OF TOMORROW

Ah, the deep pleasure it is to sit here at the end of a fine hardworking day, entire body wrapt in that luxurious lassitude of labor (strictly unintentional alliteration) and watch the hawks riding the air swells in timeless professionalism, enjoy the swallows filling the still-blue air with their kind of writing, take part in the sun setting in its lightspilling way over the blue lake...

From here where I sit I also overlook the woodsplitting stump where I’ve just been laboring into the shadows, the wheelbarrow resting on tomorrow’s woodpile; with cold beer in warm hand I trace the striations of calm and turbulence wrangling their curlicues on the boat-empty water as the lake too settles from a day’s work, rolling over in shades of blue and gray toward tomorrow, its fluxing currents of warm and cold not so different from my own - we are ancient relatives, after all - it is a time of welcome solitude for the lake and I, its body knowing as well as mine the traverse of sun into stars, light into dark, warmth into cold, here in this now that is the source of all understanding, of genesis, of tomorrow.

From the archives, April 2002:

SWALLOWS

Every Spring, with no deeds or Japanese bureaucratic permits at all, the swallows build their nests above the doorways of houses and shops in the village, and homeowners and shopkeepers in a very pleasant spirit of community tenderness create ingeniously ad hoc structures of newspapers, magazines, plastic bags and bits of wood, cardboard, string and tape to catch the droppings, keep their doorsteps and wares clean, and soon the nests, just above head level, are home to eggs, and not long after come the tiny cheeps from bright yellow bigmouth beaks poking over the nest sides, when people-neighbors gather beneath for oohs and ahhs that lead to chats about the goings on in their own nests; and the adult swallows, of evenings after whirling the curlicues of their airy calligraphy of catching insects to feed the swelling brood, and soon having been put out of tiny house and home by the size of the kids, sit near their nests on a convenient awning rod or a telephone wire, soft little featherbundles calm even though within easy reach of shoppers and homeowners passing by beneath, and severely tempting kids to grab for them but the kids always find the wherewithal within themselves not to, for the tiny birds mean so much more where they are, sitting up there so proudly in their fine white ties and tails, about them a confidence and majesty that simply cannot be treated lightly, they are grace in every aspect; even male teenagers, who in the itchy clutch of hormonal chaos are tempted to scare the tiny creatures very satisfyingly into flight, nevertheless never do, the swallows in return for such restraint giving the teenagers the priceless life lesson that grace, not size, is what really matters, and so the neighborhood kids are educated by the swallows in essential regards, then one morning the adult birds take their own gawky teenagers to a nearby overhead wire, where the grownups sit like the people-parents in the park, taking what ease they can at last while cheerily prompting the kids to fidget and whir, whiffle their wings, learn to leap and flap and dive and climb and back and again and again, swooping over and over like people-kids on swings and sliding boards all day, until finally one evening the fledglings too are soaring through the summer sunsets, feeding themselves for autumn, and so the flocks both bird and folk are winged from day to day and year to year, and every village neighborhood is lifted to heights that once known are not forgotten, even in the swallow-empty airs of winter.

WINGLESS

The barn swallows are out in full now, filling the dusking sky with their chatter and stunning aerodynamics— but what is the value of those skills, exquisite as they are, compared to the ability to appreciate such beauty?

I watch here wingless, at least in fact (the least of our leasts), winged in a greater way than even those swallows, for I can behold their elegance above fresh-watered paddies lined with sprouts of rice, reflecting sunlit clouds that spell the sky with calligraphies silently relating the vastnesses of beauty occurring around this tenuous planet of ours, beauty that every concept of god falls far short of, once it is perceived... Now that's flying.

Here's hope for our fragile species, which long ago mysteriously pursued the wingless path...

THE BIRDS

There are a lot of interesting birds around here. I don't mean interesting species, but interesting birds. Individuals. Real characters. Some of them are complete mysteries. When you live where this great a variety of birds actually do their thing, you get to see that they have character, for example the manic warbler, and the crazy bird I’ve never spotted that shouts "What the hell?" over and over at every Spring sunrise, then there's Dr. Crow of course, couldn't go without mentioning mister dark wisdom himself, much referenced in these ethereal pages-- or the hawks, the swallows, the pheasant in lust or the ducks in love--

For recent example - this afternoon in fact - there's a certain bird, the screaming blur that hangs around here and is highly secretive about his true identity (I suspect it may be a brown-eared bulbul, but I've never spotted him in well-lit stillness), he blends in so well with the gray lower branches of the cedars where he mainly seems to hang out cloaked in the darkling invisibility he prefers, all in perfect keeping with his gothic mood, because although he's very territorial, he's also extremely paranoid at all times of year (which for a bird is really extreme), so whenever I go outside in this leafless time and that bird is within 50 yards of the house he spots my sinister movement and screams "Look out everybirdy! The monster just came out of that unnatural structure there and it's coming for us, it's moving this way with giant claws, it has two legs but no feathers! Fly for your lives! FLYY! FLYYYY! FLYYYYY!" And he keeps that racket up until everybirdy within 100 yards has flown to safety in fear of their lives, he himself taking off at the last minute, still screaming for all he's worth, leaving behind only a dancing branch just before I can grab him with my long giant claws and devour him whole. Interesting bird. Don't really know him; just a gray blur streaking off screaming into the dusk of the trees.

Then there are the frantic tiny feeders who come by once or twice a year in large numbers and scour every inch of every tree for insects and whatever they can find in the way of avian fast food. Some weeks ago Echo put up a pretty realistic sort of 3D sticker butterfly high up on the big glass doors by the weeping cherry for when the grandgirls came over the holidays, and when a few days ago those birds arrived to scour the tree, every five minutes during bird-party time one of them would spot the delectable butterfly hovering right there midair in delicious stillness (talk about out-of-season but who cares, it's like caviar in NYC) and dive for it before any other bird could get it, hit the glass BONG!, flutter stunned to the deck below and stand there wobbly for a few minutes looking up, trying to figure out the meaning of glass and what the hell was that butterfly, then it would fly back to the tree and give another of its fellows a crack at the inviting delicacy.

This went on for a goodly time (Bong! Bong!) until a couple dozen birds had gone for the big bright snack and hit the deck, by which time I suspect some of them were sitting there in the cherry tree chuckling to each other, chirping "Psst: There goes Harry: Look: He spotted the 'butterfly.' Go for it, Harry, Grab that baby! Go get it, Harry, it's all yours! HA HA HAA!"

There's also the thrush that collided once with our big kitchen windowpane, and no thrush ever since has done so.

Like I said, when you get to be really neighbors with them, not watchers or hunters or simply-passing-byers and whatnot, bird personalities can be pretty surprising, anthropomorphically speaking. No doubt just as surprising as I am to them, aviomorphically speaking.

BIRDWORDS

For the barnswallow family (Mom, Dad and the two post-nestlings), the becalmed evening sky isn't offering much in the way of soaring insect snacks, so the four spend the time preening. For the parents, that means routine elegance of motion; for the gawky newbies, who don't yet know how to do a professional job at the beak-through-feathers thing, it's an awkward business. And they really need some preening: from here it looks like they still have a lot of poky kidfeathers.

Then when that's all done to respective satisfactions, from their darkling perch atop the wire the four whir down and scour my plum and weeping cherry trees, their wing flutters and bouncy bustling rustling up small insects from the leaves and twigs as they venture in along the branches toward the trunks, looking for gourmet caterpillars along the way, chattering as they go, about all sorts of important things. I wish I had a barnswallow dictionary.

SWALLOWS

Every Spring, with no deeds or Japanese bureaucratic permits at all, the swallows build their nests above the doorways of houses and shops in the village, and homeowners and shopkeepers in a very pleasant spirit of community tenderness create ingeniously ad hoc structures of newspapers and magazines and plastic bags and bits of wood and cardboard and string and tape to catch the droppings, keep their doorsteps and wares clean, and soon the nests, just above head level, are home to eggs, and not long after come the tiny cheeps from bright yellow bigmouth beaks poking over the nest sides, and people-neighbors gather beneath for oohs and ahhs that lead to chats about the goings on in their own nests; and the adult swallows, of evenings after whirling the curlicues of their airy calligraphy of catching insects to feed the swelling brood, and soon having been put out of tiny house and home by the size of the kids, sit near their nests on a convenient awning rod or a telephone wire, soft little featherbundles calm even though within easy reach of shoppers and homeowners passing by beneath, and severely tempting kids to grab for them but the kids always find the wherewithal within themselves not to, for the tiny birds mean so much more where they are, sitting up there so proudly in their fine white ties and tails, about them a confidence and majesty that simply cannot be treated lightly, they are grace in every aspect; and even male teenagers, who in the itchy clutch of hormonal chaos are tempted to scare the tiny creatures very satisfyingly into flight, nevertheless never do, the swallows in return for such restraint giving the teenagers the priceless life lesson that grace, not size, is what really matters, and so the neighborhood kids are educated by the swallows in essential regards, and then one morning the adult birds take their own gawky teenagers to a nearby overhead wire, where the grownups sit like the people-parents in the park, taking what ease they can at last while cheerily prompting the kids to fidget and whir, whiffle their wings, learn to leap and flap and dive and climb and back and again and again, swooping over and over like people-kids on swings and sliding boards all day, until finally one evening the fledglings are soaring too through the summer sunsets, feeding themselves for autumn, and so the flocks both bird and folk are winged from day to day and year to year, and every village neighborhood is lifted to heights that once known are not forgotten, even in the swallow-empty airs of winter.