27 March 23 – Nature 03 – BIRDS AND NATURE

Nature on the Wing

Today, our nature focus is creatures  wing – birds that is, however lovely are butterflies, hawkmoths, and Black Soldier Flies.

But a few words on Earth Day before we take flight with our avian friends. We’re writing this post on 22 March, one month from 2023’s Earth Day on 22 April 2023. It’s a day worth celebrating, and events are plentiful. Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2023 is “Invest In Our Planet.”

The first Earth Day was focused on the United States. In 1990, Denis Hayes, the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international and organized events in 141 nations. On Earth Day 2016, the landmark Paris Agreement was signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and 120 other countries. This signing satisfied a key requirement for the entry into force of the historic draft climate protection treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement adopted by consensus of the 195 nations present at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Numerous communities engaged in Earth Day Week actions, an entire week of activities focused on the environmental issues that the world faces.

Why do we look up?

Bird Brains – and no, this term does not refer to any of the Almanac’s  readers.

Why do we look up when we spy a bird(s) winging by? Airplanes are just bigger birds despite their metal coating. Why do birds enter our consciousness so often – what fascinates us about superheroes, sparrows, and pilots who have broken the surly bonds of earth. On Earth Day 2020, over 100 million people around the world observed the 50th anniversary in what is being referred to as the largest online mass mobilization in history.

As for our selection of poems, first, you will find a poem by yours sincerely (honk, quack), “Goose Walking Part 2.” The first part was published in a recent post. If you missed the first one or both parts, we’re taking orders now. Get them while they last. They’re quacking good! 

All of our guest poets have their eyes on birds: a sparrow, a white-headed woodpecker, diving birds, and “Three Birds of the Milky Way.” 

Goose Walking

Part 2

by CatherineStenzel

Only a few creatures partner for life – penguins, swans, the albatross

but chances of a lifetime union not so good with us

Wolves and dolphins and these gray geese espoused all their lives

with no churches, laws, or mandates, two by two they survive

Why so few brave this coupled state cannot be known

Why some embrace their twinned lifetimes, a mystery deeper still

Perhaps with just one other a place exists that endures as always home

Yet when the other flies the dark edge, the one left needs fly alone

For our Canadians, consider how many gray, full-blood siblings hatch across the years

If geese held reunions, what a crowd in the sky! What joyful, feathered tears!

But no such fetes have been witnessed – rather across the centuries 

they rise to fly, to take a mate, to brood offspring

and like all of us they die – in the meantime . . .

Canada Goose ambles down Forest road

Canada Goose waddles side to side

Canada Goose pads along foregoing flight

Why she appears just here I cannot know

All that can be said: We each come. We each go

We may again chance to meet each other

But with passing time, we will not recognize one another

Still, in all the vees of geese overhead

partners abide with each other until one of them flies ahead

But who can say what happens after?

Geese ask not, honking celestial laughter

Diving birds, exuberant and understated   

by Norman Fischer

Diving birds, exuberant and understated

In dark distance on the churning sea

Violate the soul

And make pact with meaning

To set it straight, exercise control —

How a line of words detract from one another

Till you see, finally, that everyone’s your mother

Darling captain of your primitive soul

In which you likewise rock and roll

Like birds upon the aforementioned sea

Eye on the Sparrow

by Georgina Marie Guardado

I woke to rapid flapping, the air cold

the time unknown. The dog’s paws tapping

on chill hardwood floor. Sudden

commotion. Jumping to corral what was

assumed to be an animal fight, I find

a California Towhee in my dining room.

Frantic, frightened. Brisk movement in her

wings making the room that much more frigid.

I stammer to her. Follow her room to room

as she attempts to fly her way out of walls

until she finally calms, allowing me to cup her

into my hands. We sit together outside

on a frosty concrete step. My bare feet

settling on top of wet fall leaves, gathering

the taste of morning in my mouth, the scent

of rain and dirt. She catches her breath.

My thumb softly wrapped around her chest

feeling her heart rate regulating, her eyes opening,

her fear receding. Leaves rustle, wind and traffic

move along while she and I watch each other

in a place where time moves slower than the rest

of the world. Her eyelids the color of peach

and terracotta. Her body the rusty hue of autumn.

Her eyes the same shade as mine, dark as loam.

I flatten my hand. She doesn’t move. We sit

together for what seems like hours. What seems

like fate when safety is reciprocated. Ten minutes

later she flies, stops on a dog-eared picket

and looks back. The dog quietly watches me.

How I love and let go all at once.

The White-headed Woodpecker

by Sean Hill

Quiet. Given to prying more than pecking, an odd member

of the family, lives only in the high pine forests of western

mountains like the Cascades, where I spent an afternoon

almost a decade ago in Roslyn, Washington looking for what

I could find of Black people who’d migrated from the South

almost a century and a quarter prior. The white-headed

woodpecker doesn’t migrate and so is found in its

home range year-round when it can be found. Roslyn,

founded as a coal mining town, drew miners from all over

Europe—as far away as Croatia—across the ocean, with

opportunities. With their hammering and drilling to extract

a living, woodpeckers could be considered arboreal miners.

A habitat, a home range, is where one can feed and house

oneself—meet the requirements of life—and propagate.

In 1888, those miners from many lands all in Roslyn came

together to go on strike against the mine management.

And so, from Southern states, a few hundred Black miners

were recruited with the promise of opportunities in Roslyn,

many with their families in tow, to break the strike. They

faced resentment and armed resistance, left in the dark

until their arrival, unwitting scabs—that healing that happens

after lacerations or abrasions. Things settled down as they do

sometimes, and eventually Blacks and whites entered a union

as equals. Black save for a white face and crown and a sliver

of white on its wings that flares to a crescent when they

spread for flight, the white-headed woodpecker is a study

in contrasts. Males have a patch of red feathers

on the back of their crowns, and I can’t help but see blood.

The Three Birds of the Milky Way

by Donika Kelly

On the cusp of winter, under the pollution

of a hunter’s moon, I see, for once, no bird,

but a cross; no wing but a brace to bear

what must be borne. Here: the queen on her throne,

the Summer Triangle, the wingtips

of the great swan charted in the sky.

The guide says there are three great birds of the Milky

Way, the Pathway of the Birds. I make note,

try to imagine what I might fashion

in the cold night, in this place I didn’t ask to inhabit.

How did I end up here? What wind blew me

off course, took me from heart and home? My

body falters, loses feather and beak

and bone, turns to dust or ice or stone.

Background

Norman Fischer is a Zen priest. He is a former abbot of the Sana Francisco Zen Center. In 2000 he retired as co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, one of the largest Buddhist organizations in the West, and founded The Everyday Zen Foundation, an international network of Buddhist groups and social projects. His latest Buddhist title is Training in Compassion (Shambhala). Norman Fischer lives on a cliff near Muir Beach California with his wife Kathie, also a Zen priest. Their two sons live in Brooklyn

Georgina Marie Guardado was raised in Lakeport, California. As part of the Broken Nose Collective, an annual handmade chapbook exchange, she created her first poetry chapbook, Finding the Roots of Water, in 2018 and her second chapbook,Tree Speak, in 2019. In 2020, she was an Anne G. Locasio scholar for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference poetry workshop. The Literary Coordinator and Poetry Out Loud Coordinator for the Lake County Arts Council, she served as co-editor for the Middletown Art Center’s RESILIENCE and RESTORE collections of written word and visual arts funded by the California Arts Council. She is the current Lake County Poet Laureate for 2020-2022, the first Mexican-American and youngest to serve in this role for Lake County.

Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Hill has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Hill has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. He is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, a monthly broadside publisher. He has taught at several universities, including the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Montana.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021). She is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Iowa.

Bonus Sections

Again, we’re going to forego the usual “Explorations” section of the post in favor of publishing of a few bird-centric bonus sections.

30 pages of bird metaphors:  

Here you will find dozens of bird metaphors in alphabetical order!

Even Shakespeare was for the Birds

– a few below and more here:

Cuckoo
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he;

Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo

Song from Love’s Labours Lost, Act 5, scene 2

Falcon
As confident as is the falcon’s flight

Against a bird, do I with Mowbray fight.

Richard II, Act 1, scene 3

Lark
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate

Sonnet 29

Parrot
That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a

parrot, and yet the son of a woman!

Henry IV Part I, Act 2, scene 4

Sparrow
There’s a special providence in

the fall of a sparrow.

Hamlet Act 5, scene 2

Nature’s Lesson

Nature teaches us simplicity and contentment, 

because in its presence we realize we need very little to be happy.

Mark Coleman, “A Breath of Fresh Air”

In the wilderness of the Rainbow Trail at twilight, silence reigns. On this silent backpacking and meditation retreat I am leading deep in the red rocks of Arizona, a small group of men and women have been walking and camping under the steady presence of Navaho Mountain for seven days and seven nights. Immersed in winding sandstone canyons 650 million years old, we have been alone except for occasional visits by curious ravens. Now the retreat participants are returning from spending twenty-four hours alone. As we sit around the campfire, the moon rises slowly above the sheer canyon walls, casting shadows and animating wizened faces in the rock.

Since I began leading meditation retreats in nature, I’ve observed again and again what a profound sense of peace people feel when they spend some meditative time outside in the forest or in open meadows. The power of the natural world encourages us to let go of our habitual mode of being, which is usually self-centered, acquisitive, and endlessly seeking something outside of ourselves. The everyday thinking mind, with its restless concerns and perennial planning, begins to calm down. The body feels more at ease, and the heart slowly opens and resonates with the peace of the natural world. On wilderness meditation retreats, people taste the depth of intimacy it is possible to experience with nature, themselves, and their community.

Nature teaches us simplicity and contentment, because in its presence we realize we need very little to be happy. Since we are part of the animal kingdom, our senses are naturally more alive in the outdoors. The rustle of leaves or the rapid flight of birds could indicate the presence of a mountain lion or bear. Hiking in places where we are not the only predator helps us understand that all of life is intimately interwoven and that we are a part of that web. Meditation training, on the other hand, provides the tools to steady the mind so we can be open to receive the jewels of nature. Through meditation we learn how to work skillfully with thoughts and emotional patterns that interfere with simply being able to rest wherever we are, with full presence.

Exploration Tree: Beginner’s Mind

Take a walk and let yourself be called to a particular tree. Stay with the tree awhile to study, look, feel, smell, and sense it. Listen to it as wind rustles its branches. Bask in its shade in the midday sun. Get to know it at different times of the day and in different seasons. How is it connected with life around it? How do you get to know it and which senses do you use?

Feel the difference between your idea of the tree and the rich textural experience of it. Notice the impulse to move on because of impatience, resistance, or boredom. When you feel you “know it,” what does that do to the sense of curiosity and mystery? Can you maintain interest even when you think you have reached the end of your exploration? Is it possible to fully know what a tree 

really is. Start to bring this curious attention to all that you meet.