Going to the Fair with the Fair People I Call Mine

We went to the Orange County Fair last week, ate a lot of fried foods, rode some rides, played some games, won a fish and walked about one hundred thousand steps.

And guess what?

The Bird Photographer took an Honorable Mention in Nature Photography for his exquisite photo of cedar waxwings sharing food. Honestly, it should have taken first place (and there were a lot of astounding and beautiful photos there), and I am -- as you know -- a fierce and discriminating critic. Plus, I'm not biased at all.

You can see more of Carl's photos here:

Website: www.cbjphoto.com
Facebook: carljacksonphotographer
Instagram: @cbjfoto

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)

The Awareness of Birds

Toes of sneakers on a dirty sidewalk with a silhouette of a crow blacked into the concrete.*

I think I told ya'll about my new gig, over at Cerebral Palsy Foundation. I will be writing, I think, monthly about various topics related to disability. CPF consults with the television show Speechless, a hilarious sit-com that very accurately portrays a family who lives with disability. The show features a terrific actor, Micah Fowler, who actually has cerebral palsy. Minnie Driver plays the mother, and I have to say that if it weren't for her being incredibly thin and glamorous with a British accent, the part could be mine.

In any case, this writing gig is awesome, and my first short piece is up on their blog. It's called The Awareness of Birds. March was Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month, so the topic for the month was "awareness."

Check out the Cerebral Palsy Foundation website, too. Poke around, donate, increase your awareness.











The Awareness of Birds













*I'm learning about how to caption photos for the vision-impaired. I'm bummed that I haven't been doing this all along, but I guess that means that even the most aware of us need to constantly improve and learn and listen.

The Enigma of Glass

CHRISTMAS SPARROW

by Billy Collins

The first thing I heard this morning
was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—

wings against glass as it turned out
downstairs when I saw the small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

Then a noise in the throat of the cat
who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap of a basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

On a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a shirt and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, when I uncupped my hands,
it burst into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

For the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms as I wondered about
the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

Merry Christmas Eve! 

And thank you, Leslie, for this poem!

Saturday Quote

Malibu Creek State Park, California

Please tell me how I can love you better.

Thich Nhat Hanh 

What Wings Sound Like

Fra Angelico: The Annunciation
Florence, Italy

I have always wondered whether Mary heard Gabriel's wings when he landed in the courtyard and what sort of sound they made. Was it a rustle belying sinew and skin pulled tight over cartilage and bone until he landed, a skid and thud? Blue-bled at the tips, fading inward. She drew back, then, afraid. Or did they whisper like the drapes pulled out of marble by some sculptor insistent on revelation?  She leaned forward, then, resigned.

The hedge outside my bedroom is full of nests. I have never noticed just how many birds live among us. I am drawn to the nubs that emerge from human backs, wings not yet pointed with only a suggestion of flight.

Questions about too many birds -- Random Poetry Sunday with Music

Listen to this while reading the following poem:




A Question about Birds

I am going to sit on a rock near some water
or on a slope of grass
under a high ceiling of white clouds,

and I am going to stop talking
so I can wander around in that spot
the way John James Audubon might have wandered

through a forest of speckled sunlight,
stopping now and then to lean
against an elm, mop his brow,

and listen to the songs of birds.
Did he wonder, as I often do,
how they regard the songs of other species?

Would it be like listening to the Chinese
merchants at an outdoor market?
Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?

Or is that nervous chittering
I often hear from the upper branches
the sound of some tireless little translator?

Billy Collins, from his collection horoscopes from the dead

Farmer Elizabeth

So, we have a break in the big city life that I usually describe. A tiny little bird lay on the patio outside the garage apartment in my backyard, and in lieu of The Dog eating it, we picked it up with an old tee-shirt and debated what to do. We looked up and noticed a nest practically perched on the edge of a light fixture, and on closer inspection, saw the two little birds, above, nestled together, there. The whole thing was kind of nasty, to tell you the truth. The little bird had clearly either fallen out or been pushed out by its siblings or Medea, its mother. What to do? We called over Big Strong Manly Neighbor, who inspected the surroundings and agreed that putting the baby back in the nest would probably be futile. I almost don't want to type out what we decided because it seems like heart of darkness material, particularly for those of us who aren't comfortable with -- ahem -- the natural world. We left the little bird in the tee-shirt, on top of an ivy-covered wall that is often frequented by The Neighbors' cats.

I'm going to listen to this, but what would you have done?