Swaying daisies sing a lazy song beneath the sun.

As I was listening to "The Fountainhead" on my familiar drive from Vancouver to Seattle, I was struck by the irony of a building. The thought came to me when Roark was contemplating the variety of natural resources surrounding him: "He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky." 

From the earth resources are taken to prevent us from being affected by elements that allow those very resources to thrive. We use wood to build a house to shield us from the wind, the rain, the sun. How easy it is to dismiss that fact that the same wood came from a seed which was carried by the wind and then nourished by the rain. It grew as the sun performed its duty and beat down on it.

Perhaps we can pay tribute to such elements even if we seek to avoid them more often than not. For example, the child pays tribute to the wind when she flies her kite on the beach. She takes delight in something that would annoy her if there were no escape from it. The young travelers pay homage to the rain as they laugh when caught in a storm on the streets of a foreign city. Maybe when we take delight in such things, even if for a few moments, we are participating in nature's song. 

It is not a "giving back" that I am thinking of, and I am not trying to point out the fact that we take from nature. I am thinking of more of a metaphysical bind and utter dependence we have with it.

I live in an apartment in the city and I can not say that I feel close to nature. I hear sirens roar by more often that I hear a bird's song. But look! My book shelf--wood; my coffee table--wood; my plant stand--steel, glass, and well, a plant. No, just because these came from nature does it mean that I am "surrounded by nature" in the typical sense of the phrase. I am, however, surrounded by the inescapable truth that I rely upon it and not it on me. Mankind is not as powerful as he sometimes thinks.