whereIwonder&why

Last week, at the predicted predawn morning of greatest activity for the Orionid meteor showers, a handful of us entered a richly dirted, well treed, five acre place, that includes a spacious “lawn” in which to stand, twirl, and stargaze straight up to the sky with views unhindered, or, if you choose, through the web of nut tree branches — hickory, black walnut, red and white and black oak, as well as sweet gum and black gum — and over a waterway that right now is rife with grasses and muds way more than waterbody, thus not a place to reflect the lights of the heavens.

As it was, this night, this early, early morning, the greatest activity for Orionid meteor showers night/morning, was pasted over in cloud. There was and would be no sky lights to see, even the 7:06AM sunrise occurred unshone. But it did not matter. The peace of darkness lifting into light with no audible nor visual disruption even though on all edges of this land were homes, a supermarket, an urban arterial, and just down from the access road, a major hospital. Even though all these trammels abided adjacent, we were not of them, we were not among them, we were not theirs, if only for these two hours in late October in northeastern Massachusetts.

And at 6:40AM a single mallard called out from the pond, one loud Honk! Two seconds later, maybe three, two warblers began to burble just in front of me, then a robin, and a cardinal over to the left, and redwing blackbird, and then a song sparrow, and then a mockingbird, and a crowd of sparrows all at once talking, clanking their lunch pails, thrashing amid the shrub that surrounds the nut trees in whose presence I then stood. The stillness was history, and to be awaited for its return in, oh, say 17 hours from now. But who can mind such a songfilled replacement to silence? I stood, enchanted, a vine entangled in one lock of my hair, the ground firm, the light soft, the day rising in its own time and at its own pleasure, and to mine.

I drove home, wishing I were on my bicycle; next time, I promised myself, fed the patiently waiting cats, saw that Mark had slept through my going out and my coming back (good thing, because he had been sleeping poorly for several days), brewed myself a cup of coffee and let rest of the day crowd in.

We were told that the Orionid meteor shower will occur at that predawn hour through November 7th with a little less intensity each day, but motion-filled nonetheless. Perhaps a clear night will occur in these 8 days up to that morning and I will go outside at 5:00 AM and stand on my street and look up with hope, or maybe I will go outside at 4:45 AM and make my way back to that once a upon a time farm, now wildland, and sit on the ground that in places is so dense, prehistorically dense that no tree can inch its roots through, so dense that it is a meadow in a wood, a wood that sways and soughs on the meadow edges, its back to disruption, its back a bulwark for this place.

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A friend of mine, who never fails to speak of something of interest told me this cosmological information:

Upcoming during December will be a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. This is an event that was known to occur  approximately every 400 years; however it paused or hid and has not occurred visibly since 1226. Yes, the year twelve hundred and twenty six, nearly eight hundred years ago.

The time schedule to watch this phenomenon progress and finally culminate is:

45 minutes after sunset look southwest, and

-on December 4, Jupiter and Saturn will be visibly “close” (2 degrees apart)

-on December 16-18 they are almost touching

-on December 21– they appear to the naked eye to be “one”

My friend tells me that with even a small telescope, (e.g. an 80 mm refractor) you are likely able to see and differentiate them to some degree. I haven’t got a telescope, so I will see what I can see with my trusty binoculars. 

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Here is Jupiter on left, courtesy of a Hubble Space Telescope photograph, and Saturn on the right, courtesy of NASA.

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God ever knows what I never
know so, God, I know in you
is all before and after me and all
is near even when far

There is so much, there are so many in this world who have merited and achieved venerability.

There are so many who have not, who will not.

I will, on this gratefully rainy day, write of delight in the impomposity (new word?) of older trees, in particular tulip poplars. The one of which I have written before in my town, one that I have been photographing for a number of years now as it has declined in health and robustness, but never in stature, is no more. I bicycled past its spot a few weeks ago and behold! there was nothing but mulch, dust, a few shards of bark, and one flower. All else had been cut, sawn, ripped, and carted away. Here is a late in life photograph of this tree dying from time’s passage, land’s diminishment, man’s malignment, air’s loss of breath.

But about two weeks ago, my sister and I visited an area that is well populated with stands of elderly, stately, venerable trees including scarlet, black, pin, and white oaks, mockernut hickories, shellbark hickories, sweet gums, beeches, some sassafrass, one or two magnolias, two spindly but growing american elms, a few sugar maples and a sycamore or two, and a whole community of tulip poplars, including one estimated to be about 400 years old.

The home for all these wonderful breathers and givers of life is flush against two major highways and a puzzle of urban streets on which houses are being replaced with HOUSES.

The home for all these wonderful trees is a respite for any one of us who happens by and wittingly or not deep breathes air that has life, even as in our personal and corporate industry we wrest it of its every molecule.

But speaking of homes, a different “tall” tale:

I will finish with this from A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn’t any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I’m not at the bottom,
I’m not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop.

As September 2020 dries and dries here in New England, the world squirms in discomfort at myriad new, largely unwanted events. We pine, even as we separate from each other in our theories of why, who, what, what next, what was. History, just current events yesterday, a minute ago, has as many eyes, as many versions as there are sentient beings on this planet.

The weeping Gray Birches out front are dropping golden leaves like dust. The Concord River, cutting through downtown to meet up with the Merrimack River, is barely a body of water. I watched a great blue heron the other day slogging through the muck that is the bed of the river where two canals usually drain into it. The heron had to work to raise each foot to move forward in search of errant fish. For 20 minutes I watched, and saw no captures, just slog, slog, stop; slog, slog, stop.

I am sorry to be writing such a blue blog post. I am sorry that there is cause to.

But another impression, oddly heartening: yesterday I was pedaling along a major state numbered roadway (3A) also known, in the area I was pedaling, as Middlesex Road. It carries constant vehicular traffic including many trucks. It is not the pleasantest route to bicycle, but along it are occasional surprises that bring delight. One, well, one was an old cemetery, perhaps 90 feet wide by 50 feet deep, surrounded by a stone wall. I walked my bicycle through an open gate straight through to the 50 feet to another open gate that let out onto a small woodland. I leaned the bicycle against a sugar maple and tiptoed into this woodland. I got about 30 feet in and stopped. Several cardinals, a finch, and I think a robin were talking, calling from different corners within the woodland ahead of me. And beneath their treetop calls, the sugar maple, pine, ash and shrub tree woods were a silent breath.

Eight feet behind me, consistently audible, was the road traffic. But before me, and surrounding me was this woodland breathing.

It was lovely.

Do you know, that is all I want to say today.

Thank you for reading.

I was walking to the mailbox to send a card. My phone was in my pocket–gone are the summer days when we would walk empty pocketed, wandering possibly anywhere and unconnected to any satellite beam, unwatched. Maybe, if were “grown-ups”, we would have folded a couple of singles and a five into our shoes. A neighbor, several houses down, had lined their property with sunflowers. A week and a half earlier they were just green stalks, pretty indiscernible from the tall privet hedges with which they share the property edge. Now they had not only burst forth, they were giving out seeds, some having already distributed all they had.

And who do I see there? Bees!! Bees of all stripes, my hive’s residents sharing surface with bumble bees and perhaps others of their community. Look, look, they’re making a beeline!

I want to thank these neighbors for planting so many sunflowers. But I do not know them. This is too bad, that I stop myself from knocking on their door. I can attribute it to the ongoing virus. But I have been enjoying the ways in which they use their green space for several years now. How many of us know our neighbors these days? How many of us have any familiarity with what occurs just outside our front stairs? Our back porch? Our back window? Beyond the fence, the hedge, the wall that demarcates our side from another’s? Nevermind the people down the block, or one or two floors below or above us.

I could be an old fart and grouse that it’s only these past couple of generations who do not know, raised, as they have been, on keyboards and computer screens, even when outdoors, as their heads are bowed to the pittance of a screen on their handhelds. But let us confess, we are almost all of us limited in our awareness of what immediately surrounds our living spaces. We are more attuned to what is broadcast for us on one or another screen than the space through which we pass, or could easily pass, if we ventured forth. I remember the delight I experienced 20 or 25 years ago when I could pull this little pocket phone out of my pocket and call my sister as I walked down the sidewalk! How cool is that!! I can call her and describe to her where I am walking right now! So quickly it became I need to call her right now, this call cannot wait until I am back home, this call to ask what date is so and so’s birthday, demands to occur now, nevermind the patch of wildflowers I am passing by laden with bees dipping and delving, doing their remarkable life-giving pollinating before my very eyes, if only I looked, instead of poking at the numbers on my electronic device. This call, this distant contact about unurgent matters matters more than this moment here now.

So I need to stop, need to look about me, breathe, listen, touch the textures at hand, lick the salt of sweat off my upper lip. Put the phone back in my pocket. Stand still, watch the bees, watch the sunflower petals riffle in the breeze. When I set myself back in motion, to make it slow (hard for me! it is easier to stop short and peer around for a bit, than to amble at a pace below three and a half to four miles per hour), and notice what surface I am treading, what sits at the edges, who is standing at their front door ready to say hello to me if I will say hello to them.

Here are a couple of photographs, hard to see her, but look carefully–a great blue heron in, due to our current drought, a low water pond. I stood and watched her for about 20 minutes, and then I couldn’t stand still any longer; I just had to move on (:-)) She had been there before I had arrived, and she remained standing there after I left. She preened feathers, aired out her wings, scratched under her chin, preened again, and paid close attention to the terrain. She stayed in place. Attending.

Can you say you have ever experienced complete silence? Do you believe one can experience complete silence? Do you know if it exists? As what, a concept, an audible absence-external and internal, only external? I will stop offering options for what I am asking it is, because by them I am skewing your response. I go back, and rephrase just slightly. Can one know if complete silence exists? How?

I go forward and re-ask again slightly differently, if you know complete silence exists, where, how do you find it?

Is it felt? How?

Is it calming? Does it cause fear? Peace? Anger? Freedom?

I come back, can silence even be a concept? Is it a presence? An absence?

Sometimes I can walk down a New York City street and become aware that I have not been hearing the always massive-decibel sounds surrounding me, neither original sounds nor echoes, neither mechanical sounds nor human. Why? Has a shawl of silence draped itself around me? Is noise, perhaps, only a function of attention? What does that say about silence?

When you think of silence, do you think of it as lightness? Do you think of it as weight?

Can sound be felt? Can a thrumming inside one’s head, seemingly inside one’s ear be called sound? If so, does this make silence impossible?

And, if so, can someone without the physical capacity for hearing experience sound, feel sound?

Does motion mean sound? Therefore, in life, is silence even possible? Blood flowing through our veins and arteries, constantly; organs tugging their needed sustenance out of resting or passing food stuffs; breath even held still circulating in the lungs in the vessels in the molecules–not silent?

Something just occurred to me as I sit here pondering silence “out loud”, two things actually–when you read this text, do you hear a voice? Whose?

Secondly, it seems that silence can be visual. See this picture? This guy at this moment in the presence of a rushing river, chattering and squawking gulls behind him, chirping songbirds behind me, and automotive traffic behind them; this guy embodied silence and it took my breath.

Unphotographed, but closely watched, through fairly new binoculars through the kitchen window, as I sat, eating my lunch at 1:00PM this humid, hopefully soon rainy day, was a young robin. She looked, it seemed at me for a few seconds, then turned her head left responding to a sparrow who had landed further along on the very branch on which reposed said robin. The sparrow, as sparrows do, immediately leapt off the branch toward another spot, angling his way toward the bird feeders, currently well populated by other sparrows. One sparrow does not care if 10 other sparrows are at the feeder, he shoulders in when he is ready. Everyone squawks and everyone shifts.

The white breasted nuthatch announces her arrival from the west, about a tenth of a second before she lights on the sunflower seed feeder. She lands or redirects to nose-down, everytime. Her long, sharp beak pokes into the grid, she yanks out a sunflower seed, and rushes back to the tree face to jam the seed in and then repeats this procedure, three or four times before she pauses her flights, likely to then poke the tree bark against the sunflower seed tucked underneath it using that broader push surface to force the seedpouch open the the seed to fall out, and she, the nuthatch to consume it. Meanwhile, the sparrows are flicking and flacking each other from feeder to feeder, variously clutching and falling off of perches, and fluttering their wings to regain balance. On top of the shepherd hooks from which the feeders are suspended, are several immature sparrows, with two more on a back branch of the dogwood, all feverishly flapping their still kind of tiny wings and calling to the adults, feed me, feed me! And they do. Child opens wide, and adult places seed in gullet to be swallowed and used.

There is also a parent-child downy woodpecker pair appearing daily, usually in the morning early and then at noon. The child, whose crown is brown, and so I think may be a male child, waits clinging to the thistle feeder, while the adult/mother pokes at the gross (to me) suet in its feeder, digs an ample chunk out and brings it to the child, 6 inches away or so on the thistle feeder. Here too, the child opens wide, and the adult sets the food morsel deep into its mouth. They repeat this five times or so and then fly away for a bit, to return 5 or 10 minutes later.

Sometimes in the morning, sometimes at lunchtime, sometimes in the evening, these days, the cardinal father and child pair arrive. The child either perches on the lip that encircles the sunflower feeder, or on a branch of the dogwood, and the father, brilliant red and in full voice between tasks, pulls out a sunflower seed and places it into his child’s mouth, again and again.

But this young robin, today napped so assuredly eyes tightly shut, not even cracking a peek once it tired of watching me watching it. The sun gentled her head and shoulders. Her tail, two u-shapes at their gathered bottoms; her wings draped alongside her, like a shawl falling from her shoulders. She was lulling me into a parallel ennervation, when from a ways off to her right side a cheep, one loud cheep struck her ear. Her eyes flew open, she turned, and she flew off the branch straight at that sound. And I was seeing only a branch, around which she had easily curled her long slender toes and dozed.

As noted at the top. I have no photographs of these goings on. Nothing to visually accompany my tale of today’s lunchtime antics. I hope you can picture them in your mind. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.¹

So here are two photographs I just took while sitting on the porch (when I come out onto the porch it takes the birds about five minutes to adjust to my presence and return, whence they had hastily departed upon my interfering arrival)–the four feeders around which these birds all congregate with a few branches of the dogwood to your left; and the beehive that remains ever active behind those bird feeders.

As I type this right now, thunder is rumbling in the distance. Our hope is for it to evidence rain this time. We remain green so far, in our trees with their deep, deep swallowing roots, and shrubs, and the bushes that feed our fragrant pink and red roses and the stalks that hold orange lilies, white daisies, pink, yellow, white, blue wildflowers; but our grasses are brown and beige. We are not accustomed to such prolonged evidence of dry here in New England. Happily not.

¹Hebrews 11:1

I mostly do not write to propound political or economic or societal or religious views. I write to share moments of this life on earth that might intrigue another of you as they do me, or might surprise, or might please, or evoke laughter, awe, a smile, once in awhile a tear. Sometimes something just pokes its face inside my head and sidles down my arm, into my fingers and out onto the keyboard, leaps into the space that electronic communications fill, and to you, if you choose to reel in what those electronic waters are running past you at your moments along their shores.

Today though I have this to say: Let us begin to value being. (what is that called when the letters of a word rearranged are another? anagram? yes. begin being. Let us begin to value being. What is it called when a word or phrase spoken sounds just like another word phrase? homophone? yes let us lettuce.) lettuce bottoms a setting, and on it is built many a salad, which comprises such a mix and is the beauty of its own eclecticism; let us enjoy from the bottom up that which surrounds us, that which is life as we know it, unpredicted, unpredictable, an adventure of no certain outcome. Let us find its good base, and climb up what this base holds firm and sing a melody, discordant or concordant, harmonized, multivariant, however it grows and merges, let it, let us.

We were made good. Let us let good be; let us begin being good. Every element was made good, and for good (both meanings — for the purpose of good, and for all time. what is that called — both are a noun, one is moral one is computational, and yet each one impacts the other. How to think of this? Each one, made good, impacts the other. But did begun-good/made-good stay good or become not?

Why, oh, why from the bottom of slopes do slopes slant so steeply up; for some? All start at 0, creation ensures it. Why are some ascendants’ adventures so beleaguered, cratered in the slipped-foot gashes of others? Why is not a hand to help held out, tilted to be caught into, cupped to carry? Why instead a fist, uncoupled, ungraspable? Why is good so difficult to accomplish, so unoffered? Thus in time, derelict, unreceived?

And, yet, it is not impossible. The answer to my question above the photo story, my question asking: But did begun-good/made-good stay good or become not? Both. Let us together remove ‘become not’ (good)’ from the experience of life.

have this dance? cross this line? have more? call you? take this book home? ask you a question?

What do these May I questions evoke in you? Who do you see asking each question? Is it ever you? Is it never you?

Is May I polite or argumentative? Is it neither? What is it then?

Are these questions hard for you to answer or easy or mindless or annoying?

The next five photographs are of two tulip poplars. The first three are of a tulip poplar I recently discovered a mere half mile from the one I have been watching for years, the one that is slowly, graciously dying and is the subject of the final two of these five photographs. After photograph three and before photograph four is a paragraph from one of my favorite books of all time, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.

“A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it spits, sucks, and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power, the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out ever more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard)

And that gingko note, the very word, prehistory, makes me laugh, a bit joylessly. The fact we hold anything before we humans were is, semantically, as not. Perhaps we will begin to read epochal signs a little more humbly. Before we were is was. Will we, singlehandedly, bring it all down along with us?

So many sources of life surround us. May they be.

I love the look of that title. Why? Something about its rhythm — visual and aural. I like to write numbers when they include the number 4. I even try to pay bills (I still pay bills with checks) on a date that includes the number 4 in it so that I can write the number 4. Why? Is it a self centeredness because my birthdate is on the 4th day of the month? Why? I keep coming back to its aesthetic. I like the look of the numeral 4. But, the new wrinkle today is that I also keep looking up at the title and liking it a lot. And it is not numerals. And it is not just fours (4s), but two twenties. Not twenties. But twenty and twenty, side by side. Twenty twenty. Four fourteen. I wish I understood musical notation, 4/4 means something? Is that four four time or four quarter time? I should research that, certainly I have time these days, and the sources for searching here at my fingertips-tap tap tap. Or maybe it’s in math, with four quarters summed equals one; 4/4ths equals 1. And then there is the way the word four forms on one’s lips. Like a kiss.

So I like that last thought. It is friendly. It is pleasant. Saying four is like a kiss.

Or or, it is like when surprised. Oh, I say. Oh! I like to be surprised. A surprise introduces me to something new. Something I haven’t already textured with anticipation, colored with expectation. Something that will bring me to a new place. Oh! Four! Oh! Saying four is like being surprised. Or, or it is like realizing alternatives. Or. Or. Four. Or. And it IS rhythmic. Four. Foot. Four footed forging forward, fording oh fording river floors, forging onward.

Twenty twenty! Now that is another look another sound. Plenty of birds, come to think of it, start their songs or their calls with “twe”. Short e twe or long e twe. It is audible overhead as in treetops, on rooftops, atop utility poles and antennas the mockingbird, the redwing blackbird, the cardinal, the titmouse, the robin, the rose breasted grosbeak, the carolina wren, the yellow warbler,the other warbler, and the other warbler, the song sparrow, even the house sparrow.

I will leave the numbers and marvel over twigs. The variety of size I have watched enter the shrub I see from my desk is amusing. The robins prevailed and they are building their nest in this shrub. (I pray that they continue to spot and chase the blue jays when they try to poke their noses into the construction site, and the house sparrows as well.) Twice I have seen dangling from the beak of a robin, when he or she pauses on the porch rail before diving into the shrub an 18 or 24 (!!!) inch strand of some kind of grass. The first one was brought in and partly woven into the forming nest, with about eight inches left streaming outside. The second one seems to have been fully woven, no tail from it. And in between these and other slightly less dramatic grasses, the robins carry in small clumps of probably desiccated leaves or shorter grasses encased in dirt. I believe these must be for daubing the nest, securing it. I keep hoping to take a picture, but they do not rest long on the railing and so my phone-camera is always too late to make the picture. At a later time, if I can without calling forth the lurking predators, I will try to get a photograph of the built nest from closer up, and without the visual disruption of the screen in my window. It will illustrate a future blog post. Meanwhile, I will add here a photograph of the cherry-plum tree out front. I love that its saplings are growing around the now fully dead original trunk, and its saplings for the past two years have provided small, edible plums (cherry-plums) that I, neighborhood kids, and, notably, diverse birds have enjoyed eating in the summer. Right now I offer their buds for your viewing.

The wind outside right now is a howler. I can only trust that those robins have anchored their nest effectively. I wonder how many other nests are within my sight if only I knew the angle from which to look. Does that happen to you? You look for something, see nothing, turn a twelve degree angle, a four degree angle, and whoosh! There it is. You move another couple of degrees and it disappears. The wonder of optics.

One final sentence: I titled this 4 14 2020 because I thought that to be today’s date, but it is not, it is tomorrow’s date. This goof adds a whole new level of questions about the source of my penchant for 4.