Housekeeping

What Blogger really needs is a dead link alert, so bad housekeepers like me don't have to discover by accident that they're sending folks on a snipe hunt. I just discovered that my link to "Sign-Post" above has been sending readers to a blank page at the Poetry Foundation. Dang. I love that poem. If you were disappointed by the old link, try this one. Hope it lasts a while.


La Récureuse, André Bouys, 1737

Unsettled

I frightened a duck this morning. She was tucked up in the weeds at the edge of the lake and I never saw her before she let out a squawk and scuttered out onto the water, wings spread, feet slapping the surface. She got 20 feet from the shore and instantly settled down, paddling serenely as if she had completely forgotten fleeing for her life 2 seconds before.

The weather is wonderfully unsettled here--storms and heavy rain last night, fitful rays of sun after dawn, then the descent of a pregnant black cloud as I hiked around the perimeter of the lake. Sunlight leaked around the cloud’s edges as it dropped fat drops of rain. The wind rose up and spread sheets of silver over the water. It carried a red-tailed hawk’s call to me from the opposite shore. The bird was perched in the crook of a tall tree, hollering in hope or anger. He took off and flew in wide circles over the lake, defying the rain, which promptly stopped.


Photos of Red-tailed Hawk courtship


The scent of spring, after the rain, Ma Lin (Song Dynasty), 13th century

Tracking

 

It’s not terribly cold here, but it’s gloomy and there’s been snow on the ground for days. I haven’t had much company on my hikes. On Thursday morning I listened to a long concert from a pair of coyotes who were very riled up about something, and Saturday morning a great blue heron flew over the lake. I’ve heard a woodpecker or two knocking around the woods. That’s about it. The rest of the birds are mostly silent and even the squirrels are scarce. I’d think all the critters were hibernating, waiting for winter to end, but the snow tells me otherwise. There are lots of dainty deer prints going from the tree line down to the lake. The turkeys leave scribbled evidence of their chronic confusion as they wander in circles among the trees. The feet of skunks and rabbits mark the trails for short distances before their owners think better of it and veer off toward safe cover. Raccoons don’t travel along the trails much at all, but they clearly go out of their way to use the footbridges—raccoons hate wet feet, apparently. Coyotes rarely leave tracks on the bridges, although they like to walk the trails for long distances. So do bobcats. I followed a bobcat track for at least half a mile yesterday. The cat had traipsed right along the trail, as if on a hike of its own. Walking beside the line of footprints, I felt I had a ghost companion, a feline familiar. As we came to a place where the trail crossed a road, the bobcat’s track abruptly turned away, back into the woods. I paused for a moment to say goodbye and then headed on my way.


Photo of mouse tracks in the snow from the National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons

"...stretched out upon Mother Earth"

I’ve spent a good portion of my Sunday reading The Book by Alan Watts—the sort of philosophical meringue that seems delightful as you consume it but leaves you hungry for something more substantial. Watts walks the thin line between expressing ideas simply and reducing them to something simple-minded. The Book’s considerable wisdom shares the page with a certain amount of 60s-style spiritual claptrap, which is kinda fun but doesn’t help me take the whole enterprise seriously. I thought about giving up on it a couple of times today, but I hung in there and was rewarded with Watts' quote of this passage from Schrödinger’s My View of the World:

“Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of time, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

Alrighty then. That was worth wading through 100 pages of The Book to reach. I’ve seen the last sentence of that quote before, but never the bit that precedes it. Schrödinger expresses in a few elegant words the joyful intuition that lures me into the woods. I can grasp that sense of being continually brought forth only when I literally throw myself on Mother Earth. This blog is all about dancing around Schrödinger’s insight, seeking the eternal now of union and metamorphosis.


The Carrot, Willem Frederik van Royen, 1699

"One must have a mind of winter"

Yesterday we woke up to an Arctic freeze, and today we're back to an ordinary Tennessee chill. When you live where the winters are mild it's easy to forget the special beauty that bitter cold creates. An ice-blue sky, glittering snow, the perfect silence that falls when it's so cold that no animals stir--these are rare pleasures for us.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


Text from Poets.org
Jay Keyser analyzes the poem here.

Garden under Snow, Paul Gauguin, 1879

Focused

A red-tailed hawk swooped low over my car as I drove out of the park this morning. She was diving for some unfortunate something cowering in the ditch along the road. I didn’t stop to see if she succeeded—but only because I was in a hurry. I don’t mind the bloodshed. I love watching hawks kill things. I get queasy at the sight of a cat dispatching a mouse, and I even feel a little sorry for the bugs that get caught in spider webs, but the bloodlust of raptors is beautiful to me. I think it is the hawk’s single-mindedness I like. Mammalian predators are so unfocused by comparison. Even when they (we) are actively stalking something, distraction comes easily. Not so for the hawk. Once she zeroes in on her victim, she never waivers. She’s pure killing machine. I aspire to her perfect sense of purpose.


Into the changes of autumn brush
the doe walked, and the hide, head, and ears
were the tinsel browns. They made her.
I could not see her. She reappeared, stuffed with apples,
and I shot her. Into the pines she ran,
and I ran after. I might have lost her,
seeing no sign of blood or scuffle,
but felt myself part of the woods,
a woman with a doe’s ears, and heard her
dying, counted her last breaths like a song
of dying, and found her dying. ...

From "To Kill a Deer" by Carol Frost. The complete poem is here.

Photo by John Harrison from Wikimedia Commons.

An unexpected bird

I got to the park early Saturday morning and headed down toward the lake, hoping I'd see the big flock of juncos that usually feed in the tall weeds near the water. The juncos continue to boycott my feeders, but at least they let me enjoy them on neutral territory. As I got near the lake I saw something moving in the grass up ahead. It was white with a vivid spot of red. My first thought was Oh my god, that's a chicken, but I immediately contradicted myself. It couldn't possibly be a chicken. What the hell would a chicken be doing miles from the nearest house? It was probably a bag of trash some lazy fisherman left behind.

But no, it was, in fact, a chicken--a white Leghorn rooster, to be precise. He was pecking around in the grass, but he seemed a little uncomfortable and disoriented. He fled when I approached, but didn't go far, just hunkered down about 20 feet away. I doubt he made his way to the lake by himself. Domestic ducks and guinea fowl will wander far from home, but as far as I know, chickens generally don't. If I'd seen him closer to town, I'd assume he had escaped from one of the Mennonite farmers who sell chickens on the roadside, but somebody must have deliberately carried him to such a remote place. Most likely, he was nabbed out of someone's yard and dumped, either as a prank, or maybe by an irate neighbor who was tired of his crowing.

I was certain he'd be a coyote's dinner last night, but this morning he was still there, in almost exactly the same spot. He seemed even more freaked out than yesterday. He was hunched down in the grass and kept absolutely still until I was almost on him, then he ran a good distance. I noticed he'd lost his tail feathers, so maybe he had encountered a predator and escaped.

It's a sad predicament for the bird. He's pretty much doomed. Even if I could catch him, which is doubtful, he'd be no safer at my house than in the park. There are coyotes all around my place, not to mention the free-roaming neighborhood dogs. If he's still there in the morning, I may ask the park staff if they can rescue him, though I don't know how interested they'll be. A stray chicken doesn't rate very high on the sympathy meter.


(The photo is a Leghorn hen--wrong gender, but I like her attitude. You can see some Leghorn cocks at My Pet Chicken.com.)