Category Archives: Nature

 A Crocus Hunt

Nature, Wild flowers of Manitoba

 

 

Today I went out on my first wild flower expedition in Manitoba this year. I went to Sandilands Provincial Forest, a very special place.  The day was cool and cloudy, but not very windy.  The light overcast skies were perfect for photography. Enough light to avoid a gray world but no shadows that create light that is too contrasty.  Modern cameras are a marvel but they can’t  handle a large contrast between dark and light areas in a photograph. A light overcast is perfect, and that is what I had. They really bring out the colours of the flowers.

 

Those droplets were sparkling like the crown jewels. Not only that. They were huge. I have never seen them so large. This was intriguing.

I also noticed that though most of the flowers were lying down, no doubt to stay away from the wind, or perhaps had been piled on by snow that had disappeared, as a result were not at their best. However, there were some adventurous specimens that stuck their lovely flowers toward the light grey skies sky. Most of the flowers enveloped their yellow feathery centres  like doting helicopter parents.

 

Yet a few adventurous flowers shyly opened up to the very cool sun, searching desperately for light while inviting insects. But largely the yellow centre were hidden. What a pity. This was disappointing but the sparkles were the exchange. I will just have to go back again on a warmer day.

This was a strange but stunning day of searching for flowers. These flowers were gems of colour.

 

The Prairie Crocus, which is what these flowers are called in Manitoba are not really crocuses at all. Just like that sensational bird, the Red Knot, is not red.  My grandson Nolan loves that fact. Well, the Prairie Crocus is not a crocus. It is an anemone.

Just yesterday I learned from Nature Norm that there are no Prairie Crocuses in the Tall Grass Prairie. That shocked me. It  is sort of like going to KFC and finding they don’t have any chicken. I think that might be because so much of the Tall Grass Prairie has vanished.  Less than 1% of it remains in Manitoba. And even at that some people think the The Nature Conservancy of Canada has acquired too much Tall Grass Prairie. I think it also might be because they like disturbed areas as they evolved with prairie fires and heaby grazers–bison.

 

The flower has 5 or up to 7 sepals.  Sometimes these parts are blue and other times tending to white. But it has no petals. The petal is a  separate part of the corolla or inner ring which is often brightly coloured Those are the lovely purple parts of the flower.

 

It is also interesting to me that they seem to prefer disturbed areas.  They like Manitoba ditches. Go figure. Even the infernal ATVs can’t scare them off.

And like so much beauty, these flower come with danger. They should not be touched let alone eaten. Their sap is downright nasty. It can cause skin to blister, and cause vomiting, tremors and even collapse. Don’t tangle with this beautiful flower! Some have used it to colour their easter eggs. Hence their scientific name, Anemone Patens.  It helps that they usually flower around Easter.

In my opinion it is one of the most beautiful flowers of Manitoba and a worthy choice for Manitoba’s provincial flower.  I also like the fact that it is tough. Its flowers can sometimes poke through the snow. Yet they are also extremely delicate.

 

This was a great day in nature. Life is good.

 

St. Mary River, Nova Scotia

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, autumn, Nature, photography

 

This is a panorama shot of the St. Mary river consisting of about 8 images merged into one.

The St. Mary’s River in Nova Scotia was a delight I discovered about 10 to 15 years ago.  I was surprised by the beauty. So today I was not surprised.  I was confirmed in my high expectations. This is an area of simple, yet great, beauty. After all, it’s a river in a forest. What can be special about that?

The St. Mary’s River runs for about 250 km. (160 mi.) and drains an area of approximately 1,350 sq. km. it has 4 branches with 130 lakes. The river was named Rivère Isle Verte by one Canada’s premier explorers, Samuel de Champlain.  A fort in the area was also called Fort Sainte Marie when the French built it in the 17th century, but it was later taken over the English who changed the name of the fort and the river to English versions of the old French names. Sort of like Donald Trump who wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America.  Little minds do things like that.

The river is one of the many east coast rivers that contain the extremely interesting northern Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) species.  This is the 3rd largest of the members of Salmonidae family behind the Pacific Chinook and Siberian taimen salmons. Sadly, it is now an endangered species. Most populations of salmon of are anadromous, meaning that they return up river to spawn where the offspring  hatch in natal streams and rivers but move out to the oceans when they grow older and mature. The adults then move seasonally upstream again to spawn.

But interestingly some populations only migrate to lakes and become “landlocked” and spend all of their lives in freshwater. So iot is not true that they must return to salt water. Some of them just choose to do so.  When the mature fish return to rivers and streams they change colour and appearance.

Unlike the Pacific salmon species, the Atlantic salmon can survive spawning and return to the sea to repeat the process again in another year. About 5-10% of them do exactly that, returning to the sea to spawn again. Such individuals grow to extremely large size.

The life stages of Atlantic salmon are the following: alevin, fry, parr and smolt. The first stage is the alevin stage when the fish stay in their breeding grounds and use the nutrients from their yolk sac. During this stage their gills develop and they become hunters. The next stage is called fry, where the grow and then leave their breeding ground looking for foodk so they move where more food is available. During this stage in freshwater they develop into parr where they start preparing for their trek to salt water.

 

 

Young salmon spend from 1 to 4 years in their natal rivers and when they are large enough they smoltify, which means their skins change colours from colours adapted to streams to colours adapted to the oceans. They also are subjected to endocrinological changes to adapt to the differences in fresh water to ocean water. When smoltification is finished, the young fish (parr) learn to swim with the current instead of against it. That behavioral change  allows the fish to follow ocean currents and find prey such as plankton or fry from other species of fish such as herring. Apparently during their time at sea they can sense changes in the Earth’s magnetic fields. Nature never ceases to astound

After a year of strong growth, they will move to those sea surface currents that lead the fish back to their natal rivers. It is believed by some scientists that they use their sense of smell to detect the “right” rivers as well. They don’t move thousands of kilometres as many have suggested, instead scientists have learned that they “surf” through sea currents. Only 5% of the salmon go up the “wrong” river. As a result, it is more likely that they stay close to the rivers where they were born when they are out to sea and swim in circular paths to do that.

Atlantic salmon have been severely affected by humans as a result of heavy recreational and commercial fishing as well as habitat destruction, all of which have affected their numbers. As a result serious efforts have been made to conserve including aquacultural methods, though those have also been criticized by environmentalists. 50% of farmed Atlantic salmon now come from Norway where the aquaculture has been most effective.

The natural breeding grounds of the Atlantic salmon are rivers in Europe and northeastern coast of North America in both the United States and Canada. In Europe they can be found as far south as Spain and as far north as Russia. Sport-fishing in Europe has been so popular that some of the species in Europe southern populations have been growing smaller. The distribution of Atlantic salmon is strongly influenced by changes in freshwater habitat and climate, particularly changes in water temperatures, which of course are affected by climate change.

When the salmon leave their natal streams they experience very fast growth during the 1 to 4 years that they live in the ocean. In the ocean they must face an ocean of predators including seals, Greenland sharks, skate, cod, halibut, and of course humans. Dolphins have been seen “playing” with salmon but it is not clear that they eat them.

Once the salmon are large enough to undergo the tough track back upstream to their natal streams, the stop eating entirely prior to spawning. It is believed by some scientists that odour allows them to sense when they are again in their natal streams.

 

You will not be surprised to learn that Atlantic salmon populations were significantly reduced in the United States and Canada after European settlement. Rivers were degraded by the activities of humans in the fur trade, timber harvesting, logging mills and the spread of modern agriculture. As a result, the carrying capacity of most North American rivers and streams was also degraded as the fish habitat declined. The historian D.W. Dunfield claimed in 1985 already that “over half of the historical Atlantic salmon runs had been lost in North America by 1850.” In Canada a bill was presented to the Canadian Parliament that called for the protection of salmon in Lake Ontario. In the Gulf region of Nova Scotia where we have been travelling 31 of 35 salmon streams and rivers were blocked off by lumber dams and as a result many watersheds lost all of their salmon.

Where humans come damage often follows.  Then when damage occurs humans learn to regret the error of their ways and sometimes make heroic efforts at great cost to change things back to the way they were. Could there be a better way?

Despite all of that such rivers are flanked by the incredible variety of trees of the eastern forest as shown by the incredible variety of the autumn colours.

 

Self-Sabotage

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Birds, Nature

 

While we stayed at our B & B outside of Chester, Nova Scotia, we suffered a power failure, and I reluctantly went to bed at 10 o’clock one night at our lovely B & B in Chester Nova Scotia. After that I did not miss the sunrise in the morning as I often do. John Lennon, that great English philosopher, once wrote, “The sunrise every morning is a beautiful spectacle, and yet most of the audience still sleeps.” It was not a great sunrise though. Too many clouds covering the beatify. That was a pity. Or as the British would say, a dreadful pity.

 

I must admit I am guilty of missing the vast majority of sunrises. I have called myself an inspector of sunsets, but confess I have missed many sunrises, which are really just as good.

 

I did enjoy reading this morning in the lavish rooms of an outstanding B & B. . I got back to my book on the fur trade, finally. I had been too busy to read now for some time. That is another of my serious moral failings. Today though I enjoyed the quite morning.

 

After reading awhile, I noticed a lovely band of pale orange/red slipping through the blinds of the living room from my upstairs lounge vantage point. It took me too long to realize I should be photographing it. My bad. A bad photographer, distracted by an interesting book. Oh well that was good too. Our host Jackie was not so slack. She captured a wonderful image. By the time I got there the picture was lame. In photography the prize often goes to the fleet of foot, not the malingerer.

 

 

A little later in Mahone Bay I saw this cormorant soaking up the sun in its face.  It did not miss the sun rise. It was not a malingerer.

 

Yet I thought of what legendary Canadian photographer, Freeman Paterson said. I had watched a documentary on him on Gem recently. Many years ago, Paterson presented an outstanding slide show in Steinbach. Who said Steinbach is a cultural desert?

 

Paterson knows a thing or two about beauty. Even how to create or capture it in distinctive images. He said in a recent newsletter, “I’ve long observed that most of the people sacrifice the pursuit of beauty—natural or otherwise—on the altar of perceived necessity. There always seems to be more important things to do. Life gets in the way. Yet the day will come when we no longer have the opportunity to have experiences, nor to create the enriching, sustaining memories that come with them. One might call it, self-sabotage.” It’s like missing the sunrise. Same thing. Self-sabotage.

Autumn Delight

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, autumn, Nature, photography

 

Very few people understood the eastern forests better, or at least could explain them more coherently, than Henry David Thoreau. This is what he said:

“If a man walks in the woods for the love of them for half each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed as an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

 

 

Hermann Hesse also got it right: “Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever learns to speak to them can learn the truth.  They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”

 

I love reflections of the autumn leaves in lakes or streams. I can never get enough of them.

 

The autumn colours were clearly the best that we had seen yet on this trip. They were sensational. As we strolled along the Mersey River the colours reflected brilliantly in the water of the river.

The water in many places seemed brown. This was not from dirt or pollution. It is stained brown as it seeps through the surrounding bogs and gets coloured brown. The locals call it Mersey tea.

 

Tannins stain the water brown saponins are a kind of natural soap. When they fall over rapids they form stable foam.

The river contains a lot of slate which is a smooth gray metamorphic rock that forms natural dams over the river. Over time the slate has been polished smooth. The slate was formed about 500 million years ago when silt was deposited in fine layers on what was then the continental shelf of northern Africa!  Think about that. The slate moved with the continent from Africa to North America.

380 million years ago the continents of Africa and North America moved together closing the Atlantic Ocean in the process. This collision of continents baked and bent the layers of silt and shale into the metamorphic rock that we call shale.

 

Later the continents shifted again and the continents separated once more leaving some African slate as part of what we now call Nova Scotia.

Autumn in Nova Scotia is grand. Life in Nova Scotia is grand.

Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site.

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, autumn, Nature, photography

 

This morning we said good-bye to our new friends from Quebec  and set out for Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site.This is the only National Park in Canada that is also a Historic Site.

 

Christiane and I had a wonderful walk through a trail near the park entrance along the Mersey River.  The colours were spectacular and the entire walk was a delight.

 

The eastern forests are glorious for many reasons. One of the reasons—a big one—is the astonishing variety of trees. You can really see this elemental fact when you look at all the incredible colors of the trees in a place like Kejimkujik.

 

The autumn colours were clearly the best that we had seen yet on this trip. They were sensational. As we strolled along the Mersey River the colours reflected brilliantly in the water of the river.

 

 

Kejimkujik is located in Southwest Nova Scotia together with an adjunct consisting of a parcel of land on the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Christiane made good friends with a woman from Maryland. Both of the women  had a wonderful chat as their overly eager amateur photographer spouses went off in search of the elusive perfect autumn images. At least they were elusive for Christiane’s spouse.

 

Some of the canoe routes here are thousands of years old. They are part of Mi’kmaw culture.

It includes petrogrly sites, habitation sites, fishing and hunting sites, travel routes and burial grounds, all of which attest to Mi’kmaq occupancy for thousands of years.

It has also been designated as a dark-sky preserve by the Royal Astronomical Society with some of the brightest night skies in southern Canada.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: “The wonder is that we can see trees and not wonder more.”

Modest and not so modest

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Nature

 

 

 

 

I have taken meandering to new levels.  People might think we stayed in the Wawa area for 2 weeks. That might have been interesting but actually we kept moving after a stop of a couple of hours.  The above photo is actually west of Wawa and East of Gloria’s motel which I blogged about earlier.

East of Gloria’s motel I stopped to photograph another of the islets I love so much. Again, the islet is a modest island. A few trees on a small pile of rocks jutting out of a lake. But I think they are magnificent. Not really modest at all. But modest in words. They don’t brag like our neighbours to the south. Humility is not a bad thing. I find it becoming. This islet had just a splash of colour. Here the turning of the leaves was just beginning.

The land south of Wawa is spectacular. Of the 8030 kms (4,990 mi) of the Trans-Canada Highway this area south of Wawa through Algoma County is considered one of the finest.  I agree. It has been listed as one of the 9 greatest drives in Canada. Those are fine words. Not so modest words. Well there is a time for some quiet boasting, even in Canada.

 

Intimations of Immortality

Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Professor John Moriarty was more than a a keener for Indigenous spirituality. After all he was also a long time professor of English literature and a poet.

The English poet Wordsworth put this well in his poem, “Ode and the Intimations of Immortality”:

“In the beginning like trailing clouds of glory do we come. This is from the poem

“Our birth is but a sleeping and a forgetting

The soul that rises with us,

Our life star hath had elsewhere setting

And cometh from afar

Not an entire forgetfulness and not another nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From god who is our home.

Heaven lies above us in our infancy,

Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy

But he behold the light and whence it flows he sees it in his joy

The youth who daily farther from the east must travel,

Is still his nature’s priest

And by the vision splendid is on his way attended.

At length the man perceives it die away

And fade into the light of common day.”

 

 

This story is of course not unlike the Ojibwa story of the origin of agriculture. What we all must do is unlearn what we have learned from corrupt or dirty devices and become once more the child who can enter the kingdom of god. The prison of ordinary life can be a prison for a young boy if it squeezes out nature and can lose the “vision splendid.”  The old man must learn to walk beautifully on the earth to regain that vision and escape the prison of the ordinary day. I think that is what Professor Moriarty wanted to do. It was part of his religious quest.  I hope he managed to do that. Most of us never do.

 

Into the Mystic

Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

I am meandering back to that Irish professor of English literature I encountered at the University of Manitoba in 1967, John Moriarty . But first I want to consider another Irish poet. Van Morrison is one of my favourite singer/song writers. Here is part of a song of his that I greatly love:

 

Into the Mystic

 

We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic

And when that fog horn blows I will be coming home
And when the fog horn blows I want to hear it
I don’t have to fear it

And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And magnificently we will flow into the mystic

…

 

Professor John Moriarty in his wonderful lecture that I heard on You Tube after he died, admitted that paradise is lost, but it is only lost in our minds and our senses. In the 17th century we did enter this ‘nothing but universe,” as he called it, “but the day we take our shoes off our feet and walk on the ground of the world, and our eyes are open again, then we are back in our home in this stupendous earth… And if we could only open up to that again then we would never again misbehave on the earth.” Moriarty says we must take off our shoes and walk the earth knowing it is a great and sacred earth. This is what he meant by walking beautifully on the earth. That is what he wanted to do.

John Moriarty enlisted the help of 3 mystics to his cause. He said these are 3 people on whom we can rely absolutely and totally.

The first of these is a Rhineland mystic called Heinrich Suso, (Suso also spelled Seuse). He joined the Dominicans with whom he had a re-awakening. One day he walked into his chapel while he was suffering greatly and, as we know, suffering is often a door to grace and wisdom and enlightenment. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said there is no spiritual enlightenment without suffering. Suso talked about “heavenly lightnings passing and re-passing in the depths of his being.” Moriarty likens this to the northern aurora borealis of Canada, or Scotland or even sometimes Connemara,  where he lived in Ireland, after he left Winnipeg, and other places where great curtains of light can be experienced in the sky. He says besides cosmic auroras there are also “auroras of soul.” For example, if you walk into Chartres Cathedral in France that is what you experience there. The stained-glass windows you see there “are attempts to make manifest the heavenly light within and without,” he says. Suso experienced the hidden auroras of soul that are within him. These had occluded in him but eventually the eclipse was over and the auroras of soul were revealed and he could see these heavenly lightnings passing and re-passing in the depths of his being.

The second mystic Moriarty brings to our attention was Teresa of Ávila, OCD (born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada; 28 March 1515 – 4 or 15 October 1582), also called Saint Teresa of Jesus. One day she saw one of the highest of angels, one of the cherubins, beside her. The angel held a golden spear with a tip of fire that he plunged into her again and again. She experienced incredible pain and joy at the experience. That was called her trans-vibration in which she experienced a heavenly fire inside of her.

The third mystic Moriarty asks us to consider was Pascal. He was one of the great minds of Europe. In a waist coat of his after his death a servant of his discovered a tiny parchment that has come to be called the memorial of his night of fire.

Each of these 3 mystics experienced in some way the fire of God inside of them. Then says Moriarty, everything in the universe can also experience the same thing, the same light, the same fire.

It is import that we enfranchise women, but, says Moriarty, that is not enough:

 

“We must enfranchise the universe…the truth about the universe is really ecstasy. The truth of the universe is a boon of heavenly lightnings…the truth about it is a night of fire.”

 

From all of this Moriarty says,

“If only we could come back to the fact that we live in a stupendous universe, if only we could know that every bush is a burning bush, if only like Elvira Madigan we would come down from our tightropes to our tears and creeds and stand on the earth then we wouldn’t be harming the earth…then we wouldn’t want to go up in space.”

 

Then we would have a new attitude to nature. Then we would know that nature—the earth—is sacred.

The Appetite for Life

Books, civilization, Classic Books, Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Ivan Karamazov in the novel Tthe Brothers Karamazov is the epitome of the man of reason, but this does not prevent him from knowing the joy of passion and love. He is also, presumably, the nihilist that does not believe in God, and hence can do anything he desires without moral consequences, but nonetheless he knows the importance of nature, life, love, and morality. He is the one who says if God does not exist, everything is permitted. But, As Ivan told his much more saintly brother, Alyosha,

 

“… even if I believed that life was pointless, lost faith in the woman I loved, lost faith in the order of things, or even became convinced that I was surrounded by a disorderly, evil, perhaps devil-made chaos, even if I were completely overcome by the horrors of human despair—I would still want to live on. Once I start drinking from this cup, I won’t put it down until I have emptied it to the last drop…many times I’ve asked myself  if there is anything in this world that would crush my frantic indecent appetite for life and have decided that nothing of the sort exists. This appetite for life is often branded as despicable by various  spluttering moralists and even more so by poets. It is of course the outstanding features of us Karamazovs.”

 

His appetite for life has overwhelmed his nihilism. Even though he is passionate about ideas, as Dostoevsky himself was, Ivan says,

“…so I want to live and go on living, even if its contrary to the rules of logic. Even if I do not believe in the divine order of things, the sticky young leaves emerging from their buds in the spring are dear to my heart; so is the blue sky and so are some human beings even though I often don’t know why I like them; I may still even admire an act of heroism with my whole heart, perhaps out of habit, although I may have long since stopped believing in heroism.”

 

Besides loving the world, including that world of nature he so glowingly described, the green world that emerges from its buds, he also loves the world of civilization—western civilization exemplified by Europe. It is where he finds meaning in a world that often seems meaningless. As Ivan said,

“I’ve been wanting to go to Western Europe and that’s where I’ll go from here. Oh  I know that going there is like going to a graveyard, I tell you!  The dead who lie under the stones there are dear to me, and every gravestone speaks of their ardent lives, of human achievements, of their passionate faith in the purpose of life, the truth they believed in, the learning they defended—and I know in advance that I’ll prostrate myself and kiss those stones and shed tears on them, although the whole time I’ll be fully aware that it’s only a graveyard and nothing more. And I’ll not be weeping out of despair, but simply because I’ll be happy shedding those tears. I’ll get drunk on my own emotion. I love those sticky little leaves in the spring and the blue sky, that’s what! You don’t love those things with reason, with logic, you love them with your innards, with your belly, and that’s how you love your own first youthful strength.”

 

After this magnificent speech in which he makes clear that he too is filled with passion, passion that includes the mind, includes intelligence, he asks Alyosha, his younger holy brother who has been preparing to become a priest, if this makes sense. And Alyosha says, “I understand only too well,” proving that he is also a Karamazov. All of them are filled with passion. All of them have this astonishing “appetite for life.” Even Alyosha, the near holy man, a near ascetic, says, “I’ve always thought that before anything else people should learn to love life in this world.”

He is no ascetic monk. He is a Karamazov.

 

 

Forests are our Friends

Nature, New Attitude to Nature

 

We must learn to have a new attitude to nature. That includes a new attitude to our forests. Forests are our friends. As David Attenborough said about forests, “They are the best technology nature has for locking up carbon.”

 

Once more what is good for nature is good for us.  What is good for forests is good for us.  Forests are a wonderful source of bio-diversity and bio-diversity is essential for human health on the planet. Some people say happy wife happy life. I am not stupid enough to quarrel with that. I just want to add, happy forest happy life.

 

Forests will be a vital part of any recovery we can make of the natural world. They provide two very important things that will be vital for the recovery. First, forests are very important in storing carbon rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. They are among the best of our technology. If we are going to hold down to a minimum the effects of climate change we must take advantage of the things forests can do to help. Secondly, forests are critically important for maintaining bio-diversity. We are losing our biodiversity at a stunning rate. We must stop deforestation everywhere for both of these reasons. Both of these processes work well together.

Costa Rica provides an example of what must be done. Early in the 20th century more than was 75% of Costa Rica was forested. By the 1980s this was reduced to ¼.   Costa Rica realized this was unwise and made serious efforts to change the depletion of the forests. Costa Rica encouraged land owners to plant trees. This turned out to be remarkably effective. According to Attenborough,

“In just 25 years the forest of Costa Rica has returned to cover half of Costa Rica once again. Just imagine if we achieved this on a global scale. The return of the trees would absorb as much as 2/3rds of the carbon emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by our activities to date. With all of these things, there is one overriding principle: nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration. We just have to do what nature has always done. It worked out the secret of life long ago. In this world a species can only thrive if everything around it thrives too. We can solve the problems we now face by embracing this reality. If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us. It is now time for our species to stop simply growing and establish a life on this planet in balance with nature, to start thrive .”

This applies to us as well. We will only thrive if nature around us thrives.

Of course, it is not just forests that are important. Nature is important. People not so much. People think we are important. We are wrong. If nature does not thrive, we do not thrive. It really is that simple.