Migration

 

Migrating Nashville Warbler
photo by Carl Jackson 
Instagram: @mo_better_birds

I'm slowly easing myself out of Facebook and Blogger to Substack -- migrating in a sense. I hope you'll come over there with me. Eventually, I might even get subscribers, but for right now you can get notification that I have a new post via email. Please don't ask me anything else, because I only know the basics, and I've been trying to get off Facebook for years but just don't want to cut ties with certain communities. If you migrate with me to Substack, you can read everything I write, add little hearts and likes and dislikes and even comments! It looks neat and streamlined, and I'm in need of neat and streamlined. Even my blog on Blogger is cluttered, and I'm tired. 

The Substack form is at the end of this post!

And how about that photo of the Nashville Warbler that The Bird Photographer took about a week ago in a park? He was walking through some Sycamore trees. He said that these little birds tend to bounce between branches under the canopy. It's rare to see them in sunlight as they tend to stay in the shadows, blending in with the leaves, hunting for bugs. They migrate from Canada to Mexico and Central America. 

I would love to migrate to Mexico or Central America right about now. Jesus Christ. May I say one thing about Dear Leader's new nominee to the Supreme Court? Or two things. One is that Amy sounds like an intelligent person despite her "orthodox Catholicism," and good for her balancing career and motherhood and raising adopted and disabled kids all while climbing the ladder to the highest office in justice land. That ladder, though, was placed there by the person she's succeeding, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and it seems to me that Amy's going to pull that ladder up from her high perch and slam the door in the face of all the women who follow her. That'd be us and our daughters and grand-daughters.

Secondly, I can't respect anyone who takes a job from Dear Leader. Amy should have waited for an appointment by another Republican President, if there ever is one. Anyone who colludes with that piece of shit isn't a decent human being.

Mexico

Two mornings now the cactus wren has woken me, but I'm not complaining because it's Mexican. I'm in Mexico. It's hard to believe that the creature making such a ruckus is a bird, and I haven't actually seen it but imagine it to be chunky and grossly sociable. There's a hardscrabble beauty to everything around here in Baja. Yesterday, I took a walk alone toward the ocean, my footsteps the only sound on the sandy path, and the crash of surf only anticipated. An enormous ridge of sand rises at the end of the path, and you have to wind around a long narrow tide pool, edged with grasses and cacti before you climb up and over the ridge to the deserted beach below, the roar (waves crashing) meeting you. I hadn't yet gotten there, gotten to the point where the sound meets you, when I saw in the distance a pack of dogs, maybe five, come up over the far ridge on the other side of the pool. At first I fancied coyotes, then contemplated wolves and settled on dogs, their ears dark v's, spaces between them and wondered where they were going and whether they were wild and what would I do (dumb, non-dog loving American) if attacked and would anyone hear me if the roar of the Pacific was not yet discernible from bird calls much less screams. The dogs were so in the distance, but I could have sworn that they saw me, that they scattered over the dune, scattered toward me, so I stopped and turned around and walked back, quickly, trying not to look back over my shoulder. Over my head, high up in the sky and then past my line of vision flew a long streak of a bird, black-edged and elegant and alone.

A great frigate, the Bird Photographer told me later.

Frigatebirds can stay up in the air for two months without ever touching the ground.

I'm not sure what I want to say about this, how my mind conjures both threat and wonder but it does and it does again no matter the place.


RIP W.S. Merwin

The Solstice

They say the sun will come back
at midnight
after all
my one love

but we know how the minutes
fly out into
the dark trees
and vanish

like the great 'ohias and the honey creepers
and we know how the weeks
walk into the
shadows at midday

at the thought of the months I reach for your
hand
it is not something
one is supposed
to say

we watch the red birds in the morning
we hope for the quiet
daytime together
the year turns into air

but we are together in the whole night
with the sun still going away
and the year
coming back

photo by Carl Jackson

@cbjfoto 

The Small of the Back

Some Venus

The folds of this ancient goddess' stomach. Her foot's low arch.



A memory:
When I hear the crunch of steps on gravel, outside the apartment, I know it's not him because he is so quiet. I lie there on the bed, wrapped in sheets, waiting. It is warm. The plastic blinds click together as the breeze runs through them. The word rustle. Later, his hand on the small of my back. A hand on the small of the back is a beautiful gesture. Resting there. On the small of the back. 





I wrote this down in my small blue leather notebook:

The new way to live: reading and reading and coming up to take a look around

I don't know if I heard that or thought it myself, but it's a good one.







I'm dipping into Toni Morrison's new book The Source of Self-Regard, and I've just begun Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. I'm finishing Sigrid Nunez' novel The Friend, and I've loved it. Sigrid was at Hedgebrook with me, finishing that book. She is a lovely person, someone I wish I knew better, especially after reading her book. It's curious and funny and sharp and original. I wish I could finish my book. Maybe I will later this month when I retreat to Mexico with the Bird Photographer. Immediately after I type that, I feel I need to explain. Explain how I can go to Mexico, explain how I can get away. Do I need to explain? I have a free place to stay, a generous gift from a dear friend. Sophie's father and Saint Mirtha will take care of her while I'm gone. I am determined to get away, to take respite when it is offered, by whatever means I can. Yet, I explain. We define ourselves by how much we can suffer, and who am I otherwise?







In other words, I'm reading and reading and coming up to take a look around.

Writing, Respite and Denali

I'm still here in beautiful rural Washington. There's not much to do but relax and listen to the birds, putter around the beautiful house, wander outside and chat with the goats, read novels (Tommy Orange's There, There and Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen), read some poetry (Marie Howe's Magdalene), eat a plum, eat a peach, let a corner of a chocolate bar melt in my mouth, suck on a Tootsie Pop and gaze at the Bird Photographer.

I haven't written much, but I've arranged and re-arranged my hundreds of pages into a sort of order. It took hours and hours to do that much, but a structure is finally, literally, at the tip of my fingers. My plan is to finish up in the next day or so and then, when I get home, re-type the whole lot and send to the editor as a rough -- extremely rough -- draft.

The Pacific Northwest in the summer is perfection. It was here -- or up in Victoria -- where I spent a week by myself only four years ago, a recipient of the magnificent Heather McHugh's organization, Caregifted. That week changed my life and opened me to the possibility of and hope for more respite from the life of caregiving that, while enormously rewarding and filled with grace, has also drained me of myself or the essence that keeps me vital. I realized then how important it was to seek respite in whatever way I could, to open myself up to the possibility of replenishment and to work just as hard to get that as I do to take care of my daughter. While I am aware of the enormous privileges I've been granted that others just do not have, I also remember the nearly twenty years without significant respite. I remember what it was like to have no hope for it.

We caregivers must get back to ourselves as if our life depended on it because it does.

photographer: Carl Jackson

Listen to the latest Who Lives Like This podcast -- a rousing discussion of nurturing the self with Paige Figi, the director of Coalition for Access Now and the mother of Charlotte of the famous Charlotte's Web cannabis oil. Jason and I interviewed Paige just a week before she climbed Denali, the highest peak in North America. Here's the link:

Who Lives Like This?!

Yeah. I know. Not all of us will climb Denali, even if we desired to do so. Yet, still, there's joy to be had no matter how you choose to find yourself.

As my friend, writer Chris Rice said the other day, Your book is your Denali.


Onward.

Parables of Neurology, The Cosmos

Star Trails
Photographer: Carl Jackson

At some point in the waning years of the last century, Sophie was on her eighth or ninth drug, a drug that wasn't yet FDA-approved but that The Neurologist At The Time thought worth trying. I received the drug from a pharmacy in London, a tiny little shop on a cobblestoned street with a 17th century sign hanging outside that swung in the English rain. You figure out which part of that sentence is fiction. I've told this story before. The drug was a white powder and came in a foil packet called a sachet, and after I carefully poured the contents out, I cut them with a razor blade to get just the right amount for the baby, about enough to fit into a 1/4 teaspoon. I dipped my finger into the powder and put it on my tongue. Powerful enough to stop seizures but bitter enough to spit out. I gave it to the baby.

Know that the word irritable is frequently used in neurology literature as a possible side effect. An Earlier Neurologist listened to my complaints about the Baby's constant fretting and said, You have to figure out what your tolerance is as far as irritability, after which I lit the fuse that connected the telephones of the last century that we were using and blew him up. That should be parenthetical.

On the third day and then night of the drug in the sachet, Sophie began screaming all night long, flailing her arms and arching her back. She screamed until she became hoarse. You can't imagine what a hoarse infant sounds like -- just air but more -- air that you can hear, and I spoke into the air as I walked with her, up and down, up and down. Enough. This is enough. No more. We will not do this. The next morning I called The Neurologist At The Time. The Neurologist At The Time was what they called cutting edge, no pun intended, knives and docs, docs and knives, and I liked him. I was going to say love but that would be fiction. I called him up and said, The Baby is beyond irritable. She is psychotic, if babies can be psychotic. She is still seizing. She is now on two non-FDA-approved drugs and is being weaned from Phenobarbital. How many babies do you know on this combination? Could the three drugs be interacting? 












(silence)













The Neurologist At The Time said, That's a very interesting idea, and the words travelled as sound through a wire connecting us, across the country (I was visiting my parents in Atlanta and The Neurologist At The Time lived in New York City) and assembled themselves into block letters that floated out of the can I held up to my ear and spun round my head.


T h a t ' s    a   v e r y   i n t e r e s t i n g   i d e a.












(silence)









I have a Bachelor's degree in English and French literature. I've also read an indeterminate number of novels, including all the classics in French. I've studied Mandarin Chinese, excelled in modernist poetry and wrote an honors thesis on Pascal's Pensees. The only science class I took in college was Zoology, and during my senior year I thought I might round out the piles of novels and poetry that lay everywhere in my room by taking Waste Management. I got a D in Calculus.  Yet, evidently, as per The Neurologist At The Time, The Cutting-Edge Neurologist, I was having interesting ideas about my nine-month old daughter's brain and its response to seizure drugs from other continents.

I never got over this, by the way.

The landscape changed in a moment, over the telephone. The tiny little mother mind™was born in that moment, and I'd describe the birth as a kind of star trail like the photo the Bird Photographer took in the middle of the California desert, a time-lapse of stars burning or dying or traveling as the world spins on its axis, but that might be a mixed metaphor, and I  don't know physics either or even photography. Black holes. No man's land.

This is not fiction.


Stephen Hawking said, The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

*^%#@&*(^*#!!!!

Sophie at school
photographer: Page Jackson

Good Lord, I'm feeling blue. And anxious and agitated and lazy and enervated, all at once. It might be because Sophie is truly done with school, and I haven't properly "mourned" that or reckoned with it or processed it* or whatever other 21st century method there might be to deal or not deal with it.

Anywho.

It might be reading about Trump's "victory" at the Supreme Court this morning. The Muslim Ban thing. It might be all the begging we're doing around the Ass Hole Care Act that's wending its way through the Senate. It might be the gross feeling I have, pretty much all the time, when I think of those people who support the Pussy Grabber in Chief, most of them people in my distant past who were as stupid then as immoral now. Some of them are people that I love, and there's the rub.*

It might be the literal caregiving of Sophie who has a bit of a cold and cough, is drooling excessively, not sleeping so well and helping to generate the kind of ambivalence that I hate admitting to -- that I'm not cut out to keep doing this, day in and day out.

It might be that I just finished a novel that I felt compelled to keep reading even as it made me feel like taking a shower every few paragraphs. It's called Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. I read so much about it, including the tidbit that Obama loved it. I'll say that it's a very good read, but it's leaving an awful taste in my mouth -- much as Gone Girl did and A Little Life. I actually hated both of those, however "well-written."

I need a novel that will cut me to the quick* and not make me feel all slippery, not make me collude with decadence. I'm tired of the overwrought.

I'm only one week out from an amazing vacation, too, and perhaps that's at the root of my blues -- Canadian blue at the end of my fingertips, soon out of reach entirely.

The view from the seaplane we took from Victoria to Seattle

Sundown in Victoria

Wind-blown in Port Angeles

The Bird Photographer doing his thing in a meadow of daisies

What's up in your neck of the woods?*











*Cliché

A Reverie For Where I've Been

The Mermaid Pool where I swam laps
Victoria, British Columbia

The Poet and Me
photographer: Carl Jackson

My dear friend, the poet Heather McHugh, arranged for Carl and me to stay in Port Angeles, Washington and for a week in Victoria, British Columbia. I don't even know where to begin to describe the fun we had, the sights we saw, and the relaxation I felt over the past eight days. I was here four years ago for a respite week through Heather's Caregifted foundation, and I will say that it was, indeed, that week that literally propelled me toward Hedgebrook the following year, and then the enormous changes in my personal life over the last two and now, this.

This.

There is just NO WAY I could have imagined re-visiting Victoria four years later in such happiness. There is NO WAY any of us know where our lives will lead us. I am convinced, again, that it's as important not to despair when things are shitty as it is to feel grateful when they're good. Nothing is permanent, ever.

I took a lot of photos on my iPhone as well as on the regular camera, and I can't wait to share the fancy ones with you because we went out whale watching one afternoon for more than 3 hours and saw/encountered a big pod of killer whales. That's a religious experience, to tell you the truth. Then again, riding ferries could also count for a religious experience, especially in the Pacific Northwest. We rode merry on the ferry from Bremerton to Victoria, from Sydney to San Juan Island and then back. It was windy and rainy sometimes and about a thousand shades of gray and blue otherwise sun-split skies and the air is filled with melancholy and peace and salt tang and sweetness. Being with The Bird Photographer for so many days was divine.

Jigsaw puzzles on the ferry to San Juan Island!

English Camp, the dreamiest of the dreamy places we visited
San Juan Island, Washington

No words necessary

Lying on my bed and gazing out to the ocean
English Camp
San Juan Island, Washington

The most astonishing color peonies I've ever seen
Butchart Gardens
Victoria, British Columbia

Butchart Gardens
Victoria

English Camp
San Juan Island

A very windy whale watching trip/Religious Experience

My future home
Victoria, British Columbia

The Bird Photographer, doing his thing

I have oodles of pictures on my fancy camera, especially of killer whales, so as soon as I upload them to the computer, I will share them. Right now, I'm sitting in a tiny airport getting ready to board a seaplane which will take us back to the Seattle airport. I've never flown on a seaplane, but I'm about as relaxed as I've been in many years, so I think it'll be good, and if I crash into the Canadian ocean -- well -- there'd be worse ways to go.

About Canada: I'm sorry to leave. Every person we met was so kind and thoughtful. If politics came up, every person we spoke to was deeply sorry for the bullshit we face in these Disunited States. Every person expressed sympathy and agreed that 45 is horrible, that the changes wrought by him and the Republican congress are abysmal and not a little depressing. It was comforting to have these conversations, sort of the reverse of the gaslighting we've been subject to over the last few months.

Sigh.

How are ya'll? I've missed reading your blogs and getting your comments and will be back soon more regularly.

I miss you.

All Italics Are Da Vinci's Except For That Moon

I say that the blue which is seen in the atmosphere is not its own colour but is caused by warm humidity evaporated in minute and imperceptible atoms on which the solar rays fall rendering them luminous against the immense darkness of the region of fire that forms a covering above them.

Leonardo da Vinci, from Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci


What happens when everything you see and touch and hear and smell and feel comes to you as in the fulfillment of a dream?

Writing about the kite seems to be my destiny since among the first recollections of my infancy it seemed to me that as I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips. (a dream of Da Vinci's infancy)


The room at the top of the stairs where I learned to rest four years ago, the woman who cared for me like a mother, the courage to send in my writing, the awarding of three weeks in a cottage in the woods in the same part of the world the next year, a great upheaval that led to a bird photographer, an owl, a whale's fluke (like a whirling wind scouring through a sandy and hollow valley which with speeding course drives into its vortex everything that opposes its furious course....), a white bed in the same part of the world four years later and then this: waking at four, always four and a beam of moonlight shining in the only strip of window not covered by curtain. Shining on the blue sea, blue moonlight. I'll get the moon for you, he had said, and he pulled the curtains to there right before love (touch), and then sleep, and waking at four, always four and there it was, and you (I) stood there in a black nightgown bathed in blue.

To me it seems that all sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by Experience; that is to say, that do not at their origin, middle or end, pass through any of the five senses. For if we are doubtful about the certainty of things that pass through the senses how much more should we question the many things against which these senses rebel, such as the nature of god and the soul and the like, about which there are endless disputes and controversies.

There's a little blue book by the side of the bed of the woman who cared for me like a mother, a little book of selections from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, and I open it to Flight, to Structure of Birds' Wings, to You will study the anatomy of the wings of a bird together with the muscles of the breast which are the movers of these wings. And you do the same for man in order to show the possibility that there is in man to sustain himself amid the air by the flapping of wings. And what are the chances of this, of reading of birds and whales and blue and flight written in the 16th century?

Impetus is the impression of local movement transmitted from the mover to the movable thing and maintained by the air or by the water as they move in order to prevent the vacuum. (Movement Through Wind and Water)

The body of anything whatsoever that takes nourishment continually dies and is continually renewed; because nourishment can only enter in those places where the preceding nourishment is exhausted, and if it is exhausted it no longer has life. (Life of the Body)

Still

Somewhere in Durham, NC, 1982

I recently found a bunch of letters from friends and lovers in a box at the back of my closet. I also found a trove of negatives from a documentary photography class I took as a sophomore at UNC in 1982. I'd forgotten about the family that I visited over a period of three months and chronicled and with whom I became friends. I moved away. Still I remember developing them in the darkroom, my hands immersed in the bath, the slippery feel of the paper blooming shadows and light, the hands of the boy I loved mixed up with mine, his mouth.

Saturday morning. Complacencies of the peignoir.

Still. What makes me "happy" is fifteen minutes in bed meditating, then reading about authors I love and their new books, then hearing Sophie in the room down the hall humming again after more than a month of silence. Also, Costa Rican coffee from the man I love who is out there somewhere taking photos of burrowing owls.











Field Guide

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious dement of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That's all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

Tony Hoagland

Hand-Outs

photo by Carl Jackson

Over the weekend I went with The Bird Photographer to Point Fermin near San Pedro to watch the peregrine falcons feed their fledglings. Like I said in a post I wrote for Cerebral Palsy Foundation last month, I wasn't aware of the incredible variety of birds that are among us nor their fascinating habits, until I started hanging with him.  The picture above is what's called an "aerial transfer" from the male to the female. That's a small bird, I believe, that the male has just caught. He heads back to the nest with that in his talons, the female flies out with not a little ruckus, he drops the prey in the air, and the female catches it mid-air and takes it back to the nest. It's insane except it's not. It's nature.

I don't feel like extending the metaphor, but I'm nothing if not an endless weaver of the metaphorical. Think precision, ruckus, prey, nourishment, nature, nurture, violence.

I'm struggling to deal with Sophie's new normal that might not be normal. She isn't having many seizures as the CBD seems to be really helping with those, but her general well-being isn't so great. I have no idea what's going on, and if I hadn't been doing this for so long, I would be up all night trying to figure it out. Figure it out. There's no figuring out, sometimes.

If something can be done about the situation, what need is there for dejection?And if nothing can be done about it, what use is there for being dejected?

Shantideva, 8th century Buddhist master 

It's weird to be conscious of and actually feel the enormity of the task at hand and the accompanying fatigue. I'm struck by how everything is the same, by how we're constantly learning and unlearning and re-learning.

The personal is political, isn't it? Isn't it?

I feel, still, great anxiety and even greater anger when I think about our government and the man we're supposed to call President. What a piece of shit. It looks like the country's "budget" will be balanced on the backs of the sick, the poor and the disabled. Hundreds of billions of dollars handed from one oligarchy to another so that the masses can build the weapons of war that will be used to destroy the masses in other countries. What a load of bullshit. I think it's safe to say that the funds Sophie receives from the government, procured through an aerial transfer that is much like the peregrines' pictured above, are not a sure thing. Whether the cuts come or not, the fact that they're argued about by those in power, the fact that we must continually justify them, fight for them,  beg for them is cause for a sort of irrevocable anxiety that ripples out of the body, my body and into the air.




Read THIS.














* Peregrine falcons are the fastest animals on the earth and can reach speeds of 240 mph. At one point, due to the effects of the chemical DDT, they were on the endangered species list. The entire American peregrine falcon population experienced drastic declines due to the widespread use of the pesticide. It caused their eggshells to weaken and break and led the babies to die before hatching.Thanks to the Endangered Species Act, their numbers have soared. (source is U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). The Endangered Species Act is currently under the chopping block for the Trump Administration.