On Collateral Damage

 

 

It is June on the calendar of ordinary life, I go to a shelter made of broken branches. It is a roundish form, almost a half sphere, that is about three feet plus in height and perhaps eight or nine feet in diameter.  It gives me the impression of a large coarsely woven basket turned upside down.  There is a square shaped opening to enter on one side of the circumference. It has a charm about it like a fairytale hobbit house yet, architecturally sophisticated, so I think an adult must have had a hand in making it.   I have seen kids with paint guns playing around it on one occasion, there is that element of childhood fort-making about it.   Yesterday I was walking there with a friend and I had the not so subtle sense that there was also something dark and rather ominous hovering about the space energetically.   When we crawled inside indeed there was some left over evidence to support my feelings: crumpled up papers and a partially melted, used plastic hypodermic needle indicated that someone had spent time in there recently; not likely in ultra conscious clarity.  I arrived prepared today with some bags and gloves to clean it up.

Afterward, I walked a bit father west into another circle, a place where there was a fire a few years ago. It too is circular in form but with a different energy. I am struck by the subtle contrast.  This morning there were so many birds about I could not count the diversity or number as they appeared around the mandala of new growth. They fly around connecting eleven standing skeletons of mature trees surrounding the perimeter.   With their flight they create an invisible drawing, a web of energy, criss-crossing from tree to tree.  Young cottonwoods and Russian Olive’s are over my head in height now and it is getting difficult to see across the circumference.  Two weeks ago I was wading here in rubber boots and now the flood plain is dry again though still a bit spongy underfoot.  As I am contemplating it all I spot a ragged coyote twenty yards from me.  I am standing still and yet he immediately catches my scent and makes eye contact for a few moments, then looks behind him as another coyote steps into my view.  

I am humbled to see them, they are a rare sighting, a part of our ecological system that has suffered the consequences of our interference in nature. They are collateral damage from the destruction of their habitat and the invasion of our infrastructures.  I have always admired their determination to survive, somehow they live in this narrow passage between the river's edge and the city. They make note of me, the second one takes her time as if I too am a rare curiosity; we stare across the divide into one another's eyes for a long minute.  Ordinary reality dissolves away into the oneness of our contact with one another.  I wish I could go with them, accompany them for a walk like I would with a beloved dog. It's still morning, ten- fifteen, when I check my cell phone. I want to know if they have been up all night hunting or are they hungry all the time and rarely at rest?  I don't believe it is supposed to be like this for them, so restricted in terms of natural space, but at least, these two are free to roam.  I think about the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer from a chapter in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass.

Collateral damage: shielding words to keep us from naming the consequences of a missile gone astray.  The words ask us to turn our faces away, as if man made destruction were an inescapable fact of nature.  

Isolated coyotes and the person using under the dome of the fort-like nest, are part of the collateral damage in this eco-system. We live in such complexity, we consider much of city infrastructure as normal and necessary.  The result of industrialization and militarization that cannot be turned backward on the calendar of our evolution.  It is an overwhelming topic, one that is not easily simplified, words can be deceptive and collateral mortality shows up as a new term for the side effects of destruction in the environment.  I am thinking of the Gulf oil spill in 2010 as a prime example.  Yet, there is reason to remain optimistic for there are so many signs of life in this thinly wooded place and still so much beauty here in spite of its compromised, compressed states.  Even the needle evidence of a wounded soul reminds me that there is a journey to find wholeness; there are always potential possibilities for healing. Nature has her mysteries, she can recover from a fire in a few short years given the right balance of elements. I wonder how the Gulf has recovered.

There are natural consequences to our destructive behaviors, to our lack of mindfulness in nature and on personal levels as well-in the macrocosim and the microcosim of life-we are all effected by environmental destruction.  We are learning that slowly but surely, I have to hold to that belief in order to accept the reality of our existence in the 21st century.   One of my yoga teachers said so wisely, that when we are thrown off balance, there are often actions taken that we inevitably regret.  I have been thinking about this recently and have realized late in life how my actions of the past have hurt others.  Sometimes I wish I could return to certain instances and have the chance to bring balance to the event, or self-correct like in the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character keeps waking up to repeat the same day until he gets it right. So much collateral damage is the consequence of our seeming inability to walk on earth in equanimity.   May we adjust our ways into healthy alignments and stand in peaceful equanimity. May we not turn our faces away.

Karen Knows the Names

May 24, 2017
Morning

Then I move forward again, very softly, because the hawk is listening.  Slowly the dusk begins to uncoil.
-J. A. Baker, The Peregrine


Tomorrow is her birthday and we are having an early celebration walking in our matched green rubber boots through the oh-so-rare experience of water overflowing the river trails.  There are places now where the smell of standing water is a sour note but the overall joy the inner child feels mucking around in this mud adventure is so worth over-riding the scent.  When we can no longer navigate the bog and the mosquitos we turn back onto a dry trail and find ourselves parallel to the river's edge.  I know there really is no edge, it is always a shifting line but this year the boundary between sandy shore and water is remarkable.  I have heard the myth of a floodplain along the Rio Grande, yet, this is the first spring I have actually experienced it.
     The forest seems more alive, teeming with all sorts of birds.  A summer tanager greets us before we get out of my vehicle, as if to say, "welcome".  There are so many crested wax-wings singing that we think it sounds quite like a chorus of crickets.  Karen knows the names of each bird.  A beautiful grosbeak perches for me while I observe him through K's binoculars. Later she points out a chat, a bright yellow breasted bird that has a perfectly drawn black line of feathers from beak to eye.
     A dark flurry of movement, a quick peripheral encounter-we have startled something and we are unsettled by it.  To our left a Sharp-shinned hawk has flown up, up from the forest floor with prey in it's beak and lands precisely at the top of a dead tree trunk.  Standing on the broken pedestal-like form, the protagonist pauses and checks us out below; then we know for certain, it is a hawk. In a moment, it moves higher, crosses above us with prey in mouth into the crook of a substantial branch, partly but not entirely hidden from our view.  Karen and I take turns with her binoculars sighting the details as he or she begins to pull feathers from the crown of a small light-headed bird with a long beak. I cannot tell what bird it is, only their two heads are visible from where we stand below.  When hawk pulls up from his near-focus, we see it's soft, light tawny breast in contrast to it's dark grey wing feathers. It is riveting to witness.  A pure spectacle of nature.
     He sees us looking up but is most intent on feeding and must feel safe being so far above us, maybe twenty-five feet.  A woodpecker in the vicinity makes a noisy warning call while a mourning dove is quiet on the ground in front of us, until we pass by.  Karen thinks she is most likely aware the hawk is above her.  And I consider later,  that she may have witnessed more of the initial event than we did.  
     Shortly we continue to walk on and observe the feeding hawk from behind for a moment. I already feel changed forever. Because I reside in the city, having this wildness only ten minutes away gives it even more depth of meaning.  This is my first encounter with a hunting hawk from such a close vantage point and I cannot dismiss the synchronicity that I am in the midst of a book, The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker about the hunting habits of falcons along the seacoast of England in the 1960s. This feels like stepping into the book, or a slip down the rabbit hole of heightened awareness.

On route to meet Karen in the morning, I am just about to put a new CD into the player when I hear the captivating voice of David Krakauer from the Santa Fe Institute on the radio.  He is speaking on the limits of Science in the area of mathematical predictability. One of the many interesting points he makes about the limits of Science and Mathematics has to do with behavior and observation. He stated that some of the most important problems in mathematics are undecidable. We are pretty good at predictability for big orbits of large planets but with complex systems like the human brain, not as good at predicting behavior.
     We now know that what one observes is more or less influenced by the observer depending on scale. So observing a single cell in a petri dish may in fact change the outcome of the experiment, but does that apply to a human being observing a hawk in a tree?  At the end of the day, I am still pondering the hawk sighting in my mind and the absolute spectacle of this life on earth; all of the amazing interactions of earth's forms we rarely get to see but are happening around us all the time. Krakauer says that Science and Mathematics' ability to predict are limited by resources.  That one could never have enough resources to decide with certainty whether a butterfly flapping it's wings in one part of the world effects an event happening on the other side of the world. But theoretically, at least, we think it does.
     An ever interesting question: does the hawk or the butterfly flapping it's wings effect change? How could it not?  If we effect change by observation and a hawk effects change by killing it's daily prey, then I believe all this must be more than theory.  We cannot answer with the tools of decidability, but today, this hawk definitely effected Karen and me.  In the realm of the spiritual, where I believe all things are connected, it touched my heart and soul.  And moreover, if everything is a lightwave at the sub-atomic level then at creator levels every action or non-action is altering everything.  I sense there is a subtle change in my consciousness as I try to take this in; all beyond my intellectual comprehension for sure. 

Peter Matthiessen in his extraordinary story, The Snow Leopard, describes something about the art of Zen practice:
...in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or a flower petal.  When body and mind are one, then the whole being, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual existence, ego, the "reality" of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules. 

Seeing the hawk was a moment of that Zen-like awareness, swept clean of everything, entirely in the fleeting moment, unable to grasp it. Karen knows the names and that brings the hawk to some sort of grounding in Mother Nature, but those assigned names are for convenience sake and do not truly bring to the moment of witness the limits of understanding.

The Shift

Blue-black little clusters, some almost red and others pale green hang like miniature -bunches of grapes on the mulberry trees.  Those that are ripened and ready to be plucked drip off of the trees.  The ground is covered with them. They are sweet morsels of delight on my tongue.  Gifts from the forest. They stain my lips and fingers.  

Again, springtime rejoices, this wooded place is full with bounty.  Three small black feathers and one delicate orangish wing feather are offerings found along the trail. An unusually marked stick finds its way into my hands along with the feathers. These gifts do not come from looking, though observation is key, more from gratitude for this natural place.  This past summer, fall and winter the river was an immense sandbar. There I would go to sit and meditate in the mornings or late afternoons before sunset.  I traveled up and down the flat beach almost daily drawing medicine wheels with sticks in the sand.  Now it is a different environment, wet and lush. Last weekend I rafted on the river for four hours witness to the layers of canopy along the Rio Grande's banks and her glorious fullness.

A circular area where a fire raged some years ago is now covered with water four or five inches deep; I laugh when my cracked rubber boots fill up with the cool brown liquid as I try to wade through. New growth meets my vision, I count several young cottonwoods that have seeded themselves in the circle.  The charred remains of their parents lie in a floodplain now. The river is so high this year that it has overflowed and moved water onto the paths and lower areas all through the bosque.  Ducks float on the trails. I cannot navigate my way through to the five nests I found in April and I wonder if any birds have come back to them this vernal time.

After finding a dry spot and sitting under one of many fruit-bearing mulberry trees, I come home to find an email from a friend of a friend. She is inquiring as to how I made the transition from set and wardrobe designer/stylist many years ago in Boston to living as an artist and healing arts practitioner in Albuquerque.  Her question fuels an immediate response.  Perhaps she needs a practical answer but I am more inclined to the philosophical.  What makes one shift?  For me it was a long held yearning to paint. There are those moments in a lifetime when the river of desire overflows the banks and if we have a brave heart or are desperate enough to step into change, we can discover life anew.