Self-Contained Intensity

Blue Heron at Green Lake

Blue Heron

Great Blue Heron on the hunt

Intense concentration

I saw this great blue heron on the shore of Green Lake.  It was so focussed, so intent, that it ignored me completely.

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. . .
     — Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”