I had the same thing at my previous
location. Early readers of this Newsletter will recall the bats and Chimney
Swifts in the well beneath my outside-kitchen roof (I have bats here, too), and
how Prothonotary Warblers nested in the kitchen's hollow bamboo stems.
It's clear that if we leave animals
alone, they are willing, sometimes even eager, to coexist with us. In doing so
they enrich our lives. I'd much rather be part of a community with my wild
animals, than to have a dog to bark at them, or a cat that would eat them.
*****
ON THE PLEASURES OF PAYING ATTENTION
These days are like the minimalist, modern music of Philip Glass. At first that
music seems monotonously repetitive. But if you stick with it you begin
noticing that the piece is forever changing. The same melody may be repeated
again and again, but now it's in a different key, now it's accompanied by counterpoint,
etc. Once you get the hang of it, Glass's music can be a pleasure, even a great
one.
In the same way, these days seem
all alike, yet every day there are delightful changes if you pay attention.
The process of learning to pay
attention is itself a pleasure. Years ago when I began studying yoga and for
the first time in my life focused on the joy of breathing, of stretching and
relaxing muscles one by one, of merging with my own heartbeat -- it was like
being born again. A similar awakening took place in college when I discovered a
book on Japanese flower arranging. Day after day I would look at a certain few
arrangements, constantly discovering new patterns, new color combinations, new
tensions in the interplay of symmetry and asymmetry...
You can train yourself to pay
attention. This Tuesday morning, for instance, I consciously made the effort to
absorb what I could of the essence of a certain mushroom. For a good while I
hunkered next to the mushroom smelling it, admiring its rich colors and unusual
shagginess. I visualized its network of hidden hyphae gradually migrating
throughout the leaf litter below us, then one recent day budding and sending up
this mushroom. I visualized spores dropping from beneath its dusky cap at that
very moment, riding air currents I couldn't feel, heading for unknown forests
perhaps far away. I spoke to the mushroom, called it by its name, and this
worked certain connections in my own head.
Yesterday I spent a
good amount of time standing beneath an umbrella-size, star-shaped leaf of a
15-foot high (4.5 m) Castor Bean (known locally as Mole Plant), admiring how
the sun caused the plant's leaf tissue to glow a certain bright yellow-green
the mere seeing of which evoked the sparkling hum of sunlight during
photosynthesis, of leaf cells dividing, and of sweet sap surging