Birding medium rare

Ah, Central Texas......you are an odd mistress. You are one hot mama with a cool spirit. Despite the ridiculous change in temperature in the last two weeks which probably heralds another hot year,  I have begun to throw myself head over heals into birding; and now much more close to where I live......on a lovely stretch of riparian forest south of Blanco. Throw a rock south, you hit San Antonio where this week Fiesta has left a rain of confetti on the sidewalks like Walt Disney's dandruff. Chunk a rock north and you hit snotty Austin, home of all those out-of-towners that are taking over Texas. It does have wonderful hiking trails though, and my favorite Indian restaurant out of a Wind Stream trailer called, aptly, The Garage Mahal. Yesterday I saw a t-shirt in San Antonio by someone who knows....it said...." Keep Austin..." instead of "Keep Austin Weird".

Back to birding in Central Texas. The blush of spring is full-on; I am shocked that the flowers and trees have the nerve to bloom and put on leaves knowing what is around the corner. If you listen carefully, perhaps you can hear an anticipatory groan from deep in Mother Earth as she prepares for another gosh-darn hot Summer. Those warm spring breezes at night just sigh in the tops of my trees.....like they know what is coming.

It reminds me of when my babies had a fever. They would fall asleep as normal, but wake me up in the middle of the night with curls stuck by sweat on the napes of their necks and a desperately hot breath....the true sign of a fever. That is a Texas Summer....... and the birds suffer most of all.

 Last summer I said "To hell" with my well. If Tom Benson can water his golf course all day, I can  water my birds; so I put a garden hose in a bush and let it slow-drip water into my ground bird bath. Fresh, cold, clean, sweet Texas water....all day long. It was about as much as a leaky fawcett, or a runny nose. Just enough to spoil all those exhausted warblers passing through from South America to Canada. they would come to my bath and roll around and splash like fools.....what a sight. Smuggly, I like to think of myself as the USO for migratory birds. I am Bing Crosby crooning and passing out Schlitz. Then on some days, I turned my fountain sprinkleron, way up under my huge octopus live oak that shades a third of my yard. I made sure the water hit the understory bushes,  where the birds came flocking to sit on tiny branches and fully soak themselves. No care for me nearby, or the fat green-eyed stray cat tucked up under the shade of the deck....they just sat and soaked. It was so indulgent, so sexy. One those days I was Joey Heatherton to my birds. Breathy and indulgent. I was handing out candy bars and wet kisses.

So this year, I have lots more birds than usual. Is it because word got around? Is it because I had the proper frame of mind when I mentally call them? Maybe it is the peanut butter suet and oranges I nail to my trees. Last night I saw a lovey female rose-breasted grosbeak, and my painted bunting pair that like to come every summer. I also had about 5 black-throated hummers jousting with their beaks in mid air all around the feeder. I have canada warblers, vireos, summer tanagers, little bushtits and of course cedar wax wings who come in full uniform. 

A portion of:

"The Buried Life

Matthew Arnold

1852

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;                        50
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves--            60
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 'tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;                                                70
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

Only--but this is rare--
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,                                               80
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.            90

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

I've been rediscovering my buried life. Seems ages ago, chased like a criminal, some part of me took asylum elsewhere for a while. I guess that happens to us all when we grow up and get  family and a mortgage. This is not a new or unique event and I don't share it to wallow in my self indulgence and super-coolness. I also don't need to tell anyone how much this exile ripped at me in quiet, secret ways. You know that too. It must be one of the universal rules of human nature to....

1. Through the raging furies of youth find your fire.
2. Through the obligations of living....have it dim to a simmer.

 Of course the "Fire and Restless God-Force",  tomed  like a heartbeat; a metronome just softer than the wailing of my busy days. Through the years of children and working....and paying bills, and watching the skin on my bones begin to sag with too many memories and the tug of time. Keeping witness, just below the horizon to the coming and going of friends, a marriage, and at least 5 presidents; visiting me on occasion as goose pimples rising at the lyrics of a favorite song, lines of a poem, the smell of the air in a new place....tiny remembrances of who I was when I was true.

My " fire and restless force" never completely went out. She just simmered....and got very pissed at the world and oozed out in awkward moments and through a serious of odd attachments and fascinations. I would yearn after the life of another, rebel against convention, wait. Seeking some way to feel that feeling of wonder and perfect syn crony again.

It is the truest truth that we are all alone and that you cannot escape death. But listen closer. The true original course is there, thumping; no pounding,  within you. Listen, listen to it and nothing else. Dig deep and then go even deeper and hang onto the whimsies no matter the cost. Gypsy God, Rebel God, no matter what you call the force, love is at the core.

I am so grateful that I did not lose you; and that little whispers of You were always there....

So, this little piece of writing is a love letter and a promise; a pacemaker for my old heart....that I will caste my fears on the rocks and go deeper. If my heart were a harpoon I would shoot it into the sea!

Blue

I've been thinking about the color blue. Do you think there are some universal rules of beauty, or is it all truly in the eye of the beholder? I wonder because it is hard to not respond to the color blue, wrapping us as it often does in the vast canopy of a morning sky or the arcing heave of ocean turquoise, teal, and indigo.
I think we need blue. Perhaps it is an essential visual food that calms us and tempers our edgy human spirit more than we know...like hugging a baby lulls it to sleep without a spoken word.
As with the golden mean, blue might occur in just the correct mathematical porportion to our need. A diet of light. I know some days I need blue.

This little texas lizard perched, almost invisible, on the limestone ledge where Ian spied (and grabbed) him. Flipping him over revealed this amazing peacock blue marking.....
My friend Paul, who is a geologist and naturalist, would tell me the biological imperative this blue is designed to address...and he would be right...but I wonder about that blue. Maybe there is more to it; something more subtle in the blue.
A hidden post card from God?
I've always thought that if I were God, I would want someone to notice my work.........


This purple gallinule is a rare visitor to our parts, and I hear there is one on Town Lake in Austin. We saw him in South Padre, resting from a long migration in a marshy tidal pool. The hues and colors of this bird are impossible to ignore. Somehow, his blue is a command to my heart to look, to be amazed, to acknowledge the big-ness of the mystery that so much color offers. How can he be so blue? How can the tiny number sequences in a strand of his dna be so precisely aimed to create thousands of blue feathers that grab my heart?



And then there is the other blue. When I talk to my clients and they tell me of the sad things that have happened to them; the bitter turns of fate and shipwrecks that human life unavoidably delivers.....they say to me....."I am so blue." We sit in my little office and share their grief like a communion cup and taste it together. It is an honor and a humbling thing for me. Blue is the perfect way to describe it: the way we feel when life slows to a crawl and our pain is a metrinome; when we are forced to stop living on rote and just "be" where we truly are. To me, blue describes it perfectly...and not in a negative way...in the same vast, all-encompassing, unavoidable, sweeping way that the sky and sea and clouds bring their blueness to us.
Maybe feeling blue is our lark song to Mother God.

In my Mother's Garden

Gardners come at it much like other hobbies: it depends. I always notice people's yards: some are precise and manicured; some hapless; some forgotten. Many mean next to nothing...an afterthought or marketing idea. Plants just living along side humans and no connections between.

Not mine. No way. Mine is sentimental; a work in progress. When I moved into my house 14 years ago, I was 8 months pregnant with my youngest son. I was large. I lumbered. A young mother of two and one on the way. I had just lost my Mother a few months before and I missed her with an ache that I still cannot completely describe. She was the person who loved me no matter what; who really wanted to hear what I had to say and who adored my babies as much as I. I thought her a Cherokee princess, as she used to brag that she was; a woman larger than life. Whes she got sick one year after my second child was born, her eyes began to gaze somewhere far away and she slipped away.

I began to consider my own garden, and of course of my Mom's passion for plants. She loved them all, especially the obscure, the tenacious, the unusual. She was the plant rebel. Not the garden club woman, but the thief, the rebel, the messy gardner. Nothing in her yard was as it should be-no trimmed hedges or uniform annuals. She preferred the odd and unruly wild flower; the native shrub that did not often find itself in formal gardens. In fact she often stole plants where ever she happened to find them: at the arboretum or sunken garden. We would be driving along and she would scream for me to stop, and she would dart out of the car and dig up some plant she fancied. She would take them home and plant them and they either grew or languished, depending on their moods, in her little yard in Kerrville. I loved that she stole so many of her plants; it was a testimony of her belief that Mother Earth had her own plans; that the rules we made so silly in the grand scheme of things. As the Aboriginals say, we do not own the land; the land owns us. God must grin at such ardure.

Perhaps I am not such a brave rebel as my Mom. I inherited the spirit but not the wildness of her ways. Seventeen years after her death, I have a lovely, intimate garden. It is made up of plants, bushes, and trees. Bulbs, flowers, and shrubs. Each one came from somewhere that I actually know quite well.

Yellow irises from Mary down the road. She has lovely flowers and a terrible husband. Both show in her eyes. The Fall Asters came from Uncle Bob, just before he died of liver cancer. He smiled more that anyone I know and had wet, relentless kisses for any baby. My Linten Rose I bought. It was the year I was baptised with all my children at a small Methodist Church in Blanco, Texas. I read Annie Lamotte all year and was filled with the Holy Spirit. My lovely asparagus were planted the first year here with the help of my husband. His heart was still wit me in those days. There are so many more gifts of love that ended up in embedded in the good earth of my yard.

My Climatis came from my last home. It sprang up it the middle of a St. Augustine yard the week my Mother died. I call it Mom's flower, because I think it heralded her departure. I could go on and on. My plants are my family tree; my living lineage. They mark my loyalties and are a sure trail from my heart back to each person I love.

Oddly, the only plant that I have ever mistreated was by accident. I unintentionally ran it over with my lawn mower a couple of months after my husband left me for my best friend. She had given it to me. God may not interfer with free will, but He sure knows how to work a clutch.

Late in the evenings, on warm Texas nights, I stroll through my yard under the brilliant moon and look at my plants. I quietly acknowledge each gift and the giver. None were stolen, but all have stolen my heart. I think that my Mom would find me a bit sentimental and sappy, filled with the Cherokee spirit as she was and the native spirit that whispered quiet rebellions to her. As my aging house and garden begin to mirror my own physical changes; indeed as I walk a little slower late at night, I can see the heaving breath of nature as sure as my own breath. My plants are my story of friendship unleashed and a full life lived.

Whenever I forget that creation is a continuous process, rather than a linear event that happened in some obscure garden between some naked man and woman ions ago, I remember fish. Fish have always been an important part of my life. I remember leaning over ponds as a child; over the olive green waters of the Guadalupe river and seeing shimmering little minnows moving in syncronized groups and catching lights as they moved. Later it was peach-bellied perch guarding immaculate nests in the Blanco River and finally the rainbow of colors of ocean fish that I saw when I began to scuba dive in the 1980's. They amazed me. Vast expanses of creation, moving and shining in the water, or a solitary wrasse backed up into a hole in a reef, all alone and spectacular. They are all process. No definate beginning and end but all movement and form and color and wonder.

I'm not sure what Andy Goldsworthy is trying to say with his "Land Art" pieces, but I know how he does it. He goes to a location that inspires him: Scotland, New England, Vermont; he stands before a natural space and wonders. He wonders what it would look like to place colored leaves along a wall or log, he wonders about the shadows and light effects of sunset shining through ice spikes glued to rocks with his own spit. He constructs a natural sculpture, then waits for the weather to change, for God to transform and collaborate. Andy Goldsworthy is a visual poet, a spokesman for the effect of human curiosity on God's landscape.