Whoopsy-doodle!

 

"A Reasonable Falc-simile"

 

""Marvel" at My Modest "Improvements""

The Sketch-ed of the Earth

"Kestrel Haunted by Lack of Skill With Perspective"

 

"Worried Western Bluebird-- Amorphous"

 

Made an honest attempt to draw this Cooper's Hawk on break at work and, at first, miserably failed as you can see at right.  I started again, just to try to get the eye right and the rest of it came out decent.  So there's a lesson there about stick-to-itive-ness I think.  Anyway, I took it to heart and completed the drawing and coloring of the Cooper's Hawk and, why not, his misshapen compadre.

 

  

Then I had an idea for a sweet 80's revival "buddy cop" TV show.

He's Cooper, a wisecracking veteran P.I. with a drinking problem and an unspecifiedly haunting past.

And he's Baron Von Dummenvogel, a German playboy, former billionaire using the last of his inheritance to fund a failing detective agency in hopes of restoring his family's honor.

  

Together, they are:

 

Twofer Pen-draggin'

"Wren with Yellow Magpie Beak"

"Artist Terrible at Backgrounds"

Born with a weak heart

I don't mind exploring along the same paths for the rest of my life though, of course, they never are the same. To walk along these mountain ridges, drift down beside the streams among the cedar, pine and fir, and out to the willows and sand of the larger shore around which they have all come to stand. With repetition, the steps layer over one another in memory, gathering with them all that was seen and coloring what came before.  Here the purple flowers next to the brittle husks, there the aimless damselflies and glistening needle ice, your sadness, fear and buoyant joy, the worn feathers caught in the brown grass, the perfect, short-lived blue of the crayfish shells turning to pinkish orange in the heat, and the wren singing without cease as the sky changes its colors too under the setting sun.

 To each of these places for which I have an affinity there is, without fail, a spiritual, if not physical, remoteness-- a kind of restless, communal loneliness.  It's there in the Swallows, weaving their arcs through the sky, vanishing into the blue and returning again just as fluidly as if they were the very spirit of the wind, as if their absence in the winter was no more than a longer ebb in their constant turning with its center somewhere even they may not understand.  And maybe it is strange then that one should still see freedom in tethering oneself to the same landscapes when others range so far but the world is always there no matter from where one chooses to watch it.  There are always the hailstorms or the gently falling snow, the cool relief of the lake on a Summer day as overhead the cumulus drifts or later the stratus lets through the shafts of morning light, the wet granite roar of the falls and the evening's glow lingering on the faint ripples at the edge of the water.




 There are things in this world for which I have no defense and others against which I refuse to defend myself.  With each step, they can reach me just as they need to-- in beauty, sadness, and joy.  I suppose that one only really wishes to defend what one loves and that my love has always turned itself outward.  So then what does one do with a Killdeer's fretful call from somewhere not seen, the searching tap of a nuthatch high above, nighthawks gliding over the sand unconcerned with our presence in the dimming light, the first and last Red Wings of the season bristling up in the same song, little shadows of birds shivering up out of the beach grass to disappear into the willows, a hen harrier skimming low and hungry over the reeds, and the tiny scattering of olive and gray feathers, loose and drifting in the dust of the mountain trail?  I don't know how to keep these things safe unless it's to keep them alive within, let them join together with the old, and build with each new outing.  So I try to remember to follow the course of things in faith as witness and to give myself over to the world and all of the ways to pass through it.  The paths are largely the same even if my steps and the life around them have changed and thankfully, more often than not, I tend to know my way home.

 

Perhaps that Great Egret sometimes falters too
for all his deliberate pressing of those long black toes into the mud.

Is it anger there in that hunting, yellow eye?
Do you see yourself in that second before you strike through the water's surface?

And the nightmares? Do they shoot through your sleep too?
That heavy knife-bill swinging wildly for a moment as you wake, confused.

I can see as you see me, crouched here by the riverside, and that neither of us understands
quite what drives the rowing retreat of your angelic, white wings.

A feather dropped as you lit into the air and you must have seen, as you half-circled the sky,
that little something lost and carried by the river, flowing by, just out of my reach.

Tahoe Mountain Trail

 

And what would people like us find on that evening mountainside, where the fire passed through some years before?  The trail leads out and up through all the broken white trunks, charred in streaks of softly iridescent black and stood ghostly over the undergrowth.  Our chosen path cuts into the dark, rolling green of the hillside where flickering wrens trill out their song and retreat into the dense labyrinths of chaparral which already look ancient though, here, they couldn't be anything but young.  Then the leaves start to give way, higher up, where the reddish dust spreads thinly over rock deeply scraped by glaciers long since passed into dusk and vanished out into the vast lake now visible beyond.

 




Here the last of the snags give way to the first of the trees not touched by the flames.  Here we see, by the dozens, the elegant thrust and curling away of the seeds fallen from the Incense-cedar still standing above us.  Here Fox Sparrows have fed on the joyous red star burst of Sierra Gooseberries and left the spiny husks at the foot of the bush.  Here among the natural rubble we can hold up the long, roughened, sun bleached cones in the dimming light and pick out, along the horizon behind them, the limbs of their sibling Sugar Pines, heavy with cones and silhouetted against the blush of sunset and icy blue of the lake now fairly glowing beyond.





The lights of three boats pass in different directions over that distant water, aligning together for a moment and then pulling away.  And who couldn't feel it, then?  The underlying spirit of that ridge-- its long held scarring, the traces of its more recent pain, and the mitigating grace of life both abiding and returning.  It's everywhere as we turn back down the trail towards the warm home-lights of the forest valley and the headlights winking here and there through the trees.  The bats are out now, their nimble shapes arcing and looping after unseen insects across the deepening blue of the sky as it drifts into night.  Eventually, back down among the lost trees glowing faintly white under the moon, we stop to pick out constellations we are still learning as the stars take their places above.  And, barely seen out the corner of the eye, there the gliding, faint outline of an owl as it lands on a faraway branch, black against the lighter dark of the lake now calming beyond.

Hawks sleep lightly.  They wake to the movement of a leaf in the breeze, to the swaying whisper of grass, to the lengthening and shutting-off of shadows. They are fugitives who have escaped from everything but fear.

                                                                                                    The Peregrine, J.A. Baker 

*         *          *

When the cool of evening finally comes
and with it the sweet breathing out of the pines...

You may rest.

You don't need an answer to that question or
to keep holding what's left of your failure.

You can let yourself rest.

Should there sleep in your heart a fear of morning,
with your thin body curled tight like a talon...

It's okay.  You must rest.

They are all out there still or moving softly
In the forest dark and half at peace with night.

Please, just rest.