Many thanks, SN.

That was really beautiful. Thank you for sharing it with us. I am bipolar and your words about Steve Irwin's joy really resonate with me. I wish you the very best. I wish you joy.

I have been suprised by many peoples heartfelt sense of loss for Steve Irwin(as has my husband). My first reaction on hearing the news was thats sad, especially for his family, but that really it wasn't a surprise. When everybody got stuck into Germaine Greer for saying in her usually insensitive way lately, I tended to side with her, being a person who likes not to disrupt the integrity of a creatures natural environment. Then again, my husband and I often swim against the mainstream feeling. The first thing we knew about our fellow Australian Steve Irwin was when we saw him being animated in SouthPark, so then we paid attention when we crossed channels from the ABC to see Steve approaching a deadly snake, and putting on his sunglasses so it wouldn't hit him with deadly, blinding poison in the eye. He survived that one. I was hysterical with horror, disbelief and laughter. We understood that he could be so loved in the U.S. because of their love for the outrageous, larger than life characters. I took my neice and nephew to his Australia Zoo and was impressed, especially the koala exhibit, but when I read in the newspapers, extracts from his book about how as a teenager he grabbed Red Belly Black snakes out of the bush, five in one afternoon and took them home in his esky, I thought this is a lesson to our children about not what to do, as in fact those snakes are endangered and the only predator for our more predominant brown snakes. Thanks Steve. It occured to me that if he was a kid again, he would have been put on Ritalin, but he had a father who was able to allow his boy use up all the mad energy,(his dad said, he was a monster as a kid). I hope that the next generation are able to step back when they are out being Wildlife Warriors, and think through the cause and effect of what they intend to do to save the environment, and I hope that the grief felt for this Aussie adventurers death will trigger them into a committment to saving all creatures great and small, including us, by thwarting the climate change that is upon us, which will wreak havoc on our earthly paradise.