Fall Camping

I recently went camping. 

And this is what my new friend Earl told me.
"It's fall. The leaves are falling and the moon sets at a different time every night.
Later in the night, the stars come out.
The moon will come up again tomorrow, but a little later than today."
I thought his words were inspired and beautiful.

We were also theorizing, on that day under that lazy afternoon sun, like two ten-year-olds might, whether AIDS and all the other diseases that humanity has been experiencing through the ages isn't nature's answer to humanity's overwhelming success as a species?
I mean, WE RULE, MAN!
And so nature is trying to kill us.
What if we've been winning the fight between MAN v. NATURE overwhelmingly?
What if this is nature's very own "Empire Strikes Back." Who would be the Darth Vadar of the natural world? I think the leader of the evil tyrants look like viruses and bacteria. Formless and silent. Not quite as "quick" as the green blob (I think there was a '70's flick like that), but quick enough and sharper in shape (at a microscopic level, of course).
I mean, aren't we ALL worried about biological warfare at this point in our human history?
What better inventor then nature to come up with some wicked solutions no man is ever capable of conjuring up? (Think platypus, the grand canyon, fire, leprosy, or any other natural phenomena that is off the hook weird or amazing. And then there's AIDS, leprosy, cholera.... wow that's pretty wicked.)

We also talked about how, in a very real way, this will be our future. If humans don't decide to figure out a balance with nature, nature will enforce the balance for us, in a very random and chaotic matter. It is very possible that my generation will be witness to this mass massacre (perhaps through global warming, tsunamis, earthquakes and an outbreak of a new virus... not to be morbid... but at a minimum our climatologists and the scientific community at large all agree that we are heading for a global disaster). It would be much better if humans can agree to change, before nature takes care of this for us. And yet we bury our heads in the sand and refuse to change.

After that scary but half academic discussion using all of what we know of biology and the state of humanity and earth, I took a nap in the sun. I was so relaxed  (despite our conversation) that I didn't worry about the ozone layer or getting skin cancer for a change. I'm usually a bit of an obsessive compulsive frequent hand washer because I'm a bacteria -phobe. However, at camp, I ate food that other people had prepared for me, knowing that they had made it with love. And that was, for that one day, all I needed to know.