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WORDS AS OUR 'REALITY': In the human world there are 'tall trees', 'green leaves', 'blades of grass', and 'grey clouds', but in the animal, bird, and insect worlds there are no such descriptions. Such creatures see the world openly, nakedly, devoid of adjectives and nouns. From their point of view cats do not lie in 'the grass', birds do not perch in 'trees', and bees do not pollinate 'flowers'. What we have conveniently taken for their reality is only relevant to ourselves, since to a cat there is no such thing as 'grass', to a bird there are no such things as 'trees', and to a bee there are no such things as 'flowers'. Neither are they aware that leaves are 'green' or clouds 'grey'. In fact, they do not even know what leaves or clouds are, being so utterly accustomed to living in a world without description.

But to ask ourselves a serious question - do we really know what leaves or clouds are? Are we really in possession of ultimate truth when we point to 'green leaves' or 'grey clouds' and thereupon claim additional knowledge for ourselves? Let us confess, my readers, that these descriptions, ingenious and indispensable as they are, in no way penetrate to the essential core of things. Let us confess to mostly being unconscious poets who manipulate representative symbols without usually realizing that a 'leaf' in no way explains exactly what a leaf is, much less a 'green leaf'.

And so we, too, are basically as unaware as the animals, birds, and insects as to exactly what we are living with. We can never get to the heart of the world we have metaphorically invented, and therefore must conclude the ultimate truth of whatever confronts us in the natural world to be a refutation of our illusions rather than the illusions, or symbols, themselves.

In other words, to establish anything approximate to the ultimate truth about a leaf, one would have to admit our knowledge of leaves to be relative and, hence, misleading, an attempt to describe that which, in its natural essence, defies definitive description. In sum, there are no 'leaves'; we have conveniently invented them. And to the extent that we have named and thereby humanized such existences, we have invented the rest of nature as well.

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