'What I do is me: for that I came.' G M Hopkins



Thursday, July 13, 2017

Symbols of Change #410

Sunrise on Anna Maria Island
'Where morning dawns and evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.'
I have a reputation for running. It's inherited. My mother often complained that when my father got out of the car he just took off. In Africa the sellers who laid out their wares in the car park of the shopping precinct used to call after me, 'Always running!'  Every year I resolved not to run in the corridors, but failed.  I thought I walked quickly, but I can barely keep up with my daughter who when she was studying in Edinburgh skipped up and down those hills like a gazelle.
Years ago when I was at university a well-meaning person took me aside and advised me to take it easy. She even gave me a copy of Chuck Girard's record (vinyl the first time round) called Slow Down and for ages I was haunted by the tune, the long drawn-out notes and the injunction to, 'Be still, my child.'
We all intend to slow down - when we finish uni, when the kids get older, when we have more money, more time.  It's difficult because just as the children are starting to leave the nest, our parents need parenting and then the grandchildren arrive.

So perhaps this is the time for a change of pace.  I have been encouraged by the kind responses to my previous blog but my dear friend DD added his words of wisdom on the whole heron theme. His advice was, 'Fight the glide.'  I love that and I certainly don't want to slow down so much that I stagnate and lose any sense of purpose.
Wood Stork
So what I want to do is to slow just long enough to notice. My not-so-secret crush is the comedian Peter Kay. I love his observational style of humour - putting into words what everyone saw but no one noticed. That's what writing is. I have just read Doris Lessing's autobiography Under my Skin and I was fascinated by her account of growing up in the bush in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  She says that writing,
'takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticised, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.'
I think that this amounts to asking questions.  So here's today's question: Do squirrels eat mangoes?
I pondered this as I noticed two squirrels squabbling on the high wire, neither of whom was willing to give way. Then one of them hurled himself into the mango tree that abutted the path and dislodged one of the fruit onto the grass. Nearby were several half-chewed mangoes with their juicy, orange insides hanging out. A mystery.
Bird of Paradise
What else did I notice today?  Two wild green parrots with one nestling her head against the other's neck. Pillow talk, I'm sure.  An osprey waiting above me to pounce on prey for his chicks that I could hear calling from their nest on the spire of the Gloria Dei church. Lots of wonderful birds on the roof of #410 71st Street, especially the great egret, stepping out like a beautiful bride, coy and demure.  And in the Gulf, the huge brown pelican plunging into the ocean and the black skimmer slurping in the shallows for her young nestled in the white sands nearby.  I can only say that I wouldn't have noticed them, the sunrise and sunset, the gorgeous bird of paradise or the ugly wood stork had I stayed indoors. 
Great Egret
DD says he is not interested in crosswords, 'Why would words want to be  boxed in like that?'
Here's to the outdoors, slowing down and noticing. This week I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that said:
Think outside. There is no box.







Saturday, July 8, 2017

Symbols of Change

I’m back on the lovely Anna Maria Island in Florida for two weeks.  It’s July and it’s hot. Too hot. But in the early mornings, as the sun rises, there is a white light that envelops those who run and walk while there is still air to breathe.

Against one side of the island laps the Gulf of Mexico, warm and weedy after storms.  On the other side, there are the marinas housing the many crafts that swarm in these waters. ‘The sound of money,’ remarked one man to me as yet another vessel sped past churning up the sea, its engine drowning out the laugher of the beautiful people hanging off the sides.  Somehow I thought of Daisy Buchanan and her voice that sounded like money.

I thought of her again when I found one of my ‘boys.’ I was walking along Marina Drive just as the sun was rising. I stopped to watch an Ibis poking his curved red bill into the soil in search of breakfast when ‘he’ swooped towards me and settled on one of the marina’s posts nearby. I was transfixed.  A gorgeous tall blue heron, distant cousin to the local variety that have come to mean so much to me in recent months.  I could almost have reached out and touched him and I felt a frisson of joy when he looked straight at me and held my gaze.
They’re all different. Birds. On a nearby rooftop, lured by a pond, rested a collection of other Florida familiars: several snowy egrets tossed their punk-like hair while two wood storks, a ‘threatened’ species, hunched over in a sulk, looking down their long beaks at their unlikely pink feet. They struck me as ugly: two veterans, old before their time.  At almost 60, I don't want that to be me.

The heron, in contrast, is elegant and poised.  He elongates his neck and balances like a ballerina en pointe. It is his stillness that delights and draws me, however, as I come to the end of a busy term and, moreover, my teaching career.  All through the difficult winter of decision making, the heron stood as a symbol of waiting and watching, of quiet and content amidst the other voices.

I remember the day in Victoria Park when my grandson Finlay and I came across seven or more herons lazing on a mud bank. It was a rare warm and sunny spring day and I amused Finlay by inviting him to lie down on the grass with me.  We lay together like snow angels without the snow, making shapes in the grass and ignoring the stares of strangers.  Why do we sometimes need the excuse of small children to do something spontaneous and silly?  Little did he know, but Finlay was sharing a moment, an epiphany. It’s ok to not know what’s ahead. It’s good to take time out to reflect, to think, to imagine and dream. Teachers have all the answers, but at present I have none. It’s back to nature: to the birds and the trees and the sky and the stars for me. Back to noticing and wondering and hoping.

My heron stood absolutely still. They can do this for hours. Wasting time – being the herons they were born to be, without rush or regret. At the base of his beautiful neck hangs a flapper-like fringe, silky and delicate. Daisy Buchanan again, except that she was never still and cried out in frustration:

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon…and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” (The Great Gatsby)
I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m with Wendell Berry on this one:

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night, at the least sound 
In fear at what my life, and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake 
Rests in his beauty on the water 
And the great heron feeds. 
I come into the peace of wild things, 
Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water. 
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time 
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
(The Peace of Wild Things)