"To be free and be close to god"

I said those words, years ago, to a shrink who asked me what I wanted most in life. Reading it now, I realize it must have sounded very pompous or just phony, but it was what popped into my head at that moment and it was—is—the truth.

I suspect the phrase is one I read somewhere, a philosophy of life acquired secondhand from a poem or some self-help bible, but Googling it just now only got me a slew of instances of “close to god”—or rather, “close to God,” since most of the discourse on the ‘net concerns that god. Freedom never seems to appear in conjunction with him.

Wherever it comes from, my credo isn’t useful or warmhearted. It doesn’t preclude action or caring, but it doesn’t demand them either. I know I feel closest to fulfilling it when I am ambling along the trail and spot something beautiful and ordinary, like the little foamflowers in the picture above. They have just started opening up here in the past few days. The blooms are tiny and intricate, so perfect they are a little shocking.

The moment of perceiving common beauty is a sacred moment, and creates a sense of liberation I never know any other time. I stop feeling stranded in the psychic hinterlands, resenting the limitations of my flesh-and-bone prison, yearning for a knowledge that is beyond me. Every possibility condenses to the form and matter of a plant, a bird; and all of those possibilities are fulfilled. The experience of immanence contains flawless love of crude existence--a thrilling paradox.


For a virtual stroll through Tennessee wildflowers, go here and click on the "Wild Flowers" tab.


Photo of Tiarella cordifolia from Wikimedia Commons.

They're back!

The frogs, that is. We often hear the little peepers in February, but I haven't heard the real springtime frogs until today. Judging from the Herping with Dylan video below, I think I was hearing primarily chorus frogs. Whatever they were, their calls made a beautiful counterpoint to the birds' chatter. All the racket disturbed the serenity of the lake in the best possible way.

This clip runs a bit long, but I can never get enough of Dylan, and the end credits are cute. The frogs he's cataloging are in Illinois, but we have many of the same species in Tennessee. (You'll find a nice page devoted to Tennessee's frogs here.)



Click here to see all the HWD videos.

Looking

I expressed my inner ferret this morning. I had decided to do a little off-trail exploring before the ticks and poison ivy take back the woods for the season. I was trudging up a leaf-covered hillside and stopped to look at some sort of orange fungus that had sprouted on a fallen tree. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a patch of leaves move. At first I thought they were just being shifted by the breeze, but then they moved again. Something was definitely under there.

I generally try not to harass the creatures I come across on my daily walks, but I felt an uncontrollable desire to go after that mysterious, quivering bump. I grabbed a strip of bark and pushed aside the dry top layer, but the thing—Vole? Lizard? Mega-sized wood roach?—moved away from me, down into the damp, rotting leaves. I kept digging, thinking C’mon, I just want to see what you are. I’m not going to eat you or anything. The object of my desire, however, recognized my predatory compulsion for what it was. It kept moving, and soon it was clear that I had lost my quarry.

I got a nice little consolation prize, though. As I was headed back down the trail I saw a veery perched on the bare branch of a dogwood tree. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a veery before, but I recognized it immediately, thanks to all the time I’ve wasted poring over bird books. The veery is a migrant here, and never comes to feeders, as far as I know. This one was a birdwatcher’s dream. She posed prettily for me, turning around a couple of times as if to say, Get a good look, lady. I’m just passing through.





Ferret drawing from Het Leven der Dieren, A.E. Brehm (1829-1884) via Wikimedia Commons

Veery photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Shy and secretive

The trail is like a progressive peep show right now. The squirrels are especially busy--playing their erotic chasing games, chattering dirty to each other. I keep wondering when one of them is going to fall on my head as they leap from tree to tree. It’s all very sweet. One of the charms of spring is all the procreative energy it sets loose.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised recently when I saw a used condom draped over a rock. It was lying next to the trail along the lake shore, a delicate remnant of transient shared frenzy. (I hope there was shared frenzy. I hate to think of some poor woman hiking all the way out there for nothing.)

It was only after I thought about it for a while that I realized I’ve never seen a discarded rubber in the park before, and how odd it is that I haven’t. This park is in a rural area, not many miles from the little town where I grew up, and anyone around here can tell you it has always been a favorite refuge for horny teenagers, or any couple looking for an alfresco tryst. Virginity loss, infidelity, casual prostitution, not to mention good ol’ recreational sex—it’s all going on in those woods.

And yet, in spite of all the hours I spend out there, wandering down side trails and exploring the secluded spots along the creeks, I never saw any direct evidence of human sex until a couple of days ago. It’s not as if people are disinclined to leave other signs of their presence. They leave beer cans and cigarette butts, fast food wrappers and used Kleenex. Anglers are the terrible about dumping bait tubs and tangled line. But the fornicators are a tidy bunch. If they were as careless as everybody else, the park would be fairly littered with condoms, their wrappers, forgotten thongs, etc.

For all the complaints about our porn-soaked, hypersexualized culture, we’re still very secretive when it comes to the real thing. Unlike those skunks I blogged about a while back, and the squirrels cavorting through the treetops, we crave privacy for coupling, and even hide anything that might give us away after the fact. What a shy, quaint species we are.



Angélique et Médor, Agostino Carracci (1557-1602). Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Tuning

It’s been wet and gloomy here for several days. We’ve had enough rain to push all the creeks up a few inches. Streams meander throughout the park where I’ve been walking lately, and the sound of rushing water can be heard everywhere, accompanied by a steady drip from the trees. While the water’s voice fills the air, moisture softens the carpet of leaves and stifles the usual rustle of wind and wildlife. Twice in the past two days I have startled large groups of white-tailed deer, and they’ve bounded away like ghosts, their hooves silent against the soaked ground.

The sounds in the woods shift constantly as the weather and the seasons change. Listening to them is a big part of the pleasure of hiking for me. The birds’ songs are pretty, of course, and their drumming, rasping, crying and honking engage the ear; but I think what I enjoy most are the more subtle noises. It’s easy to miss the skittering of a squirrel’s tiny feet, or the faint burbling pop of ice along the lake’s edge in midwinter. Even on a fairly windless day, there is always a delicate creaking in the high branches of the trees. I find I have to make a conscious effort to tune my hearing toward the small sounds, but when I do, they fill the aural space as completely as the din of the crows or the woodpecker’s laugh. I feel a little like a spy at those moments, listening in on a hidden conversation.


Mountain Brook, Albert Bierstadt, 1863

The seamless world

I am always astonished by the connectedness of things. Nothing is discrete. Every action, thought or sensation is embedded with all others. The work of consciousness is selecting which connections to value, which to ignore.

Today I went hiking after a heavy rain, and when I returned to my car I found that a wolf spider had taken up residence in the cup holder of my car. I suppose she was looking for a dry spot. I like wolf spiders, so I let her stay and she rode around with me all day. I went to a violin lesson, made a grocery run, met Dave for coffee, drove the 40+ miles back to my house--and the spider stayed right there in my cup holder. A couple of times she climbed up to the edge and waved a leg in my direction, but mostly she just hung out at the bottom of the well, happy with her new home. I won't be surprised if she's still there in the morning.

My new buddy seemed to beg for a blog post, so I went looking for a spider poem, but couldn't find a good one that seemed appropriate. The way she hitched a ride made me think of hitchhikers, so I switched to searching for hitchhiker themes, and found the outstanding Diane Wakoski work below. One of the reasons it caught my attention is its recurring image of the mountain ash tree. I recently had an exchange about the fruit of the mountain ash--also known as the rowan tree--with Olfacta at her blog.

I love that perfect circle of event, art and memory.

They burn you
like the berries of mountain ash in August,
standing by the road,
clearly defined,
Autumnal brilliant, heads
scorched from waiting
in the sun.
How can
you pass them up?
But you do,
and dream each night of a hell,
where you are a hitchhiker,
and no one will ever stop to pick you up....(more)

From "The Hitchhikers" by Diane Wakoski, 1977. Complete text at Poetry Foundation.



Photo of wolf spider carrying her young on her back by Clinton and Charles Robertson, from Wikimedia Commons.

Measured resistance

Fights between hawks and crows are usually noisy and brutal. Crows generally gang up to attack a lone hawk, and I find it disturbing to watch, even though I know the crows are only defending themselves. I can't help identifying with the predatory hawk, just trying to survive, all alone against the mob.

But today I saw a squabble between a Cooper's hawk and a solitary crow that made me think about the beauty of restraint, and the intimacy of conflict. It was early morning and overcast--prime hunting conditions for the hawk, since everyone is out in search of breakfast, and the clouds mean he casts no warning shadow. I heard the familiar battle cry of the crows, and looked up to see a half dozen of them chasing the hawk along the tree line.

Normally, they would all have stayed on him until they drove him out of their territory or onto the ground, but that didn't happen. Once they had him safely away from their roosting spot, all the crows but one turned back. Then the hawk and the sole defender flew in a wide circle for several minutes, the crow diving, the hawk smoothly dodging him. Cooper's hawks are not much bigger than crows, and the pair's movements were so unhurried and graceful, a casual observer might have thought he was seeing two crows at play.

The crow was persistent and the hawk did eventually retreat, but the crow didn't seem victorious, nor the hawk vanquished. They both left the field of battle slowly, calmly. I got the sense that they had simply agreed to cease hostilities. Members of enemy species, they had colluded in peace.


Photo of Cooper's hawk by Mdf from Wikimedia Commons.