It has been several weeks since my first class in animal chaplaincy… and I keep returning to my original notes, trying to read them more deeply. Sometimes words we hear once open themselves with new meaning over time. For me, this happened with a line from Jakob von Uexküll, the Baltic German biologist: “All animals, from the simplest to the most complex, are embedded in their unique worlds with equal completeness.”

These words come alive for me every day on Brighton Beach.

In the mornings, I hear the cooing of pigeons, the soft, beautiful call of the morning dove, which I especially love, and the cries of seagulls and other coastal birds. Sparrows appear only rarely here, and in recent times they have........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)