Present

As a Silicon Valley creature I’ve worked and dined with many a human animal in the last 25 years. And I had an epiphany today. I’ve actually had it a few times, but now it’s coming to fruition.

If I could get paid to stare into my yellow and white daisies, my camellia, and the freesia growing yearly through my rosemary I would. If I could get paid to spend my days napping in between foreign movies, I would. And if while I’m watching those movies if I could have a Greyhound in my lap, even better.

I am beyond the hoopla of the corporation. I only engage for survival, and for the one day I can retire to the daffodils and daily tea and poetry. As they say “it’s easy to make money, if that’s all you care about.”

 

 

Good Evening

I hope the leaving is joyful, and I hope never to return

~Frida Kahlo

I have spent very little time outside these days. It’s glimpses of seabirds in the morning heading west to the Pacific, and I mourn the loss of Vitamin D. The doctor says that I need to take a supplement, but it doesn’t help much. I need to be outside, really, hiking. Tomorrow it will rain, but I get to be home, inside, looking out, and there is some solace in that.

I have found time to read on BART going into SF for work, and I just finished Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson. She shares my love of animal rescue and taxidermy (mutually exclusive), and a more quirky way of looking at the world. I finally finished a book after many years, thank you public transportation. It’s a fun, easy read, check it out.

San Francisco has become my urban nature observation. I say hello to every pigeon I see like a crazy person, and watch people on streets on and on BART with a trained eye. I study their skin, their clothes, their disposition. The unshaven back of a man’s head, or the feathers we all wear…colorful scarves, wisps of hair falling from a beret, presence… and the smell of alcohol wafting up from the homeless man asleep in the back. I am among these wild, and I am the second witness.

It’s just another day

It’s just another day
Where people cling to light
To drive away the fear
That comes with every night
- Oingo Boingo

Today I retrieved a dead American Goldfinch from the ground. I had seen it sickly roosting on a metal hanger in my gazebo, and I guess it had died on my lawn. My dog Georgia tried to eat it, but I alerted her away from it and put it in the trash. I thought to bury or have it stuffed, but I am too tired for such things as of late.

I have some time to kill before my next job, and my thoughts creep in and out. I waver between bored, satisfied, lonely. I’ve taken to wearing ear plugs to drown out the conures, as they are hormonal from the rain. The days are cold and Georgia’s arthritis is worse. The clouds are not as pretty, nor are the sunrises. I spend my mornings looking out my back window, through the little bits of grass that have stuck to it, trying to make out the little birds that flit among the bushes. As the Eastern Grey Squirrel gorges itself on the millet bell, the White-crowned sparrows wait beneath for the extra bits to trickle down to the felled stump. I can’t see it all very well, as the seal on the window has broken and is foggy, so I just let my eyes rest on what they can see. I don’t look on them with a birder’s eye.

Caged

We are constantly invited to be who we are.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Today I made myself step out of my comfort zone. That zone is at home, doting over my animals, napping, watching movies, and thinking about writing. Very little of the latter it seems. But I was lucky enough to be able to take some time off, so I went over to the coast. It’s not a luxurious drive, but a 10 minute meander down a hill into Pacifica, CA, and a walk along the Pacific Ocean.

Pacifica is kind of odd, and you have to look for its gems. If you can look past the people that weird you out — like the addict nursing his Budweiser just outside the cafe where you are sipping on your espresso, or the trippy ZZ Top-looking guy taking his daily stroll along the ocean. It reminds me of the dirtier parts of Arcata, CA, where I grew up.

ZZ Top asks me what I like to take pictures of, because I have my camera, and I reply “lots of things.” He says “you should take a picture of that red-tailed hawk over there…” and so I try, but he flies away before I can get a good pic. But I’m grateful to him for pointing it out, and he keeps walking.

I sat for a long time on the beach, on a rock that made my ass hurt, settled in among the trash, feathers, dead crabs, and broken shells. I made myself write a page in my handwritten journal, and I was going to read these fabulous nature book I had brought along, but that will wait for tomorrow. I was content to watch a gull playing keep away with a starfish.

It felt good to get out of my cage. In fact, my birds I keep at home seem to be an analogy for my life. I can see that I am free, that I have wings, and that there is a lot of the sky and earth to explore. But I’m content to stay within my routine, what I know, and at night I close the door and stare into my little mirror and ring my little bell. It’s my mind that has bars around it, and it seems that every day that passes I pick away at them with a file. I know I can change.

I ended my mini-outing on a bench just in front of San Andreas lake, nibbling on half a sandwich and listening to the traffic just behind me on Skyline Boulevard. That’s where I seem to live, straddling the line between urbanity and sanity.

Get out of the way

That which you manifest is before you.
- Garth Stein, “The Art of Racing in the Rain”

My mother used to talk a lot about things that she wants to do, but has never done. If I had a dollar for every time she said “I’m gonna…” well, let’s just say I’d live in a castle. A pretty one in the Scottish highlands. She doesn’t say it so much anymore. In some ways she’s given up.

2011 was a breakthrough year for me in terms of learning a valuable lesson. I learned that when I give people advice about what I think they should be doing with their lives, I should turn the lens on myself instead. That’s really how it is, we criticize when we are stuck or unhappy. It can be subtle, or it comes out in a sea of tears.

I had several of my animals get sick and die this year, and it was very emotionally draining on me. I lost my dear cockatiel, Beetlejuice, to old age and liver disease. Then I lost five budgies to what my vet and I think was either food poisoning or a bad case of genetics (budgerigars are now prone to shorter lives because of avian breeders breeding them for looks instead of health). Then my dog was diagnosed with a mast cell tumor that he had to have removed for a hefty sum; it’s hard to see a gorgeous Greyhound all wacked out on pain meds and then he won’t look you in the eye for days. The level of tumor was so small, I half-wondered if it could have been dealt with in another, less invasive way. They always say that they don’t know what causes these tumors, but strangely I have an idea of what causes all tumors.

These are the tumors that lie beneath the surface that you cannot see. They sit on the top of your stomach, and they keep you from standing up. These tumors make everyone sick. Symptoms include, but are not limited to: “I’m going to hold on to something someone ‘did to me’ many years ago.”  Or, the famous “I’m going to make myself busy with everything else that doesn’t matter, because I’m afraid of getting down to my real work.” When Tori Amos sung that there are so many dreams on the shelf, she was singing to us all.

I now believe that your attitude and your inability to move forward makes you stagnate in a sea of dead birds. And their disease pollutes the lake and becomes your drinking water. Because you’re comfortable remaining sick. Because you think that if you get happy or get well, something will blindside you. But I have news for you…something always will. But you should try to get happy and well anyway, because you can’t race in the rain if you aren’t present, you’ll crash. I kind of thought that my state of mind was causing all of this stress and unhappy circumstances to come to me, and maybe in some ways it did. Whether you do the needful with a heavy heart or a hopeful one can affect the choices you make, and affect the outcomes.

I struggled to keep going with my nature blog because I was so afraid of not saying the perfect thing every time. I was so constrained and my mind was tormented. I was limiting myself. I can’t say I have it all figured out, though I wish every time I had an epiphany that I did. Instead, I’m just happy that I wrote this, and now I’m going outside to look at the stars and kick the leaves around.

 

 

 

Watching

“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”  - Dr. Seuss

My mind has been unfocused, scattered, assaulted. I’ve been spending way too much time looking into the mirrors and minds of others and less into my own. I won’t even give it a name, it doesn’t deserve it. Turn it off.

I read somewhere or someone told me (does it really matter?) that the problems of the world take a focused mind, an attention to one thing at a time, a meditative finger on what you love most.

That attention may be uncomfortable, like a staring match, and you may blink or laugh, and look away. You might not like what or who looks back at you, or what you see.

But you have to come back to it, because it’s beautiful, that tree, that creature standing before you. Like a Raven’s voice, the natural world is complex and deserves observation.

Wind

My face is a mask I order to say nothing
About the fragile feelings hiding in my soul.

- Glenn Lazore (Mohawk)

Outside the wind is waiting just outside the fall. It dances around late September, and by December it will be here in full force. I watch with patience as the landscape changes; the leaves begin to wilt on the Catalpa, the songbirds are fewer, and we all move forward into darker hours.

My hair is long now, and I have to wear it back in a ponytail when it’s so windy. Even then, strands of my red hair at the temple are pulled away by the gusts and enter my eyes, nose, and mouth. As I walk, the wind is at my back and pushes me forward. The wind in the trees, especially the Eucalyptus up near San Andreas lake, sounds like a rushing river. I am always surprised to look up and not find water, only a gigantic tree, and the intoxicating scent of its bark.

I think of the little wild birds, late at night, sleeping and holding on for dear life to swaying branches. This is much like what I do as I rest, my wings (arms) tucked up around my head and neck like a bat, my only protection from my dreams. The other night I dreamt that there were men in a car, parked in my backyard, and my aviary was on fire. I don’t have an aviary. I am out of control.

The randomness of the wind makes me feel safe. It wraps its tender or strong air in a cold embrace around me, and sometimes sings me a quiet lullaby in the early morning hours, before it dies down at dawn.