A Morning Stroll

It is warm on the last day of February, over 50 already. Many plants are reaching to the sun for another part of their annual cycle. Susan and I went for a walk at dusk yesterday and saw a number of things showing up. For me, the sound of the Mourning Dove was great. I love their call- it is something that I've heard from the high deserts of New Mexico and Joshua Tree to our backyard. Their voice is something I never tire of hearing and it was great to see them feeding beneath the feeders.

The Indian Plum (Chokecherry) is also blooming. In the plant book they describe the fragrance as a cross between watermelon and cat urine... really enticing! This is one of those native plants that seem to take really well to the land.

I'd planned on making this mostly a photo blog this week, but for some reason I can't get photos to link up to the Blogger site. I'll keep working on it... that is the reason you didn't see images of the Sapsuckers last week.

Why is it that we want to know the names of things? What is it that drives people to spend millions of dollars on plant and bird identification books or trivia books? Why do we want to know? I think partly it is because we define ourselves in contrast to things outside of ourselves. We know more about ourselves as we make distinctions and similarities with those things that are outside ourselves. Also, I think it is because we are creatures who make meaning of things and want to communicate with each other, especially with those who have our similar interests.

For some people, bird is enough to describe the animal that just flew by. Whereas, someone else wants to make finer and finer distinctions. This is just like someone who likes the finer and finer descriptions of wine, cheese, or the bouquet from roses. Why do we do this? Is it because we want a specialized language for those who are like us- our "tribe"? It is a way to distinguish between those who are in our tribe of birders/winers/buggers? There is so much information that comes into our brain and I guess it becomes a way for us to sort what we'll pay attention to and what we won't.

When I open up the plant identification book and see that, yes, it is Indian Plum- I am connecting with other people who are interested in plants and other people who identify plants. I haven't become one of the tribal members who can say that this is Oemleria cerasiformis (species and genus)- that is a different tribe. (This tribe still speaks in a dead language for live plants). We are all part of overlapping tribes: shared languages, customs, traditions, rituals. I imagine there are anthropologists who cringe when tribes are used in this manner, but I think it is intriguing to consider that we are no longer isolated like tribes of the pre- city/state. Though we do have tribal, clan, and famalial affiliations that are no longer geographical.

So, today I will sign off to the electronic tribe that reads English and that some affiliation with me and this little plot of land in Oregon on this great big spinning globe called Earth. Health to you all.

Time and Reality

This morning, there is a layer of frost melting nearly as fast as the sun rises above the trees. The spider webs are lines etched in the air. The grass, after months of quiet, has shifted into a race toward the sun. The bulbs are reaching out to take in some of that energy and showing us their color. This hyacinth has aged one week- the older one was taken moments ago.

Time does take on a much different perspective as we have more weeks to compare. It seems like a week now is just a blink of the eye. This is such a trite saying and that many, many people have written that before... guess it's great to be one of the thundering herd who've said, written, and noticed this. As I was sitting on the deck watching the sun rise and the birds arrived at the feeders; the robins called out. In a flash it was decades ago and I was outside hearing the Robins call. It was no longer Alpine, Oregon but Oak Harbor, Washington. In a flash I experienced the severing of time and immersion in the past as if it were really this moment. Another person might say that it wasn't "real". That it was only a memory- a flash of recall that was imbedded in our neurological net- that it was only a subjective distortion of the current reality. Is reality something outside our perception of it?

In that moment of cool air, sunshine, robin calls... for a moment, wasn't that reality? Everything else fell away- there was no job, car, Aisling, Susan, I was in my youth. The unfortunate person who is captured in the world of Alzheimer's- is the world they inhabit not real? Maybe as someone who stands from the outside looking in, we could say it is a fantasy world... but it is real to them isn't it?

We are in a dance with the world. Our understanding of life is based on our experiences, culture, family influences, hopes, and fears. What we see is filtered through those many lenses and we make judgments based on those things. Someone will see a purple flower, someone else: a hyancinth, another person: Hyacinthus orientalis and another person will know of the love between Hyancinth, Apollo, and Zephyr. Are any of these any more real than the other? Any more right? Not to me.

There are some conventions and absolutes that are important that I won't others to buy into as being right: compassion, love, kindness rather than anger, hurt, violence.

I wish everyone agreed to do it my way, but that won't happen. People interpret love and kindness differently. Some people think that physical punishment is kindness... something that I can't see. Last weekend we walked along the road and dug up some native plants to repopulate our land with: wild iris, madrone, Douglas Fir, and reeds. In some religions/cultures there is such a reverence for life that they meticulously dig up the soil so that a creature isn't harmed. We tend to be more "expedient" and in the meanwhile, harm and kill numerous little living beings. So, who is "right"?

A final image from last week came from deep inside the bark chips that have been fermenting for almost a year. These fungi were found within the pile of chips that I was shoveling to cover weeds. It was like a hidden world- somehow these was this cavern within the bark chips.


LATE BREAKING NEWS!
Susan just came in and said there were three woodpeckers doing a courtship dance... sure enough there were three Red-Breasted Sapsuckers doing what they do in their courtship. Here are a couple of photos... Time for me to go get my pants dirty.

Metaphors

I'm reading a book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. Most people consider metaphors a language issue: we create a metaphor to describe something in another way. Their contention is that we make meaning through the use of metaphor. It is rare for us to define our experience just based on the sensory input from the external world. We create a connection based on a previous experience, a social construct, or an existing storyline through the use of a metaphor. They wrote something that elicited a question for me, what if our base experience is cultural? We often ascribe to our biology as our foundation, our baseline. What if it is the culture in which we live is the basis? Interesting thought.

Now, what does this have to do with living on the land at Aisling? I spent 7 hours yesterday planting native species: trees, shrubs, and other vegetation. As we have cleared away blackberries and English Ivy, we are planting other species. I often think about what this land was like before the settlement and before logging. This would be a time when the native species were, well, the only things present. I see ourselves as stewards. This is a linking between two concepts: taking care of the land and my image of a steward. My raw experience is that I am planting, but my mental processing is linking it to something else, to a higher concept. To me a steward is one who has, traditionally, taken care of things and provisioned the ship/house/estate with what is needed for the regular functioning of the "house". There is a judgment about what is regular functioning/normal.

I also carry with me an internal image of the many forests in the NW that I have visited and all the plants- trying to recreate the collection of memories into a representation of what this land "should" look like. As I went about planting it was with these internal images of where I'd see salmonberries, salal, oregon grape, thimbleberries, and other plants. Where do they go based on my memory, not based on the experience I have of that plot of land.

So what? These are the types of things that intrigue me- these concepts. I guess it continues to be part of my praxis in life. In another field it would be called action research. Also, these types of intellectual wildernesses are a favorite part of my pathfinding in life.

May your life be filled with things you don't know and the inquisitiveness to find out.