The Crow That Remembered What We Forgot
I watched a crow this morning build its nest with the focused confidence of someone who has never questioned their place in the world. It knew exactly which twigs would work, where to place them, how to weave them into something that could hold new life. No hesitation, no second-guessing, no existential crisis about whether it was doing crow-life correctly.
I envied that crow more than I’ve envied any human in years.
We are the only species that has to learn how to belong. Every other creature on earth seems born with an innate understanding of their role, their niche, their way of being that serves both themselves and the larger web of life. They don’t have to read books about finding their purpose or attend workshops on discovering their authentic selves. They simply are what they are, exactly where they belong.
But we—we’ve forgotten the art of belonging so completely that we’ve convinced ourselves belonging is something we have to earn rather than something we inherit simply by being born. We treat the earth like a hotel we’re visiting rather than the body we’re part of. We’ve become ecological orphans, disconnected from the family of life that created us.
The loneliness of this forgetting runs deeper than personal isolation. It’s species-wide alienation, the unique suffering of animals who no longer know what kind of animal they are. We’ve lost the instructions for being human that every other species carries in their bones—the knowledge of how to live in a way that enhances rather than degrades the systems that sustain us.
Watch any animal in its natural habitat and you’ll see effortless integration. The deer browsing at forest edge, the fish navigating coral reefs, the bacteria cycling nutrients through soil—each perfectly adapted to their role, each contributing something essential to the whole. They don’t suffer from the anxiety of not knowing where they fit because fitting is what they do automatically.
We suffer because we’ve made ourselves misfits in our own home.
The crow building its nest this morning was participating in a conversation that has been ongoing for millions of years—the conversation between life and environment, between individual need and collective flourishing. It knew its part in that conversation without having to think about it.
We’ve forgotten how to join the conversation at all. We stand outside it, analyzing it, trying to manage it, imagining ourselves separate from it. We’ve become the only species that has to consciously choose to belong, and most of the time we choose alienation instead because it feels safer, more controllable, more human.
But what if being human isn’t about transcending our animal nature? What if it’s about being the kind of animal that can consciously choose to belong, that can participate in the web of life with awareness rather than just instinct?
The loneliness we feel isn’t punishment for being human. It’s information—our bodies and souls telling us we’ve wandered too far from home, that we need to find our way back to the family of life we never actually left, only forgot how to recognize.
Every other species belongs without trying. We are the species that gets to belong on purpose.
