Landscapes
When my mornin’ comes around, no one else will be there
so I won’t have to worry about what I’m supposed to say
and I alone will know that I’ve climbed the great big mountain
and that’s all that’ll matter when my mornin’ comes around
~ Iris Dement
My mother’s brother, my uncle Geoffrey, died last October. The cancer in his body from years of smoking metastasized quickly, and just as soon as he was admitted to a terminal care facility, he was gone.
I did not visit him before he died, as he would have not recognized me nor would he have cared that I was there. My sister visited him religiously, but my mother could not face the inevitability, so she kept her distance. However, once he was gone the sheer tsunami of mortality washed over her, leaving her to wander through the landscape of life’s uncertainties.
During his life my uncle was a fairly well-known local artist in San Jose. He created etchings, lithographs, and taught at the local university. His art is in several public permanent collections including the San Jose Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts San Francisco, Lannan Foundation New York, and Crown Press Berkeley.
Just a week ago my sister invited me to his house to choose some of his prints for my own. He had this great studio in the back of his house in Willow Glen — a messy converted garage filled with his creative life. As I stood at the table flipping through his prints I felt like I was standing inside of him, that the walls of the studio was his body’s frame, his art his presence, and the thin layer of dust on the floor his heart. I don’t know any other way to describe it.
One liked one piece in particular very much. It was a print called “Tapas” and he had made ten versions of this print. I think I chose 2/10 and 6/10.
This time I spent looking at this piece got me thinking about how little we know about the mind. I felt like what he put down on paper was his interpretation of his mind’s landscape. I sensed that his prints were a rendering of how life’s wind, rain, sun, death, fruits, and flowers leave their marks on our brain, and this output was my uncle trying to make sense of it all.
Seagulls
“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding.” – Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
Last Friday I had a meeting near the ocean, bright and early. I always think it’s going to take me a while to get there, but it never does, and on this particular morning it was no different. This is a meeting with myself, to talk with the birds and to take it down a notch, so to speak.
Sometimes when I’m down by the sea I buy some bread and I feed it to the seagulls. They all descend at once, some watching and waiting cautiously from the rocks, others bold enough to snatch the bread just near my feet, where the opportunistic pigeons are getting in on the action. I always coo at them with my favorite sweet nothing of the day, rehearsal I’m sure for the day I’m a crazy old woman. A man in the parking lot of the nearby restaurant snaps my picture.
I take a deep breath and intently watch the gulls. I love how their yellow and black eyes contrast beautifully against the feathers on their head. Most, I assume, are California Gulls (Larus Californicus). In my limited research on gulls, however, I’m sure these gulls’ plumage changes, depending on the season, so I could be surrounded by a melting pot. I know I have seen Heermann’s Gulls (Larus Heermanni) on the shores of Monterey.
I remind myself to bring my camera next time, to take some pictures and put some names with some beaks.
Larus Heermanni
Renewed in winter
Sometimes, in winter, I feel renewed like in spring. It mostly comes at night, when I step outside into the cold to get relief from the heater. The moon is laying on her back within some stratus clouds, and the glow from my neighbor’s hot house lights up a bit of the night sky. If I remember to wrap my old green velvet blanket around me and wear shoes, I can be outside in my jammies for some time, like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin. Linus [writing to GP]: “Everyone tells me you are a fake, but I believe in you. P.S.: If you really are a fake, don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know.”
I look up at the stars and vow to learn some of their names. Ah…there’s the Big Dipper, I at least know that one. I know that my name is now a moon of Uranus. So not romantic, but funny.
This is the time of waiting, where the tips of narcissus have just appeared above the soil, under an unnamed tree in our side yard. The lilac tree will take a bit longer to bloom, and it’s children won’t be around for long. As goes the camellia, pink perfection not long in its season.
I planted a few lovelies last spring. The forget-me-nots that were truly forgotten will now make a showing in a month or two. A bougainvillea that I hope takes over the back fence, and salvia for the hummingbirds. I often see hummingbirds hovering around the bright leaves of some of my non-blossoming trees and plants. I think when the light hits a leaf just right the hummingbirds are tricked into thinking it’s sustenance for their long journey.
Just down the street from my house is the city park. My favorite thing to do is to visit the park on my walk after a day of family picnics, which are few and far between now because of the rain. I love watching the enormous ravens picking through the trash, looking for fries or leftover burritos. I can get pretty close to them before they chortle at me and lift off (I say lift as they are not fairy-light). But since the families have moved indoors they are left to pick through the neighbors’ trash, and this I find hysterical and delightful. Mostly because I find over-consumption and trash abhorrent, especially the overflowing kind. Good for those ravens for making due and surviving in their ever-shrinking greenbelt.
These things I observe fill me with optimism for the coming year. And as Charles Schulz once wrote “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”
Nothing
It is sweet outside
Where it seems magical
And if nothing works
We’ll do nothing
~ From the song “Beach” by Mew
A friend once told me that if we don’t learn to be present, we will live our life as if in a dream.
I am often amazed at the fearlessness of animals, their ability to hold on to nothing, to walk into the dark without dread or premonition. Some nights I lay in bed with the bedroom door wide open, staring out into the night clouds like some scared peeping tom, willing a ghost or nighttime critter to appear. This is the extent of my bravery, when in the morning I have to tend to the spiders that take advantage of the midnight access to a warm carpet and the dog’s water bowl.
And this is how they do appear, when I stop and do nothing. Just the other day I sat in the chair in my bird room, wondering whether I should pick the figs for my neighbor who likes to make fig jam, when an Anna’s Hummingbird suddenly appeared in the window, and then flew on. I was reminded of the time I spent a long night at the wildlife rescue, listening to the little sucking sounds of a baby Anna’s as I fed it a concoction from a syringe. It did not think “predator,” it only acknowledged “food.”
For sensitive animals like myself, I am never just acknowledging what I see or hear, my mind and heart are always seeking subtexts and nuances of communication and what is put out there. Most of the time I am reminded “to be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” and I am softened even by the coldest looks. But then I’m reminded that in some subtexts there’s information in them that wills me to survive, to feel fear, that all is not nothing.
Nourish
Before I fall to sleep at night my subconscious wakes up and asks me to stay a while. My mind wanders in to my backyard, willing the newly-planted dark clover to thrive, and it wonders at the sturdiness of the nasturtiums that have taken over the gazebo and are considering a war against the tomato cage. I bought a bougainvillea to stop it from advancing, but it’s just been trained and I don’t know yet how effective it will be in combat.
This is the one thing in my life that nourishes me, these late night daydreams where I float through the natural space outside my room.
No hummingbirds yet at the Salvia, but it’s only a matter of time. I want what I plant to provide for the birds that visit. I am excited when we water because that means the soil will loosen and the worms will stir. Though I stopped buying bird seed the house finches make due by eating the dandelions and the flowers and greens they produce. I love comparing their bright red heads to the grass I have let die to the color of straw.
Among the new additions of coleus, bougainvillea, and forget-me-nots, there’s a gathering of river stones where I planted one flower from a pink geranium. My mother told that me that I could just stick these little shoots in the ground and they will take off. “They are sturdy” she likes to say. She says that about all plants, really.
Underneath the stones, about a foot below the surface, lies Morrissey the cockatiel. Morrissey was a foster bird of mine who recently died from a genetic defect of his trachea. Through mites, lice, and a deformed beak…and finally his own makeup he surrendered, but not before he sang through it all, waving his little left foot for effect.
Though I don’t like to use water without purpose Morrissey loved showering with me. So I turn the hose on the rocks at twilight and give Morrissey a little of what nourished him.
Towhee is my alarm clock
Every morning, right before dawn, a California Towhee starts his chirping. I am typically asleep on the big red couch in our back room, and regardless of my reluctance to awake before I need to, his call fills my heart with gladness.
According to the Cornell Ornithology website: “California Towhees hop or run on the ground but tend to stay close to the protection of low shrubs and trees. When not foraging they may perch on shrubs, rooftops, and backyard fences, to sit and chip for long periods.”
I am happy to say that this is consistent with my experience, as I listen to him chip from the neighbor’s rooftop. A mourning dove might alight on the roof and gaze on him with focused patience, while the occasional mockingbird will wait for a break in the monotony to introduce a new and complicated song, to the joy of early risers.
Water and the beauty of spring
American Goldfinch, male on left, female on right
“In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.” — Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
I greet the spring days with joy and some civility. I suffer from S.A.D., and do not enjoy days when it’s cloudy and rainy. On days like this I sit at my back window and watch the gulls playing in the wind and the lone mourning dove bracing itself against the slanting rain. In my sadness, however, I see the beauty in “weather,” the billowing clouds, the swaying eucalyptus, and the water we so desperately need.
What’s odd is that I don’t wish for water for myself. I wish it for the annual visit of the American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis) at my feeder, and the California Towhee (Pipilo crissalis) that waits for the rain to make the worms available. It’s a wonderful thing to see the C.Towhee skirt along the ground and under the jasmine in the back of our yard. I sometimes I imagine I am Mistress Mary as I peek under the plant, hoping for a glimpse of a Towhee or its family.
I never happen upon a bird under the jasmine, but there must be something fascinating under alot of things, if we look a little closer; the bright pink Camellias on the ground, the Lilac tree relegated to its space behind the evergreen, and the field mouse that has made its house somewhere in the planter near the gazebo. Let us not forget these treasures, it is what keeps us young and curious.
Love
Today I was feeling very happy. Recently, a kind, gentle person from Iowa contacted me and told me that she would like to use some posts from my blog to teach her nature writing class. For a while, this filled me with love, and not to mention a longing to visit Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Truth be told, I still feel that love, and probably will for a while.
That is how it is with me, that when someone cherishes me for something I did that was born of passion, I tend to feel love, and loved. It’s something I secretly cling to, and long for more of.
And it got me to thinking about love: who I love, and what love is.
Today I learned that someone I deeply love had to experience death and the possible dissolution of their marriage, all in a span of ten days. I ached. I felt a pain in my heart that was not unlike yearning, but I felt a little more lost, and more unsure. It was like peering into space with the feeling that if you didn’t hold on, you might go into a black hole.
In times like these, I like to turn to animals for a lesson. What can animals teach me about love, and loss.
For some reason, when I think of love, I think of last Halloween, when my Greyhound, Jack, plucked a eastern grey squirrel from the Catalpa tree in our backyard, broke its neck, and proceeded to eat it. I shouted “Jack! No! Leave it!” Not only until I pinched his ear did he drop it. His body shook in a primeval way, and I could see he hurt from not only from me pinching his ear but from my disappointment.
I stood on my porch, in the rain, looking at the unbrushed lower teeth and gentle paws of the dead squirrel on my steps, and all I could do is be present with my feelings, that somehow I was responsible for its death. I was hyper-aware of the temperature, the cloudy sky, and my breath as I wondered how to best deal with Rocky. The odd thing is that I never felt more alive, even in death.
This is how it is to be in love, when you experience life without any filters. It’s also when you can let go of expectations and perfection, and learn to enjoy your backyard, even in the driest of winters.
Robin
The moon and stars
I’m so tired, I wish I was the moon tonight.
- Neko Case
The wind whips through my chimney and I have a quiet head. Nature begs me to return as I turn out my dog to relieve himself. The moon looks like a white button I want to push. As a child I always thought if I pushed the moon it would open up the universe to me, only now to realize I have to find my way one star at a time.
