On Observing and Being
The world is on fire and I want to talk about birds
The world is literally, figuratively and in very many ways, on fire.
But, what I’m going to talk about is birds.
Years ago, a friend who was a poet and a birder asked if I wanted to stop by a little nature area before we grabbed dinner. There were some little birds that he had seen yesterday zooming around and he thought they might be back at it tonight.
We trudged into a small clearing, and all of a sudden these barely visible brown birds burst out of a shrub and started zooming around. My friend was delighted, and tracked them with lenses cupped to his face, handing the binoculars to me so I could see too.
What I remember most was his joy.
These days, I find myself noticing the crows outside my house who like to caw at me when I walk to the car now that all the leaves have left the tree. They perch above my front door, pelting the front porch with peanut shells to break them open.
Last week, they looked on as a plumber came to fix my sink. He was an older man, skinny, hunched over and muttering to his son as he scrutinized the work of the people who lived here before me under my cobalt sink.
“This is a work of art,” he said “and I don’t mean that as a compliment.”
From what I have gathered, the people who owned my house before me seemed to like meditation, nag champa incense, hiding buttons, rocks and gems in corners of house and doing things around the house in whatever way they could get it to work.
The plumber dove right into the repair, muttering to his son who walked in and out of the house to get this tool or that pipe from the truck.
When he had finished and walked back into the house with the invoice, he was suddenly animated, “Those crows!” he said, ”they are so smart!”
He feeds them too, he told me (though I hadn’t indicated that I did) and he’s always amazed at how intelligent they are. Then he launched into a monologue of some books he had read. I sat and listened as he talked and talked about spirituality and birds.
My writing is wandering, but, I’d rather talk about my kitchen sink and my plumber than the challenges in the world.
Recently, I’ve started to see that people whose work is about doing something different than productivity-at-all-costs - those folks seem interested in bird watching.
There’s Jenny Odell who became entranced with birds and wrote about it in How to Do Nothing.
“You can't really look for birds; you can't make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.”
There is Ed Yong whose XOXO talk (I highly recommend) was an honest and heartfelt exploration of the hard work he did during the pandemic writing about Long COVID. He is now an incredible nature photographer and birder as well as being an author and journalist.
There is something about observing birds that feels calming to us.
I may not take up birding for myself, though a friend did also share with me a really cool app Merlin App that helps identify bird songs that has me at least wanting to listen.
But what helps me is that these folks are talking about listening, observing and sitting in what is.
From what I understand, to be a birder, you need to pay a certain kind of attention to the world around you. This attention is about being an animal alongside another animal. It’s about being with these natural creatures, co-existing with them, and simply being.
I don’t know about you, but I could use a lot more being.
I’ve created something that is meant to help me return to nature, maybe it could help you too. It’s called Everyday Flourishing and in it, I explore ecological principles and asks us to think about them in our everyday life.
It’s a work in progress, much like myself.
I’d like to hope it can support us in seeking out calm, joy, delight. Even while the world is on fire.
The first things we’re doing is to think about Observing and Interacting.
I’ll be doing some workshops - one per month for 2025, you’re welcome to join in. The first one is on January 20th at noon PST.