Something Centripetal

When I go out specifically to see birds, I will often go out in the morning without having eaten and spend a few hours or more wandering in marshes or meadows, along creeks or the shore of the Lake.  I have noticed that hunger of this order helps to sharpen alertness while firmly easing me out of the self-focused state I so easily slip into. It brings me a useful diffusion of thought as the body starts to pay more strict attention and the mind freely drifts.  Somewhat in line with the spiritual and religious uses of fasting, this bodily hunger helps me to understand an existential hunger as well.  We all have a need for something, however ill-defined which will sustain our spirit, calm us and help to move us through our lives.  In the way that most of us live, it is easy to feel distracted or disconnected from the world around us-- out of place, without roots and restless.  When I go out into the natural world to see birds, there is the physical reconnection with the natural world but there is also the act of encountering another life that is in place, deeply rooted in the world around it and at rest in that, no matter how much it worries about predators and finding food, it is not struggling against itself-- the bird simply exists in its natural state.

For me, hawks most clearly express this idea in that they create a deep resonance within me.  Something in the back of my mind responds automatically-- an inner compass pulled to and shivering towards its object.  Owing to a few lovely conversations in which I displayed my own inelegance with the spoken word, I have been trying to understand and become more able to express this connection.

First these are fairly measured, elegant birds living under a well-defined, vigilant tension.  There is to them a kind of feral constancy which I mean in the sense of steadiness of temperament but which is also pleasantly tied to notions of faithfulness, loyalty, and love.  My own name is derived from Gawain, the name of a knight of the round table which is most closely thought to mean "Hawk of May".  This speaks to the nobility that has tended to be attached to hawks because of their well-controlled bearing but also hints at the fierceness and violence with which they hunt.  Our words for these animals mostly tend to focus on this violence with the word "hawk" coming from roots meaning "to seize" from which has also grown the word havoc.  "Falx" is Latin for sickle, with it's own attendant associations with reaping and death, and came to refer to sickle-shaped weapons which morphed into "falcon".  "Raptor", only fairly lately applied to birds, means "robber or plunderer" and comes from the root "rapere" which means "to seize and carry off" and unfortunately is closely related to "rape".  But it is also closely related to rapt and rapture which maybe makes it an apt name in that it points out the odd mix in which these birds have been viewed throughout Western thought.  At times, they have been associated with royalty and virtue, used in heraldry and as symbols across cultures.  And then they have also been shot and killed as vermin as they prey on livestock, poultry, and game-- hated simply for hunger and a will to live.

 I have written before about "seeing the bird in two ways" and it is difficult to dissociate the actual birds that you see before you with the resonance they have for us, the associations we feel that give rise to these names and symbols-- these metaphors.  Metaphor is what we use to reach out and try to grasp something that we either cannot directly express or directly understand.  It is our way of seizing an idea, to carry it away, take it apart and digest what sustains our lives, what then becomes a part of us.  Metaphor, in art, spirituality, and thought, is a way in which we sustain ourselves and are able to feed that existential hunger and find connection with things which we cannot fully understand.

Metaphors can be seen as a guiding pattern or constellation-- something by which we orient ourselves in a complex world. The most important part of a constellation is the point of observation, or the location of the viewer themselves. If your point of view is changed, then the entire constellation is different. Astronomy in this simple way is deeply rooted in place while yearning for farther reaches and in this way shares territory with spiritual faith.  This speaks to the importance of knowing where we are and the significance of our place in the world while also illustrating the versatility of metaphor across mental disciplines.

Hawks can be seen symbolically as spirits of the forest and open field, a representative gestalt of the natural world itself.   As birds they can point us toward an expression of everything which soars within us and, as raptors, those emotions and ideas waiting to seize us.  As with most things, close observation of their lives can help us to recognize patterns and contours in our own.  They are there for a reason, both in a biological and a metaphorical sense, as all things are in the natural world and that reason is fully their own.  They are in place, simply and strongly connected with the world around them.

There is then Wendell Berry's idea, of which I have written before, where one can understand the world as "a music so subtle and vast no ear hears it except in fragments".  The metaphor is aptly made as we use music to give voice to that which we find difficult to give words.  It takes so many things all joined together, moving sometimes in harmony and sometimes in discord, to make up even the tiniest beauty which we see in the world around us.  It is my belief that by loving this world well and connecting with it, we come to recognize our place in it and to know what is ours to add to this vast music.

These hawks, these avian hunters and seekers, help me to connect with this music of the world.  They help me to understand and remedy this inner hunger.  They help me to read these constellations and to find my place.

   

Pen and Rethink...

Slow week at the Urban Trailhead...

"Common Merganser?  I hardly knew her!"

This looks decent as an experiment with colored pencils (on loan from the Explore Tahoe Collection)

Lest you think I've made progress though, let me present:

"The Western Bluebird of Crappiness"

"The Western Bluebird of Sappiness"

"Western Bluebird Sad to See How I Must Think He Looks"

Super Bonus Sketch:

 

"Cedar "Sweet Berry" Waxwing"

 Looks a little yokel somehow.  I guess I just unconsciously like to make fun of birds.

The 9th of May in the mountains

The sound of rain on the roof has no pattern that the mind can follow but surely one is there.  A series of droplets fallen from a similar height hitting, splashing, and running down the definite shapes of trees, power-lines and houses, all shifted by the same wind.  Simply because it is so infinitely complex as to defy our understanding, we call it random.  But there is a music there even if it expresses nothing more complicated than the free and beautiful movement of the earth under its clouds and around its sun.  And down here the mind can look out the window as it listens for these repetitions and it can maybe only try to follow the threads out into the wet forest evening, up through the myriad dripping needles, and on into the grey mist from where this wonder has come.

Scribble-de-bop!

Some progress:

Top is- "Evolution of a Pied-Billed Dweeb Grebe"

Bottom is- "Prairie Falcon Enttäuschung"

I think he's bummed because someone drew his wing like a fried egg which was itself badly drawn.

Irony alert: I think it was the wing that dragged this one down.

On Apical Dominance

The main biological determinant of the shape of a pine tree or fir is the presence of a lead or apical bud which directs the upward growth and sends hormones down to the lower buds which keep them subordinate and prevent them from growing longer.  This helps the tree to quickly shoot up to where it can catch the maximum amount of light.  When the apical bud dies, is broken off, or is otherwise damaged, the other buds around it go into a kind of race to replace it as the new lead.  This is what causes the split crowns, double tips and other marks of individual character in these trees.


In the same way we can speak of times in our lives when the driving force, whatever our own sort of apical bud is to each of us, has left us or been irrevocably damaged.  All of us have felt how the wind shook us and snow buried us in our younger years, damage to our weaker branches in a storm, the old growth falling off as we no longer need it.  But when we no longer have that bud leading us forward, the mind goes a little haywire with worry, confusion, doubt and everything else.  Recently it has been good for me to think that maybe there are other things inside us, other strengths and loves ready to help us lead ourselves forward into light and health.  The change might always be detectable and we may always be able to see just where the crisis point was-- our trunks growing a little crooked, our symmetry a little off.  But I have always found far more interesting and endearing the trees that have grown a little out of the ordinary, that have suffered damage, been bent by the weather, struck by lightning, singed by fire and still kept growing.

Clowns of the Forest

Acorn Woodpecker; Meladerpes formicidorkus

Acorn Woodpecker; Melanerpes formicivorus

So I'm playing around with planning a kids Nature Club, ideally to be offered at the Library.  It's something that I am actually pretty excited about and it's been fairly motivating for me.  A loose outline of the idea would be to get the kids each a nature journal, talk to them about different ways that they can experience the wilderness and all the different media and modes that they can use to express what they've encountered and how they've felt with subsequent meetings allowing them to share what they've seen and made while giving interpretive guidance on narrower subjects such as birds, geology, trees and forests, etc..  The idea would be to encourage them towards a creative interest in the wilderness and to subtly instill a deep wonder in and care for the natural world and the desire to become better stewards of such an integral part of our community.

In this spirit, I thought it might be a good idea to teach myself to draw in a more realistic mode than my usual cartoon mess so that I could talk at least somewhat convincingly about the ways in which one can improve one's skills from even abysmal beginnings.  Above you will have seen my first attempt, knocked out in a few minutes between extemporizing to visitors at E.T. about the beauty of the Lake.  I picked an Acorn Woodpecker for its impeccably well-defined lines, thinking this would make it simpler.  It did, and at least I was able to put forth something that was at least identifiable as  the species it was intended to depict.  I thought I'd put it out here as kind of a marker of my first attempt and as I practice and hopefully improve, I can loosely document my progress and have some tips I can share with kids.  So check back in... 7 years... maybe... and you should see some fairly passable bird sketches going on.

That little Woodpecker I drew just looked a little sad and uncomfortable though, so I figured I would research a bit of its Life History in order to practice evoking a little of the bird's natural personality in my "art".  Combining this with my own personal observations when I took the above picture I came up with something that I think makes rudimentary steps, at least, towards portraying the Acorn Woodpecker's relationship to the world around it including it's unfailing sense of style and personal struggles with a social drinking habit slowly creeping into early stage alcoholism.  Nature really can be unforgiving at times.

Acorn Woodpecker; Smoothanerpas formicivelourus

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