Rainsplash Piano Keys

And speaking of coincidence---let me not forget to recount a lovely one that occurred on a recent rainy day, Mon, Nov 15, to be exact, during my morning meditation, which necessarily took place inside looking out, due to rain.

Many birds at the feeder drew my attention away from meditation, causing me to wonder why they didn't take shelter in the rain. Housefinches, cardinals, titmice, chickadees, and yes, my pair of bluebirds, filled all six feeding stations, aggressively vying for the available perches, chasing each other away for their turns. It was as if they thought it was their last meal for a long time---maybe because of the storm?

Steady rain fell vertically in the absence of wind, and I sat watching through glass doors, pondering the birds and the rain on the deck banister, which was at eye-level. Tiny splashes raced back and forth across the flat-topped banister at random intervals, reminding me of piano keys under an able pianist's fingers. As I watched, I became aware that beautiful piano music was playing on WABE radio's Second Cup Concert. I did not recognize the piece, but noted how like these birds in the rain it was. I listened, consciously willing the rainsplash to synchronize with the piano, mesmerized by the visual and aural mix of the moment.

I don't know if the confirmation that followed was due to mathematical odds or cosmic choreography, but remarkably, Lois Reitzes's distinctive voice announced at the end of the piece that it was Franz Liszt's piano composition titled St. Frances of Assisi Preaching to the Birds.

In the words of Dave Barry, "I am not making this up." I was only paying attention. dkm

Mathematically Speaking . . .

How is it that so often after one gives pause to anything new, the same new thing comes across one's path again in a different context, seemingly too soon to be a random coincidence?

It happened again today. While reading The Heart of a Distant Forest, by Philip Lee Williams, I came across a literary reference to the glistening of the sun in the pine trees---a reference that would have escaped my notice had I not recently written two blog posts about the same topic. (Oct 22 & 29)

Mere coincidence? Yes, I think so. I used to think it was an indication of some cosmic force at work, but in the course of keeping this nature blog, I've come around to the coincidence theory.

Mathematically, millions of bits of information present themselves to us in a day. The odds are pretty good that once in a while, two of them will be similar, and if we're paying attention, we'll notice. THAT's the key element---IF we are paying attention. Just one more pleasure to derive from the simple act of being mindful. Yay.

It's also likely that we increase the odds of the kind of coincidence in question by our self-selected behavior patterns. That is, a person who chooses to sit in the backyard for at least an hour a day is way more likely to be reading a book by Philip Lee Williams than one by, say, Michael Crichton. dkm

"And so today I praise the strength that still courses through my hands and the joy of seeing the sunlight scattered on the pine needles."

---Philip Lee Williams, in The Heart of a Distant Forest

Pinestraw Welcome

The seat of the John James Audubon swing was covered with a four-inch deep fluffy mix of pinestraw and leaves when we returned from our trip to the west coast. Beautiful colors. Twelve days away. A thousand observations worthy of blogposts. No way to catch up. Unless---a list---a name-only list---as a way at least to trigger my own mental reflection, however incomplete. Oh joy---I relish a good bulleted list. An efficient short-cut.

• The Los Angeles homeless population and I, waiting together for the downtown L.A.Public Library to open/we lined up in orderly fashion when the security guard opened the doors/entered in single silent file/we shared the second floor/I in my carrel, writing/they in theirs, sleeping or reading/a kind of solidarity/we did not disturb each other/I love that public libraries are open to the homeless/more open than most churches/how is that?
• Big Sur/OMG/Big Sur
• The thing about Big Sur: that its carved rugged beauty, ever moving, has been there for millions of years, since long before we evolved to admire it/we're not the reason it's there/why the beauty?
• Sunset over the Pacific Ocean/view from Nepenthe/nice photographer
• Torrey Pines/cone from Moe's golf outing/this pine cone deserves its own blog post/as does Big Sur/but I cower in the face of their magnificence/the pine cone's one-in-a-millionness/Big Sur's one-and-onliness/my pencil goes still
• The Redwoods/OMG/and the Sequoias/like Elaine of Seinfeld again/describing hell:-)
• Olallieberry Inn/olallieberry jam/the word as delectable as the fruit/a berry's berry
• Biking across Golden Gate Bridge with eight revised chapters on my back to give to editor in Sausalito at Cibo
• The views from the bridge/the sun on SF/on Alcatraz/on Sausalito/a fogless morning
• The good pinch of muscle/leaning into SF hills
• The sea lions on Pier 39
• Savoring the food in Chinatown and North Beach
• The woman who wanted only 25 cents/her scratched and bleeding throat, her twisted limbs/her rheumy eyes/her Chinese accent/her satisfaction with a quarter/A QUARTER/when my wallet was full
• The vast table of clouds from the Airtran window/BEING above the clouds/IN the poetic welkin/not the first time/yet the first time
• Yellow cast of fall light through the color-turned woods welcoming us home
• Leaves/green when we left/red on return
• Air/transformed from mushy to crisp
• Pinestraw cushion on the swing
• dkm

Got It

I finally captured the luminous reflections of morning sun on loblolly pine needles in the canopy. It doesn't show up as well in blogspot as it does in iPhoto, but I think you can see what I mean about the mystery of the shine. (Referring to Oct 22 post---Loblolly Canopy) dkm

Moments

Blue blue October sky. Crisp air. A single maple leaf lets go of its branch and swings to the ground, in lovely transition from life to death. A transfixing moment observed.

My dear friend Pam told me yesterday about the same moment for her brother, who let go of life during the singing of the Doxology by his family and church choir members who had gathered around him for his transition.

I am honoured that she shared the moment with me, and it recalls another---the fleeting moment, forever remembered, when my father and I squeezed my mother's hands as her last breath drifted into the universe---in the way of the red maple leaf. dkm

A Day Inspired

Two bluebirds came to the deck today. First an adult male, then a young fluffy one. Their wing flutter was audible through the screen of the open door as they slowed to land on the feeder bar. Ever cautious, they flew away in their characteristic dip-dip-dip pattern of flight.

I've not seen bluebirds all summer. Not since last spring, when housewrens routed them out. What a relief to know they found a new nesting site. May the fledgling and its siblings have enough time to grow before it gets cold.

The visit imparted more gladness than I knew to expect of a few seconds. It was enough for a day. dkm

BB Guns, Daylight, Birdflight, & My Father

I participated in a workshop last week-end for which we were assigned the exercise of writing a very long sentence. The instructor was of the belief that every good novel should sport at least one 100-word sentence. I was a dismal failure at the assignment in class, but today the birds and I recall an old journal entry which, if polished, would fit the bill nicely. Triggered by the intersection of old memory, current observation, and lingering fret over my inability to comply with the writing assignment, it represents one of many ironies in my father's memorable personality. Wordcount: 106.

"My father, who was not a hunter, and who, far from it, was a man of formal speech patterns, tender heart, and playful spirit, once surprised me by telling us how he often sat as a boy in the church pews looking for a clear view between the necks of the people in front of him through which he could see all the way to the front of the sanctuary, and that he imagined being a good enough aim with his BB gun to get a straight shot through the hole without raising a hair on the neck of a single pious Mennonite in the congregation."

Now when I look through the trees to a spot of cloudless sky, I remember his boyish reflection, and wonder if the same shot of daylight is what guides a bird in flight. It surely must be the thing that causes it to fly, innocent of the technology of a pane of glass, headlong into a window of a house toward the light it can see through the front and back panes.

Aside from my grief for the poor bird who falls prey to its misconception of a window, a grief I most surely inherited from my mother, it gives me a kind of whimsical pleasure to recognize the large and small ways my father has also shaped my current thinking.

Maybe someday I'll write about his vivid description of a squashed hotdog, employed to teach me not to run into the street. dkm

Loblolly Canopy

Here are a few views of the loblolly pines that have inspired my recent posts: from my deck, from the swing at the foot of one of them, and from the center of the yard.

What the photos don't show is the mystery of the day: the reflection of the sun on the needles. If you inspect a new-fallen clump of loblolly pine needles at close range, they are not shiny. They are many things---blithe, slender, dull green, blade-like, brush-like, smooth or sticky depending on which way you stroke them, dry and calloused to the touch, unique by any standard---and lovely---but they are not shiny.

How is it then, that the direct sun on the high pine canopy shimmers and sparkles along every needle it touches---with an iridescence that defies description in a million instances? Visible with the eye, but not with a camera, this phenomenon lends yet another opportunity to reflect on the transcendent mystery in the beauty of light. dkm

Piney Questions

The more you learn about anything, the more uncertain you become about it, because you discover how much more there is to learn on the topic. The squirrels appear to be poking fun at my lack of knowledge. Or showing off. Or trying to teach me a thing or two. Or simply doing what they do, never-minding what I know or don't know. (I love that about wildlife---that it does its own thing for its own purposes, not caring a whit if anyone notices---a good role model for domesticated humans.)

Since my last post full of erroneous assumptions about stripped pinecone cores, the squirrels have started chewing off and dropping dozens of green-needle-clumps that look like the endmost tips of the highest pine boughs, each with several tiny perfect brand new pine cones budding along the stems. At first I thought the falling clumps were yet another result of our current drought---signs of pinetrees in stress---but my husband pointed out that they are chewed on the ends, likely the work of the squirrels again. Could be a secondary result of drought---squirrels looking for moisture---only a guess.

All of this provokes two new questions:

1. Why are squirrels chewing and dropping the pine needle clumps? I've not noticed this in previous Fall seasons.

2. How long does it take a pine cone to mature from first tiny reddish brown bud, through tightly closed green cone, eventually to dry and brown and open and fall from the tree of its own accord? Must be at least three years, since all three stages exist on the tree at once. Will research and report back.

I have at least learned, by asking an expert in the area (thanks, Anne T.), that the southern yellow pines in my backyard are of the loblolly variety. dkm

The Generosity of the Pinetree

Never mind what I said a couple posts back about a thing newly learned becoming ordinary. It never does. Not if you come back to it with another round of deep attention. Last September, for instance, I noticed and photographed and wrote about the plethora of pinecone cores the squirrels dropped. The cores are falling again and they're just as surprising in 2010 as they were in 2009, but for a different noticing. What I should have said about careful observation is that no matter how often you attend an ordinary thing, a new truth presents, yet allowing more to know in exchange for the simple act of paying attention.

Today it's not the barren cores that reveal more, but the extracted teeth of them. My good friend and neighbor Peggy described them as razor blades in her driveway. They are the same in my yard: sharp-tipped as needles and tough enough not to break when you step on them in stocking feet.

Until today, when they sprinkled down on me in the swing from a squirrel's shredding station directly overhead, I had assumed these sharp teeth came from the dried brown cones that also begin to fall at this time of year. But no. I picked up a tooth the moment it fell. It was cold and damp to the touch, green-tipped and fresh looking, not in the least dry or brown or brittle---from which I learned that the cones the squirrels select to shred are this year's new green ones, not last year's dry, brown, and already opened ones. Last year's cones are falling on their own.

But of course. The squirrels shred the green cones to find fresh seeds at the roots of the teeth. One seed per tooth. They would have no use for last year's dead cones.

I had noticed the beautiful reddish brown color of the stripped cores that fell, but had not made the connection that they came only from new green cones---and I had many times read to my first graders that squirrels and chipmunks eat pinecone seeds, but never knew fully what that meant. Today's observation has also corrected my assumption that one pinecone bore one seed for the purpose of pine tree regeneration. But no, the seeds per cone are many. Now it all makes more sense.

I am well aware that botanists have long ago studied and written about these things. But I didn't know them until I paid attention and learned from the inside out. That makes all the difference.

The generosity of the pine tree is staggering when considered. Behold the gifts she bequeaths the earth. Beauty and shade and wintergreen for us. Homes and food and protection for woodland creatures. Pinestraw to cool and renew the earth at her feet. The very oxygen we breathe. Wonder. Magnificence. Awe. Her tall silhouette against the sky. And yet we destroy her.

Janisse Ray has recently written it most brilliantly in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, about the destruction of the Southern Yellow Pine forests. http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Cracker-Childhood-World-Home/dp/1571312471#reader_1571312471

And finally, with apologies to Robert Frost:

The way a squirrel rained down on me

the teeth from the fruit of a pinecone tree

has taught me that truth is not readily known,

but revealed over time, when observed

as a cone. dkm