Mr. Wilson's Arboretum

March 31, 2002

Back to Life

Death?
Yes:
Everywhere and always.
Our little island of existence floats on an ocean of death. Our whole life is as a predicate, leading up to the subject of death. It’s always there; and we will be there always, as far as we know.
Which is not very far.
It’s all rather mysterious from this vantage.

Contemplating death brings us swiftly to the Mysteries.
There are arts of prayer and meditation far beyond what I know, and maybe I’m just crude, but I find thinking about being dead is a real grassroots technique for engaging spiritual energy. Something cries out from deep inside me when I think of it (and I can’t help thinking of it): a welling up; a bottoming out; a piercing through. A feeling? I don’t know how to say; what to call it; but I believe it comes from the very locus of my being; the seat of all my understanding. If I were to go searching for what we call the soul, I might look in that direction.

Thinking about death is thinking about the future.
Humans, we suppose, are gifted with a foresight beyond that of other creatures. This gift torments us with the premonition of our own death, but it also allows us to look beyond the perishable self; to see the larger patterns at work in the World; the cycles that balance Death with Life. Such prescience illuminates the future, and in so doing clarifies our lives today, reflecting backwards, as it were; even into the past. For it is the knowledge of Time, as opposed to the Ecstasy of a given moment of existence.

Viewing things on a scale greater than our own lives serves to disarm the ego, opening us up to a new and palliative understanding of how we fit into the larger rhythms of Life and Death. Here too is a sort of Ecstasy, for in this manner we are granted a radical awareness, which Tradition understands as Rebirth: that which is gained when the spirit of Life is transfigured by the knowledge of Death.

The future of Life must pass through the presence of Death. And though there may be many lives, there is only one death. Death is all the same, but every life is different, and so we suffer separation. Such is our fate in a flawed creation. Thus is the eternal Spirit nailed to a moment in Time.
We need to believe we are the better for it.
We must have faith that it is so.

Faith consists in trusting that our intuition is congruent with a Truth too large for us to otherwise encompass.
The Promise beyond Life is that all lives are as One.
It is through the Mystery of Death that we learn to receive this surety.
Our expanded capacity for understanding is the beginning of reunification; allowing us to look beyond Death, and beyond ourselves.
We are born to die; we are reborn to live:
the fate and the duty of being Human.
We are the present manifestation of that future Rebirth which we celebrate upon this Easter day.
We are the promise of another Spring; the promise of Life.
Life?
Yes:
Everywhere and always.

March 20, 2002

The first day of Spring.
Officially.
I'm using my triad to navigate, and sometimes it seems the Spring holidays start as soon as Groundhog Day, but today, at 2:16 PM, is the specific and scientific arrival of the season, as measured by a cosmic gauge. Mantic rodents notwithstanding, the celestial machinery does not recognize the concept of an early Spring.

Still, it has been a mild Winter.
Only one real snowfall, and that didn't last two days. Hardly any rain either, so now drought, and another "hottest Summer on record" beckon. But first, the passing season has one last gibe, turning wet and cold for its finale.

Just as well, maybe.
I'm detained: couldn't get away from work for a proper observance, but this is no weather to spend twelve hours in. Better will be coming, along with birds and blossoms. And Holidays, to truly impress the Spring upon us. But there's no denying the calendar, and the Equinox is achieved, even as I write this.
I'll just have to wait for the weekend.

I do have one token for you. My annual presentation of the flowers of the Red Maple; the first real blooms of the New Year. They were peaking at the end of February, a good three weeks ahead of last year's schedule, and now are faded, giving way to other signs of Spring: leaves of Apple, flowers of Forsythia, and Elms already nursing seed. All these precede the true tumult of the season, offering encouragement as we look for the south wind and an early sunrise. The Maple tides us over in a time of waiting, but now it's official: Spring is here, and things can only get better.
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March 17, 2002

Saint Patrick’s Feathered Serpent

Two years ago, when we first looked at Spring in the Arboretum, I plotted its course through a triad of Vernal Holidays: Saint Patrick’s for the Past; Easter for the Future; May Day for the Moment.

In this schema, Saint Patrick’s Day is the Holiday of ancestors and nostalgia, which provides the entree to my real subject: that Owl. That’s right, by the alchemy of due regard, (and my need to get this off my chest), the Valentine’s Day Owl is transformed into the Saint Patrick’s Day Owl. Which is not to say it’s green; birds of prey generally are not. A few hawks, like the Kestrel, are brightly colored, but Owls are typically nocturnal hunters, cryptically patterned, without iridescence.

That’s the case with this Eastern Screech Owl. It might have been red, but it’s the more common gray instead, and inconspicuous. It spends its days sitting in the hollow tree near the transverse road: people stream by, joggers, bikers, but nobody seems to see it. Oh, I see it, but I’m a birdwatcher. And I am informed, by the birdwatching authorities, that this bird cannot be counted.
It’s almost as if it wasn’t there.
Almost.

The Owl is there as an act of Nostalgia.
It’s one of eighteen that were released in the Park last Fall, as part of an effort to reestablish native species that have been extirpated from the city. As if our missing familiars might show us the way home.

The sentiment seems laudable, redolent with nostalgia for our old country, but there remains some question about the cogency of these repatriation projects. Plants have generally done better than the animals they ultimately support, but animals are more engaging for publicity purposes, and publicity seems to be a large part of the equation. It sometimes seems that animals are installed in the parks with more ceremony than research, and with questionable prospects for survival.

So there’s been criticism.
And Screech Owls.
At least a few are still around, some with radio transmitters, though they’ll remove them if they can. Some of the birders have a certain contempt for the whole business, tempered by the fact that it is, after all, a real Owl, even if you can’t add it to your list, except as a released bird.
You can’t count it, but it counts; as much as any living thing.

In my temporal triad of Spring, the Owl might be seen as a mediator. Its premise is nostalgic, but its promise is of future plenitude: a reborn diversity which, if it resurrects our past, must fit it into an as yet unrealized world, where the stuff of memory will entwine with the strange and new. Meanwhile, there is this moment, our moment, in which the Owl is one more misplaced soul, seeking a little sustenance in the dark woods.

Owls are know for swiveling their heads. Their big eyes are fixed, so they must turn the entire head, and can do so with such flexibility of neck as to face almost, but not quite directly, backwards. Still there will be a spot at best glimpsed peripherally. We too suffer from blind spots in our vision. Unknowns of past and future cast a shadow on our present; such is the darkness this Owl inhabits.

The “Old Country” is no longer a country, or even a place, as such. Our memory of Nature, (as approximated in the Park), now serves as the focus of our Nostalgia. And the unlikely “return” of Nature is ever our desire. Today’s Saint Patrick would need to bring the snakes back to Ireland. One sentimental day a year is not enough to accomplish it. We need to work on many fronts; in every time and place. Much healing must take place before the Screech Owl, of its own volition, returns to the heart of Manhattan. That Owl we will happily count. As for the one we have now, I’ve managed to get two holidays out of it, so the least I can do is give it the benefit of the doubt.
I fear its fate, but I hope for its survival.

February 18, 2002

President’s Day

As I think I’ve explained, we don’t really do President’s Day around here. No offense to any presidents, but it’s just not in the spirit of this enterprise. I can’t think of any statues of presidents in the Park, so maybe I’m not the only one who feels this way. There is Teddy Roosevelt, across the street in front of the American Museum of Natural History, and maybe he best reflects the difficulty: no president is more identified with conservation, but it’s effected through the paternalistic power of the great white hunter.
There is no hunting in the Park, though there may be a few poachers.
No hunting, and no presidents.
Just a lot of this...

February 14, 2002

Valentine's Day

Well, that was a rather grim post yesterday, and it's a malicious calendar that puts the Day of Love on the precipice of Lent. But even the lovelorn may live in hope, and I would not leave you without an image to counter our mortification. So take another look at that last blasted tree…

February 13, 2002

Ash Wednesday

For Lent, a few bare trees…

February 2, 2002

Interrupted

Deep in dark
I sleep.
Can’t tell cold from warm;
Warmth of sleep.
Cuddled in crevice,
In earth, in mud.
Safe from day,
Ensconced underneath,
I sleep.

Winter is to sleep away.
So why the white Sun rising
Leaking in, creeping in?
To what vain heatless end?
A headache and a fallow vision.
Vision of a moment only;
I turn my back and face the shadow
Spread wider than the one who cast it.
Wide enough to make a bed in;
To slip between the morning’s talons.
Slip back to sleep;
Sleep, sleep,
Sleep, sleep.
Turn out the light!
Six more weeks.

January 21, 2002

Mixed Flock

On this Martin Luther King Day we may see things in black and white, or we may not. The vector of the civil rights movement is now invested in the rubric of diversity. This represents a move from a Cultural premise to a Natural one; an exchange of legal language for that of the natural sciences.
Dr. King was an officer of religion, yet such are the tools of his movement: law and learning, that if they serve the spirit must do so at a distance.
And yet these things will all conflate.

Snow finally fell, leaving the woods black and white.
But it is not so, not entirely.
Among the dark trunks, flitting between the silhouettes, even in Winter, the birds persist. They are not limited in color. Black and white, yes; but also blue, and red, and green, and yellow. And as if to honor the idea of inclusion, they appear together, in mixed foraging flocks. Birds of a feather may flock together, but they are seldom exclusionary, except when breeding.

In the Winter, when there are fewer birds here, and fewer resources for them to exploit, you become more aware of these congregations. First you notice a Chickadee, up in a treetop; if you see a Chickadee, chances are you’ll see a Titmouse in short order. Then a Nuthatch swoops in and starts walking head first down a trunk. Then another. Probably you heard them yammering before you saw the Chickadee (make that Chickadees), but it’s hard to say, and you keep noticing other things... Take a minute to figure out how many different kinds of Woodpecker you’re seeing; three..four...five? Doubtless there are Cardinals in the brush, and Sparrows too, if you’re inclined to pursue them through roots and under litter, which is also a good way to meet up with the Wren, or the Towhee, while high above a Kinglet or a Goldfinch is busy...

Mixed-species flocking distributes risk while maximizing foraging efficiency, thereby conferring an evolutionary advantage on the whole population, as well as providing a nice metaphor for human diversity. Why can’t we be like the birds? Their conflicts seem few; even the White-breasted Nuthatch and the Brown Creeper can work a single tree trunk in harmony, using a similar probing technique, because the Creeper moves up the trunk, while the Nuthatch comes down, so together they see both sides, and one finds what the other misses.

It would be nice if our various peoples were so congruent. It’s risky to exchange our own laws for a Nature we do not really understand. But we reach beyond our niche, while the Creeper never does aspire to descend the trunk, remaining within the boundaries of habit.
We are not so content.
And our self-definitions do not restrain our desires.

Our desire is like a plummeting Hawk, scattering the flock, seizing one victim, as it were a sacrifice that spares the rest. And if the Hawk is drawn to the consolidated numbers of the flock, then who’s to say the predator is not a part of the flock? It’s all a matter of where you draw the line. We’ve drawn so many lines between us that our best hope is in the Mystery that makes every separation also a place of joining. Our dividing lines criss and cross us, and overrun our individuality. Soon we must all find ourselves marked with the same pattern of conflicting distinctions,
leaving us a pied people;
the mixed flock of the late Reverend Doctor.

January 6, 2002

Epiphany

Today marks the arrival of the Magi, and the end of the Christmas season, even as the first snow of Winter is in the offing. The arrival of Wisdom is much to be wished for, and surely it must travel a long hard road to reach the likes of us. Shall we receive it as a gift, putting us in the position of the Child, rewarded for nothing save innate goodness? Even so, we will not learn how to be wise, except by living out the travails of this Life. And that too puts us in His place. Or Him in ours, more to the point of today’s Holiday.

The Magi recognized Christ, though they were not Christian. Some say the terms of existence changed that day, in a New Dispensation. The Gnostic in me says that the only change was in our understanding of the terms, and that revelation and recognition are much the same, though we take one as a gift, and the other as an exercise of our own faculties. So it is that the Divine becomes Human: simply through the recognition that Humanity is an aspect of Divinity; even its coarsest Manifestation.
Or perhaps its finest.
The Magi did not so much gain a revelation as extract an admission; the truth of one of those festering secrets that separate us from God.

* * * * * * *
One new bit of Wisdom can make everything clearer, and another Year serves to make us all wiser, or so it may be hoped. One Winter revelation came to me as I walked in McGowan’s Pass, by the shore of the Meer. The bare twigs revealed a Baltimore Oriole nest overhanging the path along the water’s edge. There are many nests built in the Park each year, but the Oriole’s is distinctive: a dangling sack, rather than the usual cup-like arrangement.

I knew it had to be there.
I saw the birds in the Spring; even watched them mating nearby. As Spring passed into Summer I saw them feeding their young in the Mulberry tree at Nutter’s Battery.
But I never saw the nest.
Not until now, with the wisdom of Winter, whose nakedness reveals much that was hidden.
Now on display, underneath a wandering Star.

January 5th, 2002