The Path to Creativity IV: Learning by Heart

Great secrets still lie hidden, much I know and of much I have an intimation.-Goethe

At a neighbors yard sale I purchased a pair of binoculars for four dollars. The next morning I brought them to one of my favorite places along the Rio Grande River-bird watching!  On the way I stopped to use my new seeing device to spy on a tiny bird high up in the branches of a leaf-barren tree.  At first I thought this small silhouette might be a hummingbird, but once my vision was enlarged, I could discern it was a rounder bird with what looked to be a long narrow beak and a yellowish-green spot on its back.  A little marvel, I recorded this feathered form as best I could in my visual memory-bank and continued on the bike path to the rivers edge.  Once inside the canopy of a thinly wooded area I came to a second stop and looked up just in time to see a large raptor, maybe a hawk or an owl, too quick a glimpse to be sure. But as my magnifying lenses came into focus, I was startled as my eyes met with the bird's wide set eyes and the space between us condensed.   Some kind of ancient wisdom there, no way to comprehend or describe that moment of contact with divinity; a lesson on wings.

As this bird of prey took off from its perch, to my delight, a vivid scarlet-red bird took its place on a nearby branch. I did not know its name either, it's color said everything radiant, every name resplendent. It took my heart like a poem by Mary Oliver or the Sufi Master, Hafiz:

"What excitement will renew your body

When we all begin to see that

His heart resides in Everything?"

Take time to entrain your heart to the pace of nature is the tender advice of author Stephen Harrod Buhner. "When you go into Nature, you let the field of your heart lead, moving to those things that for some reason attract you.  You may feel one day the need to walk in mountains, or when walking in a forest be drawn to a particular stand of trees.  To notice these things you must, as Thoreau commented, let yourself ' see with the unworn sides of your eye.'  It is in peripheral vision that these things are seen, in peripheral thoughts that their signals come.  Pointed vision is the domain of the linear mind."

Did these birds show themselves to me because they caught my peripheral thoughts in the breeze that day?  What do we mean when we say, "to learn by heart"? That is different than to commit something to memory in our minds, isn't it? Can we be brought to our knees in a fleeting moment? Can I hold this, learn this, entrain this heart to a scarlet- feathered friend? What wonders of the natural world we miss when we sit in cars on freeways?

A few days later on another trip into binocular vision, I was drawn to a bleached-bone colored shape on the other side of the river.  Again, I was startled to meet with the eyes of a being as this light figure shape-shifted into a coyote. Sitting with complete composure, at one with Nature, he/she gazed back at me, as I peered at it through the thickness of the glasses.  My mind recollected my dear departed dog, the one who looked a little like a coyote. Just then, out of the thicket of trees and dark brush behind the coyote moved into view, a small pup, all soft fur and ivory-white. This dear young one came up  to its mother or father, checking in, circling around as I watched transfixed. Then, all too briefly, though what a gift, they disappeared into the woods.

My friend Karen told me the bird I saw with the long narrow beak might be a yellow-rumped warbler, and the red one, a summer tanager. I do love their names, though I love the experiences themselves more.  The binoculars have brought me closer to Nature, oh yes, entraining my eyes to learn by way of the heart to be in that place of unlanguaged wonder.