april 10, 2019 / bike / basement
A bird to write about for my birding project?
I looked up in the sky and saw a huge bird soaring high in the sky. After studying the Birds of the Mississippi River Gorge, I’m pretty sure it was a turkey vulture. Close-up this bird would probably not enchant me, but I loved seeing it’s wing span way above me. I stopped walking, looked up and stared until my neck hurt. Of course I briefly wondered what others might think of me, looking up so intently into the sky.
april 10, 2021/ 2.65 / 46 degrees
The first dose of the vaccine!
I didn’t run yesterday because we drove up to Duluth and got our first doses of the Pfizer vaccine–well, me, FWA, and STA got our first doses, RJP is a year too young. Such a bummer for her. Anyway, I still haven’t processed it all, how remarkable and amazing and relieving it is to be getting this vaccine and to be fully vaccinated before Mother’s Day! Wow.
And, marvelous Mary and her meanwhiles!
She [Mary Oliver] likes the word “meanwhile,” which I first encountered and enjoyed in her wonderful poem, “Wild Geese”: “Meanwhile, the world goes on./ Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain…/Meanwhile, the wild geese…” I like this idea of meanwhile as another word for beside/s, and to mean: there are other things beside you happening in the world AND you are not alone in your suffering/sorrow/joy AND life/the world contains more than we can imagine or reconcile, all happening at the same time. I like thinking about meanwhile as a way to connect different stories/lives/creatures without collapsing them into each other as one story or way of living/being–if that makes sense?
april 10, 2022/ 3.25 / 51 degrees
Some scattered thoughts on why we might care about things:
- Remembering the poem about the parasitic mushrooms and the carpenter ants that a poet found in a kids’ science magazine. Why and how do we lose the wonder we had as kids?
- Then I was thinking about care, and why and how we care about things. What do we need to care? Do we care about things we can understand? That we know? That have use value for us? What about things that make us wonder and delight in their strangeness? Why can’t that be a reason to care?
- Finally, I was thinking about Alice Oswald and something she said in an interview about otherness and how our encounters with the land and nature are ones of encountering that which is alien and other to us. So, we don’t recognize nature in how it’s like us, or we’re like it, but in how it is strange to us.
april 10, 2023/ 5.1 / 56 degrees
Another bird to write about for my birding project?
The knocking of a woodpecker on dead wood somewhere in the gorge, sounding like a bone Xylophone.
I remember hearing the loud hollow drumming and imagining that the woodpecker was playing a xylophone with the keys made out of old bones.
And A. R. Ammons joins in with Mary and her meanwhiles!
the future of life is pain and suffering — strokes, hip replacements, insulin shots. we’re designed to fall apart (we’re garbage). but, there’s wonder too, and death and the end of existence, which brings relief. these facts (which exist whether we believe in them or not) are too brutal to be felt bare, so we create languages to soften them — “to warn, inform, reassure, compare, present.” humans construct language out of words, but words aren’t the only way. Other beings — birds, whales, horses, elephants — have created languages too, whale songs and horse whinnies and elephant sounds too low for our ears. we (humans) think words are the world, and they do have the power to change/manipulate the worlds of other beings, but they are not the truth of everything:
our language is something to write home about:
but is not the world: grooming does for
baboons most of what words do for us.
It seems useful to have a summary, to keep track of all Ammons’ meandering, but a summary leaves a lot of the best stuff out:
After opening with some words about life as boring until it’s disrupted by tragedy, he writes:
meanwhile, baked potatoes are still fine,
split down the middles, buttered up, the two white
cakes steaming, the butter (or sour cream) oozing
down and sex is, if any, good, and there’s that time
between dawn and day when idle birds assert song
whereas a little while later they’re quiet at
hunt or nest: and when during the drying out after
rains the trickle in the ditch bottom
quivers by a twig-built strait, the
wonder of it all returns
I love how he starts with meanwhile, which reminds me of Mary Oliver and her wonderful use of meanwhile in “Wild Geese”:
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
Meanwhile the geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Meanwhile as both/and, as delight and grief at the same time.