Blog 3505 – 06.08.2025
Let It Be
Music, especially poetry with a tune, has long been a favorite source of encouragement and inspiration for me. When I search my heart and mind for inspiration or an encouraging word to share, a line from a song often comes to me. Today’s theme is a case in point and comes from a song by Derek Webb called Mockingbird.
The inspiration for today’s encouraging word comes from the stanza that says:
“And I’ll do all I can
To be a better man
Oh I’ll clean up this act
But be worse than when we started.”
At a New Timberland Owner’s Conference that my son Jay and I attended yesterday in Livingston, Texas, one of the speakers was a biologist from Texas Parks and Wildlife and he spoke about the importance of maintaining a good habitat to support the wildlife on timberland. He said that if you wanted your property to be rich with wild life you should discard the ideal of making it look like a park and resist the impulse to “clean up” everything for in so doing you would most likely destroy the natural habitat that animals thrive on. It is the brush piles and natural undergrowth that support and feed the critters. A pristine and park like property might look nice, but it is really a desert and often devoid of animal life. He further illustrated this point with a remark about a friend who keeps his lawn and shrubs cut and manicured as a matter of pride and when visiting his biologist friend often remarks, “Don’t you think it’s about time you cut the grass and clean up the place?” The biologist always replies, “That’s habitat.”
Biologists, conservationists, and anthropologists agree that oftentimes our attempts to clean up our act only result in not only our being worse off than when we started, but the land and wildlife it supports as well. Often the best personal, land, and wildlife management plan is to take heed the advice of Mother Mary in the Beatles song and “Let It Be.”
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Mockingbird
theencouragingword 