Placerville 4/24/15

Female Bushtit; Psaltriparus minimus

In an overcast lunch hour break from out-of-town meetings I could forgo my food and just slip out the door, going hungry down a roadside slope into tangled vegetation, through tall weeds, past barbed wire and across the limbs of a tree long since downed, into a small clearing. Nearby might be a homeless bed in dense undergrowth and a feeling of forgotten life on the margins of something half understood, close to daily life but far removed. There I could stand under a foreign tree and watch little yellow-eyed birds flicker among the budding twigs of a shrub I cannot name. A scrub jay might call out from where I had entered this space, which could be a calling back from a world no one knows I left or a scolding reminder that I don't belong to this overgrown side either. It would be easier than going back to stoop under these low branches and trail down through the knee-deep grass of a hillside, past a lone snag riddled with the work of birds, through an impromptu gate ripped in a rusted fence and into the bright and noise of a crowded parking lot.

    Out in the human open I would feel less a wanderer and more a stranger, drifting down sidewalks where others are hurrying.  It would be a relief to cut across lawns under the oak trees where squirrels are busy stealing acorns cached by woodpeckers who call at them in anger and swoop with little effect.  This conspicuous feeling would draw me on though, and down a curving dirt road which trails along past thorn bushes where mockingbirds sing and a cat, black, feral and thin, sighs away, at my passing, into a pile of rock and concrete debris.  On past a disused shed, around piles of wood slash and dried out bush trimmings, I might come to a kind of rest alone in the open where an abandoned warehouse barely stands there on the other side of a wide ravine which is choked with vegetation and scattered with trash blown by the wind. Here, at the edge of several places, I might encounter a small, quick species of bird I had never seen before and wonder if they feel this too-- this tenuous solitude and this free but restless spirit. Do they seek these places out the same as me or do they simply enjoy the indirect protection from predators one finds in a closer proximity to humans?  Their appetite and need for safety certainly leads them most places but their heart must also pull them forward just as mine does for me.  In the end, I suppose these places help my spirit as well to avoid its own predators and perhaps this is something else we share-- species more comfortable with the ambiguity of the borders between.  And upon returning, as I will have to, who but those little gray birds with their tiny black eyes and all the other small things out there would know the lonely world I have returned from and just what I have kept with me from that place?

Oak Titmouse; Baeolophus inornatus

A photograph I might never take

Sometimes I have recognized in these dim, late-winter woods a deep sense of quiet neglect. It is as if the spirit of the forest had nodded off in waiting for spring and, now sick with dreams, it is unable to find its way back out of its long, twisting burrows. All the little eyes that find themselves outdoors absently watch as the soft, light snowflakes drift through the pines in a fitful breeze. There is an awareness of something going gently feral within yourself-- an inner forgetfulness which lets us slip away from ourselves as easily as a book might slip out of a sleeping hand onto the damp bed of pine needles beneath us.

There is the great, constant, monotone shifting of pine branches rising and receding overhead and in the stillness between these breaths one can sometimes hear, close by, the faint clatter of willows and the sound of cold, clear water flowing away down the creek. A small hawk is perched low and puffed up in a somewhat protected limb. One wonders how it is able to soothe itself, alone among those wavering branches or if it even has to try. There is that vigilant, raptorial boredom in its eyes. In its bearing, an intimation of a life lived between the blood of its meals and punctuated by the glory of the skies turning through the tips of its wings. There is an understanding of the lonely things it must do to feed itself. Its beauty is stark and removed in the graying light as the woods sink again into a less ambiguous sleep.