For the Birds
The precipitous decline of songbirds has been much on my mind lately. Something significant is needed. Surely there is something more we can do. More, even, than banning agricultural pesticides. Beyond pollinator-friendly gardens and birdbaths. Beyond curbing our insatiable appetites for radiation-emitting electronic gizmos.
I have just finished reading Horizon, by Barry Lopez, a sweeping recap of his lifetime of extreme travel - scuba diving in the Arctic; unearthing hominid fossils in East Africa, searching for meteorite fragments in Antarctica. In each landscape, Lopez speaks about the distinctions between Western and Indigenous ways of perceiving the Natural World, as he realizes that our Western compulsion to make sense of the world by rushing to create a narrative, to use language and thinking to make meaning as we gather more and more data, has, in fact, blinded us, and it has ejected us from the flow of time.
In Alaska, the sighting of a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass becomes an event that punctuates Lopez' experience. For his Indigenous companions, the presence of the bear occurs in a dynamic flow that includes a host of other details: a snag of fur, a paw print, scents, light, all are noticed without prejudice or priority, without cognitive analysis, conjecture or language. They simply are. Lopez says, "As they noticed trace odors in the air or listened for birdsong or the sound of brittle brush rattling, they in effect extended the moment of encounter with the bear backward and forward in time. Their framework for the phenomenon, one that I might later shorten to just "meeting the bear," was more voluminous than mine; and where my temporal boundaries for the event would normally consist of little more than the moments of the encounter with the bear, theirs included the time before we arrived, as well as the time after we left. For me, the bear was a noun, the subject of a sentence; for them, it was a verb, the gerund bearing."
I think of my fox and bobcat sightings; of the return, yesterday, of the enormous sharp-shinned hawk; the absence of deer; the scent of skunk last night as I closed the window before bed, and I realize how, in my excitement, in my hunger for connection and repair, I, too, am in the habit of filing each encounter into its own discreet category until they become a string of events particular (but not exclusive) to this place. From my cozy writing studio, from my deck today, when it's 70 degrees in November, I cling to the animals to bring me hope. Though infused by love, this is nonetheless an infraction of consciousness. In time, when, more than ever, each fox and each hawk matter, what matters even more is to cultivate the capacity to see fox and hawk and humans inhabiting a shared flow, one that is continuously unfolding, and to trust that there is merit in that simple practice.
Thus, to use Lopez' vocabulary, rather than seeing a fox, I am foxing, bobcatting, hummingbirding. Perceiving patterns. Noticing details. Listening to my bodily senses rather than my mind. I am no-whaling. Not-yet-deering. No raining. Heartache-ing. Expanding the inclusion zone in a way that shifts my joy in seeing the dozens of new birds in my garden since the birdbath, without personalizing, without assigning meaning. Learning to literally change my mind so that to nourish thriving isn't something I do, but becomes, instead, a way of being.
It's for the birds.
