig for it, and therefore mimic the caching behaviour. So even though they were digging up the nuts instead of burying them for the winter, the same motion was recorded': photo by Mark Fox/Mammal Society Photographer of the Year Competition 2013 via The Guardian 5 March 2013

 A squirrel defends its food against a pigeon after snowfall in central park in Minsk, Belarus: photo by Sergei Grits / Associated Press, 2012

Living is no laughing matter:
.....you must take it seriously,
.....so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                            your back to the wall,
 or else in a laboratory
.....in your white coat and safety glasses,
.....you can die for people --
   even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
   even though you know living
.....is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

An olive tree, Bi'lin, West Bank: photo by elena martinez, 12 June 2009

Olive trees (Olea europaea ssp. europaea), Corfu, Greece: photo by Cezanne, 16 July 2003

Olive trees on Thassos, Greece: photo by Peter Pakandl, 7 September 2006

 I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees --
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963): from OnLiving, in Poems of Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, 1994