Waxwings Eat Bugs

The Cedar waxwing is one of our most debonair birds, having a slick suit of silky tan feathers decorated with a stylish black mask and vivid, glistening wing and tail tips of red and yellow. It is a very social bird, most conspicuous in Winter when rollicking flocks will dependably visit every tree or shrub of lingering fruit. A few of them hang out here in the summer as well. 

Yesterday I watched a pair raiding a white mulberry tree overhanging a pond in Ipswich, occasionally letting fly a short burst of their high-pitched, sibilant song. They also engaged in something I hadn’t seen before, flying out over the pond to hover and poke at the surface with their beaks in simple, delicate gestures before flying back to the mulberry. I had always thought of them as exclusive fruit eaters, but the only thing I could imagine they were up to was eating insects. As I was thinking of the sight this evening I pulled out Kenn Kaufmann’s Lives of North American Birds and found that yes, Waxwings eat insects, and are in fact known to hover and flutter as they snatch their meals from their hidey-holes. Another one to add to the short list of birds that I’ve observed doing a pretty effective job hovering in place: hummingbirds of course, golden-crowned kinglets, american kestrels and eastern phoebes. 

The phoebes were also busy at work over the pond, but stayed much closer to shore, and sometimes perched right on the quivering surface of a lily pad, if you could really call that a 'perch'.  

Another Summer Shower

Oh my what a big thundershower we just had! A classic of midsummer, heavy and deep, of a second’s drenching, with those frightening cracks of thunder that come right with the flash. I was out when it arrived, watching the darkening skies from inside the greengrocer’s with excitement and trepidation, wondering if I hoped to beat it to my car or to get caught. Caught I was, deliriously, running awkwardly in my sandals, splashing through the new puddles of rain, still hot from the overheated atmosphere.

I was lucky enough to make it home in time to catch the best of it from my front porch, challenging myself not to flinch at each newest, loudest burst of light and sound. Little rivers poured out of yards and onto the steaming asphalt of the street, and finally, after a few entrancing minutes, it broke up as it always does in a few rays of sunlight dodging the last, fitful squalls. Is it just me, or do these summer storms always end with a final crash of thunder after the rain has gone and the sun has returned, always the loudest, the closest, a last laugh from the sky?

Our Summer here in the northeast has been hotter and more humid than usual, making me remember previous seasons in the Midwest, particularly Cincinnati, where the late afternoon or evening flurry of atmospheric rumblings and maybe rain was an almost daily event, as predictable as sunset. But memories are so unreliable.  All of these musings, Cincinnati storms, the last gasps of thunder, the breaking rays of sun, are the products of my highly subjective mind and its accompanying bank of memories. Who knows what really happened, and where it all fits into the grand scheme?  

It is what it is, and perception is reality, except when it isn’t.

Nine Reasons to go Birdwatching

What is so special about birdwatching?  Why do I enjoy it?  What do I get out of it?

1 Birdwatching is done outdoors, usually in relatively natural habitats and areas of open space.  I am a big believer in the benefits of spending time outdoors, especially amidst the splendors of what we usually call 'nature'.  I believe it is a powerful restorative for our minds and bodies.  

2 Birdwatching is a stimulating mental activity, exercising one’s memory and observational skills to a high degree, as well as reasoning ability. It also engages one’s sight and hearing to a great extent. Few things are as important as keeping your mind sharp.  (For the record, I think that musical activity is the ultimate all-around exercise for your brain, as it engages your memory, your motor skills, your intellect, language skills, creativity, self-expression, and social skills.)

3 Birdwatching has great depth as an observational and educational pastime, allowing one to delve into the science and lore of birds as far as one could possibly hope to go.  This is true of almost any discipline, of course, but rarely is the science so accessible and useful to such a widely-practiced hobby.  Knowledge of bird behavior, ecology, etc. immeasurably helps when looking for birds, when identifying birds, and trying to understand birds.  (Fishing and hunting qualify here, I would think, as well.)

4 There is tremendous beauty and variety in the appearance, behavior and sounds of birds.  An opinion, to be sure, but one shared by lots and lots of people.  Certainly birds find their way into poems an awful lot.

5 Birds of many sorts can be found just about everywhere, at almost any time, making it a hobby anybody can do, anywhere, anytime.  You can birdwatch on your way to work, as you wake up in the morning...as I said: anywhere, anytime.  I know people who keep track of the birds that they identify on television shows (you wouldn't believe how often they use the hooting of a great-horned owl in the background; well, maybe you would believe it.  Wood thrush, too.)

6 The variety of birds is such that novices can easily learn to distinguish many common, distinctive species, and dedicated amateurs and scientists can find plenty of challenges in most environments.  Entry into the world of birdwatching is easy - most people have done it whether they realize it or not.  When I started birdwatching seriously I made a list of the birds I had already seen - crow, blue jay, bald eagle, robin, etc.  But even on a short jaunt around the corner I can be challenged with a group of various species of sparrows that have me examining the finer points of their behavior and habitat, the thickness of the streaking on their belly, and the pattern of their various songs in order to figure out what I am actually watching.  And of course there's the whole wide world to explore and learn about...

7 Birdwatching is an activity where amateurs can and do contribute meaningfully to the process of scientific discovery.  Now this is unusual in most other scientific disciplines, but events such as the christmas bird count that occurs every year across the country give us valuable sets of data by which scientists and amateurs have been able to track patterns in bird dispersion, population and variety against any number of other variables, which can be used in very concrete ways in planning conservation.

8 Birdwatching allows one to learn about their own powers of perception and recognition, giving great insight into the working of his or her brain.  This point is a little more mysterious, as it should be, but I am often interested and sometimes amazed at the way experience and knowledge in the field accumulates until identification and instinct work so quickly, naturally and effortlessly together, allowing even a relative dilettante like me to make many identifications from a long distance away, from just a split-second look at a bird in shadow.  Of course, this only comes with birds that I am very familiar with.  But what is particularly interesting is that the more you become this way with common birds, the more you can see something out of the corner of your eye for just a second and think 'wait a minute, something's off there, that's not a song sparrow, that's something else,' and end up chasing a very unusual sighting.

9 Regular birdwatching deeply connects one with the rhythms of life and the planet, allowing the many swells of the planet to affect us personally – tides, seasons, weather, daylight. This has its apotheosis in the spectacular phenomenon of bird migration, one of the great wonders of life on planet earth and the most exhilarating yearly reminder that the planet is still working.  This, for me, is the true heart of birding, and really, of just about any engaged study of nature in the field.

An agricultural idyll

I went up to Ipswich yesterday to visit Appleton Farms and have a talk with the farm manager there.  Appleton Farms is a pretty big chunk of land owned by the Trustees of Reservations, about a thousand acres encompassing woodlands, wetlands, pasture, field, and farm.  They run a highly successful CSA vegetable operation on 26 acres, which was my primary interest for the visit.  

Anyway, I thought I'd share a few photos.  Appleton Farms is a beautiful spot, and its gently undulating fields couldn't be lovelier, filled with swaying wild grains and the patter of sparrows, blackbirds and bobolinks.  Nestled amidst the pasture, field and woodland is the crop acreage, with row after row of healthy green salads, herbs, onions, hundred of vigorous and delicious plants.  Yesterday I found the small crew there weeding several rows of onions that were overgrown with waist-high lambs-quarter, a tasty green in its own right when picked much younger.  

I had my chat and then wandered around for a while with my binoculars and camera, and chanced upon a nice bird sighting - a cattle egret, my first seen in Massachusetts.  In full breeding plumage, as this one was, they are somewhat comical looking, with pale, startled-looking yellow eyes, yellow beak and dirty-blond patches on their otherwise white plumage. 

On my way home, I took a swim at Walden, which was lovely.   

More personal musings about agriculture, or 'more serious god-awful stuff nobody wants to read'

Well, if you all can stand it, I'm going to go serious for a bit and go up a couple steps on my soapbox.  Some of you are aware that I've had an interest in sustainable agriculture since my days at Earlham College, an offshoot of my interests in ecology, conservation and food.  You may or may not be aware that I've also considered over the last couple of years of taking the time to go through an apprenticeship on a small farm.  I suppose there are many reasons that I am considering doing this, but at the bottom there are two, one negative and one positive.  

The negative is that I am unsatisfied in my current position and need change.  It is a good job and has served me well, but the last couple of years have been increasingly difficult and I fear that at some time in the near future I will have a harder and harder time doing it well.  

The positive is that I am genuinely interested in farming, in agriculture, and in related fields of conservation, food, and nutrition.  But to entertain any thought of finding a place in this world, I need experience, and I need time to learn by watching and doing.  And as I've been mulling all of this over, I've been giving serious thought to what it is about farming, about growing things, that appeals to me, and to figure out what these activities can offer me, as well as what I may offer them. 

Why does farming have such appeal to me? What is it that tugs so on my heart and on my mind? Enough to counter all the practical reservations I have: that it's economically unreasonable, that I'm too old, that I don't and never have had the energy and commitment for such an enterprise?

Farming, at its root, is about life. It is about fostering a healthy environment for other living creatures that will then help to feed you and your community. Done well, farming should maintain the biological integrity of the landscape and be an interacting part of it, all while providing a stable, varied and nutritious source of food for humanity (and possibly a few bugs, worms and birds to boot).

To get into a bit more detail, we, as a people, as a planet, are currently facing great environmental challenges, possibly catastrophic problems on both local and global levels. One factor that ties many of these problems together is loss of space and habitat to development, including agriculture. If we continue to ravage our environment, we will continue to lose important banks of ecological resources, genetic diversity and biomass, and we will eventually, I think, come to a point where our losses may begin to have cascading effects across trophic levels and bioregions to the point where the basic systems of life by which our planet operates may be in jeopardy. We must conserve, and we must conserve land.

But we need food (and shelter)! And for food, we need land. Here is the crux - how to we feed ourselves while conserving the health of the landscape? I don't think these should be separate issues, or problems to be solved by separate places, as in 'conserve the rockies' and 'grow corn in the midwest'. I believe that the healthiest solution will be to conserve land and biological resources within the same place that we grow food , and even within the same places that we live, to as great an extent as we can. To farm wisely, cultivating a wide variety of plants and animals in a patchwork landscape of settlements and wild places, where farm and woods and water and town and hopefully city all give and take from each other, will be a crucial, possbily the crucial effort in reconciling the needs of both humanity and the planet for a long-term future.

The thing that gives me greatest pause in all of this is population pressure. Despite my convictions and confidence in small-scale, sustainable agricultural practices I'm not absolutely sure that they can feed 7 billion or more people. Unfortunately, I am just as concerned that current methods of enormous monocultures driven by petroleum and chemicals will eventually collapse in the wake of soil depletion, environmental desertification, pollution and the unavailablity of essential energy resources such as oil. I would choose a slow, conscious choice towards sustainability and even economic contraction rather than unchecked growth followed by catastrophic failure and mass starvation.

 
I would like to learn more about the way farms are integrated into European society. From some recent reading I've done (in Eliot Coleman's New Organic Grower) it has been stated that most Europeans still get the bulk of their food from small farms found throughout their countries - in rural areas and on the edges of their great cities alike. If this is true, it should be a great source of hope, as Europe is a densely populated region with many large metropolitan areas. I do have my suspicions that while this may hold out for vegetables and to a lesser extent meat products, it may not be quite as accurate regarding staple grains such as wheat and corn. If you know the truth, please let me know.

These are reasons that I believe in farming, reasons that I think farming would be a good thing to be a part of and to contribute to. But farming also pulls at me in more personal, even creative ways. It appeals to my curiosity, my interest in science, my fascination with how things work. A farm is a managed ecosystem, and provides a wonderful experiment for examining the ways in which different forms of life thrive or fail, interact with each other and the elements, grow and change. Farming appeals to my love and wonder of living things, and to the enjoyment I get in the great outdoors. It appeals to my creative side, as I believe that approaching a place, a piece of land, learning from it and figuring out what and how to do with it and integrating it with your own life and needs is an essentially creative effort (of course this is basically saying that life itself is a creative endeavor - which I think is true). 

Farming appeals to my egalitarian principles. It appeals to my philosophical stance, heavily influenced by my readings of American transcendentalists, that integrating the life of the mind with the life of the body in work and in play is important. It appeals to more prosaic desires of mine, from the wish to listen to the music of crickets and frogs as the sun goes down to my love of good food. And in my most pessimistic visions of the future, where stock markets crumble and oil becomes unavailable, it provides me with the possibility of survival.

Finally, it gives me, personally, the chance for change and challenge like I've never really given myself before: to put many of my thoughts and hopes into action, to learn something completely new, and to work harder than I ever have before.

Birds Without Feathers

I'm going to put something different in here, a poem I wrote the other night while I was in a motel in southern Maine.  I was nodding off and woke up with a phrase in my head that seemed very interesting at the time - "He received his smells from new flowers..."; it seems a little odd now, but it led to the poem below.  

Birds Without Feathers

He received his smells from new flowers,

and his songs from beneath the drafts of new birds,

fresh from the Carolinas.

She,

on the other hand,

was an old lady, once,

stepping amidst the lights and nights of New York City

before a third party, a devil, dragged her

and her bags of stones and feathers

into and through the sweltering maze...

Stop!

There is more, but it's not my story;

I can't tell it without assistance.

Enter the dragon (smoke fills the hall)

It

has blue eyes

and red hair

and scales as smooth as skin.

The rhodora speaks:

"Heaven!  I knew her once, when I lived in the bustle.

I never saw but the corners of her eyes,

though when my back was turned she made faces with her thoughts.

I wonder that she was making fun of me."

Dragon: "But what about the other one?"

"He never cared about me, just my beauty,

and my crown."

But they did meet once,

in a bar,

where everybody else meets (I can barely stand to say it)

and knew each other instantly,

he from the smell of sandpipers, and she,

well,

from the mud clinging to the soles of her shoes.

That's it.  If you know what it means, let me know.  The only thing I can point to that comes from something in the fore of my head is the rhodora - there is a wonderful poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that is called "The Rhodora".  

Here is what wikipedia has to say about the rhodora:

"Rhodora is a section of subgenus Pentathera in the genus Rhododendron. It comprised two species, both deciduous shrubs native to eastern North America..."

It is a pretty flower.

Here is the Emerson poem:

The Rhodora

On being asked, Whence is the flower?

In May, when the sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose,

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

All of Summer in a Moment

The mind ebbs, the mind flows.  It disappears, reappears, and then is gone again.  It lifts, descends, and sometimes just runs on some kind of blank autopilot for hours at a time.  

I woke up disoriented and cranky this morning, with a headache and a nagging thought to make the day productive, but no natural inclination to actually do so.  I lounged, sleepy and disheveled in my messy apartment, medicating my sour mood with Star Trek until I finally forced myself to get some exercise.  

I maintain that there is nothing so consistently effective a mood enhancer as exercise, preferably regular exercise in an outdoor, if not natural, environment.  If only I could truly absorb this wisdom into my bones, I would be out the door first thing every morning.  A day is always the better for it.  But no, I am lazy, and sometimes go days without exercising.  

But today, after much internal bargaining, I finally got my hands to lace up my running shoes and I hit the pavement.  Unfortunately, I really wasn't feeling it today.  In the humidity I wilted quickly and each step hit the ground with a discouraging, flat thud.  I was sweating profusely, a heavy breakfast from two hours before felt very much with me, and the music on my ipod seemed histrionic and pretentious (Shearwater's Palo Santo - though I may still become a convert).  I forced myself along a picturesque route by the Charles river, crossed the west Watertown bridge and finally let my determination go as I came back along the north bank: I stopped running and started walking. I also pulled my headphones away from my ears.  

Thunder was rumbling in the distance and the sky was turning gray.  A cooler wind passed over me and I watched a yellow warbler fly across the path to perch in a nearby shrub.  I continued walking, listening to the ominous sounds of the heavens and watching the water flow along with my steady pace.  A part of me was disappointed with my effort, but the weather was changing and my mind was charging from the electricity in the air.  A few sprinkles came down and as I turned onto a small pedestrian bridge to cross back over to the south side the rain began to fall in earnest, big heavy drops in concert with wide rumblings of thunder and a wind that sent a cascading patter of tiny waves over the flat expanse of the river.  A group of 25 geese were floating along a verdant stretch of lily pads, unperturbed by the sudden squall, and a red-winged blackbird flew from tree to tree.  The falling rain cooled me and refreshed me. 

This was one of those moments, I guess, like with Emerson's famous eyeball: I felt suspended, disconnected, above the flowing river and between the willow trees overhanging both banks, and there was so much energy and flow and connectivity to all that I could take in, the geese and ducks floating, the blackbirds winging, the water moving over rock and weed, the nearby children excited, crying out, the wind and water moving and one with each other, all of it one and so natural, so just, so there.  

One moment constantly passes to another, but every once in a while you get one that just hangs there for an endless second.  Or maybe it really was five minutes, ten minutes; it doesn't really matter.

But my mind, of course, eventually intruded in on me and I took notice of my euphoria.  I smiled and continued on my way, this time relishing the slow pace of my walk and letting myself off the hook for my lackluster athletic effort.  The rain passed and the sun was out again within a few minutes.  At some point I put the headphones back on - I have not really warmed up to the voice of motor engines - and finished the last few blocks home, where I had the good fortune to bestow some attention on a friendly mutt before going back inside.  

That's the end of the story.  There's no real point to it, except the obvious, that the world changes from moment to moment, as do our own minds and thoughts, the good and the bad alike.  And that if a life can contain just a couple of moments like that, then I can't help but feel grateful to have be here, to have been there, to have seen and felt those things, to have watched twenty-five geese swimming along the Charles River in a summer afternoon's storm.

 

Good night, chimney swifts

This evening my orchestra, the Arlington Philharmonic, performed at the annual Arlington Pops Concert in city hall.  It's actually kind of fun, despite my generally highfalutin' tastes in orchestral music.  The program is usually chock full of various medleys, of course.  Tonight we did five: Carousel, Guys and Dolls, Henry Mancini movie favorites, Leroy Anderson Favorites, and Armed Forces theme songs.  It's a very town hall, ice cream and old folks event, though there are plenty of kids too.  It's kind of noisy, as well, which takes the pressure off of attempting to give a stellar performance.  Everybody enjoys it, and as it's the last concert before the summer break, I enjoy finishing up with a couple months of empty, long summer evenings ahead of me to look forward to.  

My favorite tradition of the pops concert, however, is watching the chimney swift spectacle.  The orchestra performs first, starting around 7:45, and after a few pieces the chorus takes over for a while.  I always wander outside during the break, where the light is usually beginning to dim as the sun sets.  Across the street from the town hall is a tall chimney which holds, year after year, a large roost of chimney swifts.  

Watching a chimney swift colony return to its roost at dusk is a wonderful little intersection of man and nature and is always a pleasure to watch.  The swifts, sometimes hundreds of them, will start returning from their wide wandering around the local area as dusk approaches.  They will fly around and about their home chimney, diving and swirling about, moving off for a last few bugs, twittering and jousting with each other, playing at returning to the chimney but pulling off at the last moment, more and more of them as the evening moves on and the sky gets darker.  They gradually tighten their wandering, clustering closer and closer around their roost; if the colony is big enough it can look like a little tornado sitting above the chimney. Still they dive at the opening and pull back; I don't know what that is all about.  It just seems playful to me.  I shouldn't get too anthropomorphic, but I just can't resist trying to imagine what might be going through their heads at that moment.  

Finally, they start dropping in, slowing the beating of their wings just a bit to an awkward flutter, slowing down and floating, simply, head first, down into the opening of the chimney in a steady stream.  Most of them follow suit very quickly, though a few of them will sometimes hold out for a few minutes, the excited children who want to stay up just a little more.  None come back out.

When it's all done, it is dark, with just a dark band of blue on the western horizon to remind us of the day that has passed.  On cue, the audience applauds as the chorus finishes its set and I return to my violin and my seat to finish the performance.

Good night!

Walden, again

I keep returning again and again to Walden Pond.  Not just physically; it is a given that on hot summer days a few hours at Walden seem like paradise, an easy and bracing balm of clear water, green trees and, these days, humanity, splashing children and local curmudgeons, sitting and swimming.  But Walden returns to my thoughts again and again, memories of times there, anticipation of future visits, thoughtful meanderings in its history, from its glacial beginnings to Thoreau's sojourns to its current status as a jewel in the Massachusetts park system.

It has had a strong presence in my journaling; I started keeping a regular journal three and a half years ago after an October visit with my father.  I bought Robert Richardson's biography of Henry David Thoreau in the park's little bookstore, went home and wrote about watching an Osprey take a nice fish from the pond's northeast corner.  Now, after a succession of cooling visits during a heat wave, I find my journaling reinvigorated as I start working through another Richardson biography, of Ralph Waldo Emerson, another tireless journal keeper, and most likely the person who inspired Thoreau to keep one (Thoreau's journal famously starts off " 'Do you keep a journal?' he said..." and it is generally assumed that 'he' is Emerson).

Today I spent a few hours at Walden, and it was as replenishing and as interesting as ever.  Though the air temperature was beastly (mid 90's), I found a spot in the shade, and the mild breeze was cooled from passing over the water.  The water itself still had a bit of its spring chill, just enough to wake you up and provide some genuine refreshment from the summer doldrums that are quickly settling in.  I swam across the narrow end and back and then sat to read for a while.  Then I took a snorkel, the standout activity of the day.  Bass, both largemouth and smallmouth, were everywhere.  I came across five or six good-sized largemouths lurking by the rocks on the bottom, and at one point I swam right through a school of 40-50 more, first-years, just babies really, hanging in the top foot of water.  They barely noticed me at all and as I splashed through their iridescent green numbers I was taken briefly back to memories of colorful schools of fish in tropical waters.  

The best, though, was a lone smallmouth bass, a big one, that followed me up and down for the entire length of my swim, some one hundred yards at least in each direction.  He would let me approach within about a foot before calmly turning away and giving his tail a gentle swish to avoid my touch, but would then turn and watch me again.  As I would start moving away, he would follow, usually no more than five feet behind and often swimming directly below me.

I wonder why he did this?  What attraction did I offer?  Was I shelter?  I kept thinking of that book Adrift about the drifting life-raft, and the rich ecology that developed around the raft over the course of a couple of months - crabs, seaweed, barnacles, fish, birds, sharks.  Was I the beginning of something like that?  Did he consider me some kind of guide to a food supply?  I did notice a couple of times I dove down to look at something on the pond floor and he scampered in behind me to nose about in the muck and leaves that I had stirred up, but I never noticed him actually eat anything.  A couple of times we ran across a largemouth that was about as big as he was and I thought he might have been spooked off, but he held his ground and kept following (once he and the largemouth actually rubbed their sides together as they examined a patch of stirred up leaves).  Only when I finally re-entered the swimming beach area where many people were splashing around did he finally move off, and I was sad, but unfortunately I cannot swim around Walden all day long.  He was a beautiful fish, and very changeable in the light of the water, sometimes showing that classic bronze-brown color and other times a deeply-contrasting pattern of green and gold on his flanks.

This happened once before during an exercise swim across the lake, when one fish followed me all the way across and back.  I find it a curious and delightful event.  Next time I go back to Walden I will look for him again.  And I believe I have named him - Thoreau.

Spider's Web and other little things

I've got a nice, friendly little spider that lives amidst the potted herbs on my porch balcony.  He (or she) has been there for three days or so, and likes to build a new web every day!  Quite an industrious fellow, like most spiders. He's very small, has a yellow body with a little black patch on its rear and dark legs.  I wonder about the tiny bugs he must catch and eat - they must be almost beyond the reach of my eyes.  I'm sure that he would have no problem finding another spot to build his webs and catch his bugs, but I'm very happy to provide him with such a productive location where I can keep tabs on all the goings on.  

My own little mini-ecology; there are little weeds with thin green leaves and purple stems coming up amidst my basil plants and I've seen some ants as well.  I keep waiting for something to flower so I can keep a lookout for pollinators; that would be exciting.  All that plus spiders and the tiny bugs that they eat, like a miniature Amazonia.  Maybe I'll see a miniature jaguar prowling along through the chives.  

Sisters and Brothers

Here are a bunch of photographs from a visit from my sisters Esme and Meghan and brother-in-law Todd.  It was a great visit!  Unfortunately, I just don't have time to write right now, and so you'll have to try and figure out what we did from the photos.  Bye!

Brian's Herb Garden Volume 2 and a picture of some turtles

Today I worked on my herb garden, which is nothing but a few small or medium-sized containers that I place on the railing of my rear entrance.  This is really the only spot that I can call mine that gets any sort of sun. And it still might be a bit shady for a couple of the choices I made, such as big-leaf Italian basil.  But who can resist basil?

I tried to vary the lineup from last year, though a couple favorites snuck back in.  As I said, I've got some basil going this year, to marry off to tomatoes later in the summer and to pair with the occasional piece of fish.  Next is the sole entry in the vegetable category, an habanero pepper plant, well-known as the 'hottest' chile pepper around, with a fruity zing.  Then a trailing bunch of creeping thyme, probably my favorite all-around herb after parsley.  This is a perennial, so if I can keep it going, I can use it next winter in roasts and soups.  Next, dill, a magical herb with fish and salads.  Eggs too.  Oregano, which I actually don't use that much but had an impulse to plant.  I'll find something to do with it.  Chives, for salads, eggs, spring pasta dishes and mushrooms on toast.  Flat-leaf parsley, for anything and everything.  Mint, for tea and tabbouleh.  Finally, a small bunch of sorrel to add a lemony bite to salads and creamy soups.  

If everything goes gangbusters, I just might make back my investment.  But it's nice to have a few living things to care for and a little kitchen garden to put a bit of earthy improvisation into my cooking habits during the summer.  

Death and the Maiden

My quartet performed last night in a small recital at my friend Joan's house.  We played Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden' string quartet, a piece he wrote near the end of his life, at a time that he probably knew that he was dying yet was still composing at a phenomenal rate, creating possibly the most beautiful and moving music of entire career.  It is a dark, turbulent piece, with short interludes of serene joy popping up here and there amidst the ongoing existential arguments of death and beauty.  It was a favorite of mine as a teenager, and I was greatly attracted to its melodramatic metaphors and almost gothic storytelling.  Later on, some of that sensibility tired on my ears, possibly through overfamiliarity, and it lost some of its attraction, but I fell in love with it again through working on it these past months.  As usual, working on a piece from the inside out gave newer, older, and deeper perspectives on this wonderful and one-of-a-kind piece of music. 

 I felt that we really gave the piece a good run for its money, in particular the frenzied last movement, in which we seemed to get caught in the cascading, out-of-control momentum perfectly, balancing just on the edge of falling apart in just the right way.  It was exhilarating.  Playing music like this, in this intimate, telepathic kind of arrangement with a small group of musicians and friends, provides...I don't know.  Something unique, important; I was going to say the greatest high of my life, but that's not quite right, and a little trite.  There's certainly nothing else quite like it, and it provides one of the few avenues to some kind of transcendent state of mind that I truly don't understand.

Unfortunately,  I have a something of a love/hate relationship with performing, and every time I get through a performance like this I wish it was more of a love/love relationship, but it's not.  Leading up to a performance, especially one of chamber music like this, difficult and exposed, I worry and fret and suffer large bouts of anxiety, yet also excitement and a visceral, unpredictable anticipation.  My stomach grumbles (shades of Charlie Brown) and I don't eat.  At performance time, my left hand shakes and my vibrato goes wild, my right hand shakes and my bow bounces, skittering across the strings of my violin.  Nonetheless, at the moment of performing, my heart leaps even as I continue to fret about my technical reaches, and I find myself giving more of myself to the music than I ever had during practice, almost effortlessly, yet with enormous expenditure of energy.  It's a strange state to be in.  And each piece, in its own different way, finds you a different zone to drift, swim, struggle and fall apart in.  Today, the day after, I was happy and relieved, still exhilarated yet tired, and sad that it was over and anticipating next season's music-making, projecting greater diligence than I showed this year (and probably more than I indeed will show next year).  

I love my quartet, and I think that the way we approach our repertoire, by working extensively on one piece at a time for a season, is very rewarding and important for the purposes of giving a good performance and really getting a good grasp of the music.  I do often wish, though, for another outlet where I could explore more music, more playing and exploring, and encounter more of those great masterpieces I've listened to and loved throughout my life.  I've still never played any of the late Beethoven quartets, I've done only one of Mozart's six that he dedicated to Haydn, none of Bartok's (though these might well be beyond me and any quartet I could ever join), only one of Shostakovich's, only a couple of Haydn's...there's such a big world of this music, so much I know and love as a listener but not a player.  I would like to get a reading quartet together, not worry about perfection, just go through music and enjoy it.  Maybe I'll work on that next year, or some year.  

The second law of thermodynamics and frustrated, abrupt endings

I just finished reading a biography of one of my favorite writers, James Tiptree Jr., called James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips.  As you can tell from the title, James Tiptree Jr. was in fact a woman, a fact she hid for several years in the seventies while writing her most important stories and carrying on a dizzying array of correspondence (as J.T.Jr.) with many other writers, editors and fans.  

A biography, of course, always tells the story of a life, and a good one places that life within the context of the subject's time and place.  A great biography lends unexpected insight and characterization into a particular milieu through the lens of the subject's life, work and thought. The John Adams biography I recently read framed the unusal opportunity that our founding fathers had to create a new government from scratch through the actions and ideas of a man who even more unusually fully undertood the unique position that he and his fellow patriots were in.  James Tiptree, Jr. explored the disquieting complexities of our modern century, from the horrors of war, the immense leaps of technology and the social battles over gender and ethnicity through the incredible, troubled life of Alice Sheldon, who was known in her youth as the first western child ever seen by the African Pygmies and grew up to be an artist, a photo-interpreter during WWII and later in the fledgling CIA, a doctor of psychology and eventually a writer of some of the most groundbreaking science fiction of the 70's.  

Her best work is all shorter works, short stories and novellas, and is exciting, confident, startling, shocking, empathetic, imaginative, detailed, fast-paced; superlatives abound.  And she provided the small science fiction community endless fodder for speculation as to who James Tiptree Jr. really was; most felt it was the pseudonym of some young stud in the intelligence field, though from her unusually insightful stories on gender there were some who suspected that he was a she (or that he was gay).  

I don't really know where I'm going with all this.  It's a great biography, read it.  Her fiction is even better, read it.  Most of her best work is collected in a collection called Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.  What I kind of wanted to talk about was the connection I felt with her while reading the book.  Ridiculous, I know.  She was so different.  From a different age and place entirely, she had a life full of travel, several wildly divergent and ambitious careers, two marriages,  a life as a woman, before modern feminism; she was brilliant, mercurial, with wild mood swings...no, I'm not like her at all. 

But I just kept coming across little things that resonated so strongly.  I'll mention three.  She was obsessed with the idea of negentropy, which is the concept of a system or process that moves against the ongoing entropy that is slowly but surely pulling the universe apart into a cold, mostly empty shell of drifting bits of matter, as elucidated in the second law of thermodynamics.  From page 186: "She began to explore a theory that could reconcile her pleasure in learning and making things with doing good for others.  If her enemy was time, she argued, then it ws also the second law of thermodynamics.  That law, sometimes called 'time's arrow," states that the universe is entropic: it tends to lose energy, become disorganized, move toward death and decay.  But earth supports a local condition of negative entropy: its life has evolved from lower to higher states of organization.  Mathematician and cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, among others, had suggested that negentropy, and perhaps life itself, could be defined as everything that adds to information or organization."  

What a concept!  At the risk (in fact certainty) of being indulgent, I'll quote from a journal entry of mine, from a couple of years ago: 

Well, apparently, I can't figure out how to cut and paste text from a word document into a blog post!  When I do it, the text I wanted appears outside of the text block, and doesn't show up if I save it.  Frustrating.  I don't have the energy to re-type all that stuff from my journal.  It's probably just as well; I should save myself the embarrassment.  And now I'm just going to stop.  I shouldn't really post this at all, but I can't stand to have written all these words and not put them up here.  Maybe I'll fix it someday after I figure out how the cut and paste thing.

Have a good day!

Cyclone Nargis

If you haven't already, please go to my sister Meghan's blog at www.meghan5m.vox.com and see her first-hand account of Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath. It must have been an incredible experience, and of course is still not over as the country tries to get back on its feet and deal with the ongoing, catastrophic effects of the storm. Keep the people of Myanmar in your thoughts and prayers!

INFP - What, me worry?

Some of you may be familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality types, derived, I believe, from theories of Carl Jung. There are sixteen different types, based on four preferences that each individual's personality corresponds to - Extroverson/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling and Judging/Perceiving - and everybody ends up with a four-letter code for their personality type, such as INTP, ESFJ, etc.

I've always been curious about this system, if slightly skeptical, and have taken numerous tests out of books or through the internet over the years. I invariably end up coming out INFP: Introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. Stated baldly like that, it seems odd and not that accurate, but most of the more lengthy descriptions of that type that I've read have had more than one grain of truth, as best that I can tell by looking at myself.

Anyway, I don't want to go into it at any real length, and you can easily read up on this stuff at wikipedia or any number of other sites if you wish. But I wanted to comment on one thing I read lately that I found interesting, which pertains to the extrovert/introvert dichotomy. I've spent a lot of thought on this over the years, wondering at how different people can be in this way and why, and how little, sometimes, the extrovert understands the introvert and vice versa. They're almost like two different species. Speaking as a serious introvert, I'm often struck by how extroverted friends of mine will see other introverts as cold, aloof and/or arrogant, while I just see them as shy. And sometimes I'll see an outgoing person as an almost pathological busybody, yet they're most likely just being friendly and inclusive.

What I read recently characterized this dichotomy in terms of energy gain and loss, which totally made sense to me and seemed true to my experience. To explain further, extroverts gain energy from action and interaction, whereas introverts expend energy during action and interaction. Speaking again as an introvert, this doesn't mean that there are no rewards or pleasures in social interaction, just that it always has a cost in energy: it is tiring, and if it involves a lot of heavy emotional lifting and decicion-making, can be nearly debilitating. From personal experience, I can say that I've rarely walked away from a social engagement at the end of an evening, even one that I enjoyed very much, without a sense of relief that I was finally going home and back to the space in my own head. And in extended stretches of activity, during holidays and such, I need regular breaks of down time with a book or a solitary walk to keep my sanity and recharge. I've often envied those who don't have such issues, who so easily embrace or look for whatever social interaction might come their way or be available, and have wondered that if I could just persuade myself to do more of it I could reap great rewards - girlfriends, career opportunities, etc. And it might be so. The energy expenditure either/or might be a little simplistic as an explanation, and indeed sometimes (despite my previous statements) I can go either way myself, but it also goes a long way towards explaining how people can be so different in this way, categorizing it as less of a simple preference or sliding range of attitudes and as more of a fundamental difference in how we process information and experience.

I'm not trying to make excuses (maybe I am just a little bit - I do feel guilty and defensive of my solitary nature from time to time, and I do think I hurt people on occasion with my inattention), and I do think people can change in very fundamental ways, through perseverence and mindfulness and experience, but, well, it's an interesting idea.

The Musical Chill

I've been reading Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, for the last week or so, and enjoying it very much. It's an engaging, well-written, well-researched survey of classical music and musicians of the 20th century, and it gives a lot of insight and perspective into a lot of thorny, forbidding music. Nobody, of course, composes in a vacuum, and everybody is coming from somewhere. I've been a pretty avid explorer of this stuff for a long time, and many of my favorite pieces of music are difficult works by fellows such as Ives, Bartok, Webern, Ligeti, Schoenberg, etc, though I will readily admit that Mozart and Beethoven have a stronger hold on my heart. I am not a scholar, and the structural logic of these works usually escapes me, and so it takes a lot of effort and repeated listenings to really get a hold on music of that density. But I enjoy it; I really do. And lately, in concert with my readings, I've been taking pieces and listening to them again, carefully, and getting a lot out of them, maybe more than I have in the past. Maybe it's just the slow process of my ears and my brain opening a little bit more every year, maybe it's the synergy between the music and my readings, maybe it's the slow accumulation of repeat hearings, maybe it's all of the above. For somebody who loves stories as I do, the perspective you get learning about the lives of the musicians and the genesis and development of the art is invaluable. And the stories mirror the stories of the century - Shostakovich's struggle with Stalinism, Strauss' conflicted complacency within Nazi Germany, Copland's populist front during the New Deal and WWII America, Schoenberg's revolutions at the dawn of the century. In case you're curious, some pieces I've revisited lately in this context: Schoenberg's String Trio, Berg's Lyric Suite, Shostakovich's 5th Symphony, Stravinsky's Les Noces and L'Histoire du Soldat, Ruggles Sun-Treader.

One thing that the author mentioned briefly in passing that has grabbed my attention is the subject of what he calls the musical chill, when you experience a physical tremor that runs down the spine and stands hair on end while listening to music. He references a scientist named Jaak Panskepp who has researched this phenomenon, trying to figure out what causes it, both in a physiological sense but also what kind of music starts it off. Here's a quote from Mr. Ross's excellent blog www.therestisnoise.com: "Panskepp says that music in which a solo instrument steps in front of a softer background is especially prone to cause this effect. He compares such moments to “the separation call of young animals, the primal cry of despair to signal caretakers to exhibit social care and attention.” I immediately thought of the Largo of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, in which solo winds sing out plaintive motifs over a backdrop of tremolando strings. An entire nation is crying for its mother in the night." To test this out, yesterday I put this piece of music on my stereo and paid particular attention to the largo; it is a wonderful piece of music but I didn't experience the chill.

The musical chill has always fascinated me, and I have certainly experienced it many times. In a way it is an exagerrated demonstration of what is so mysterious and unexplainable about music, which is why it appeals to us at all. I know that theories abound, and I'm sure most of them have merit, but they all still seem light years from telling us why such an arcane art form that seems to have no practical contribution to our survival can take on such profound meaning and have such a deep emotional effect on so many people, to the point where we can experience a shivering moment almost akin to sexual release. This has gotten me thinking about what music causes this phenomenon in myself, and immediately two things spring immediately to mind: first, the passage in Mozart's Don Giovanni, presaged in the overture and then appearing with the Commendatore near the end, where the strings play the rustling, rising sequence of scales to accompany that ghostly, powerful presence. Second, the brassy apotheosis about two-thirds of the way through the first movement of Sibelius' second symphony. The thing that really amazes me about these examples is that they do it to me every time. I don't know if I've ever listened to either of those passages and not had a shiver run down my spine, as if the response has been etched in my DNA.

I'm going to keep thinking about this and try and remember other pieces of music that do this for me. And, actually, it's been spurring some other thoughts of how I might use this concept in some embrionic writing ideas I have, so if you can think of any pieces of music that produce this 'musical chill' on you, I'd love to hear about it, either in the comments or in an email to bckenney@hotmail.com. Fascinating stuff.

Eating and Reading

Last week I resolved to stop reading while eating. I had some kind of buried thought that it wouldn't be that easy to do, as it has been a lifelong habit of mine, but it's been much harder than I imagined.

Why do this at all? you might ask. No real reason beyond just trying to be more mindful in my daily life. I've done some basic mindfulness meditation here and there (of the vipassana tradition) and have found it to be very helpful, and have always wanted to use the practice a bit more in normal, habitual life outside of sitting down for a twenty-thirty minute session. And food and eating is very important to me, something I give a lot of thought and energy to.

One reason I thought it might not be too hard is that I often find myself, somewhat comically, struggling with my book, trying to keep it open with one hand while I try to eat with the other, putting it down a moment and losing my place, fumbling clumsily with my food, trying to saw through a piece of vegetable with a fork...it didn't seem like it would be hard to give that up. Plus, I would often realize that I'd been reading virtually the same paragraph the entire time, meanwhile barely noticing the food I was eating. I wasn't really aware of either the food I was eating or the book I was reading.

And I think it would be good to train myself not to obsessively keep my mind going with some sort of stimulation constantly. But there's the rub! It's agony. If I sit down to breakfast, alone, and I don't have a book at hand, my mind goes a little nutso. If I treat myself to a lunch out on my day off and forget to bring something to read, it seems like torture, and I feel naked. It's such a firmly ingrained habit that I've mostly forgotten about my resolution this last week, almost every time I sit down to eat, catching myself as I start cleaning up my dishes.

It's no big deal, I suppose, and thus far my lack of resolution has been mostly humorous, but I'm going to keep trying. Of course, my subconscious keeps bringing up one of my favorite little lessons I learned once, which goes something like this: At a meditation center, two students noticed that their teacher was sitting at breakfast and reading the paper. Remembering that he often instructed them "When eating, just eat! When reading, just read!", they went up to him and asked him why he was doing both at the same time. He looked at them and said "When eating and reading, just eat and read!" I suppose it's no surprise that I like that story, as it provides some justification for one of my favorite pastimes. But I think the deeper message is not to be dogmatic about these instructions, or anything else by extension, which is a very valuable lesson, I believe.

A palm-reading experience from my youth

When I was twenty-three years old, just a year out of college, I worked as a 'teacher/naturalist' for an overnight camp and school called Nature's Classroom northeast of Columbus, Ohio. Schools would come to our site and spend between three and five days doing all sorts of crunchy outdoor nature stuff: building rope bridges and shelters, hiking, learning about wild edibles and birds and turtles and the web of life.  There were always chaperones, teachers and parents who came along as well to help manage the kids.  

One time one of the parents told the staff that she was learning to read palms from a friend of hers and would like to practice on us if we were agreeable.  We were, though we were mostly skeptical, me included, though I'm sure we were polite enough not to be rude about it.  But I'm sure we were also all curious.  

The other day I was going through a few personal papers I had stashed away and came across a piece of paper where I had written down what I had been told during my reading.  I remember being quite surprised and impressed with what she had told me.  In fact, at the time I was almost unnerved.  There was nothing in it that was truly overwhelming, nothing where I thought 'there's no way she could possibly know that about me' or anything like that, but nonetheless I was startled at what she read in my character and person after having met me maybe five minutes before and taking a brief look at my hand.  Most of what she said was more in the nature of describing me and my personality than in making predictions of the future or advice, though there was a little bit of that.  I ultimately decided that she was simply a very perceptive person, and of course there are people like that in the world.  

In any case, I've never really let go of what she said that day, and I've never forgotten the experience.  But it was interesting to actually see what I scribbled down regarding the session right after I was done with it, and I'd like to share it now with you for your curiosity and amusement, with commentary from my current-day incarnation.

She told me that I was:

Very sensitive  [I think this is true, sometimes painfully so, especially to emotional conflict]

Very nurturing  [partly true, but I can also be very self-involved and selfish with my time]

Very idealistic [definitely true, though I am not quite the crusader I once was]

and a little bit clairvoyant [???  Doesn't everybody think they're a little clairvoyant?  We've all had moments when we know what somebody is about to say or are thinking the same things and think it's too much of a coincidence - still it was gratifying in some strange way to hear this stranger say it]

She told me that I would make a good father.  [For what it's worth, I think this is true, but it seems to be a very slow boat]

She said that I think very much, very often, in many different and unusual tangents. [This is also true, I think, sometimes distressingly so, as I can't quiet my mind or focus on what I want or need to, and am often kept awake from the restless cascade of thoughts]

My fate line is to find my center, who I am, as my life and soul line are linked.  [Not sure what this means, but if it means that I would spend a lot of time thinking about who I am, what I want from life, what things are important to me, without much in the way of productive results, spot on]

Regarding my Love line,  I was told very matter-of-factly that I was in love.  [And I very much was so at the time. I was amazed that she said this.  Now I think it must have been obvious in everything about me and how I carried myself at that time, and an easy call]

 I was also told that I would have an intense, very strong, compatible marriage, passionate and perfect, until death do us part, and that it would take much time and thought and decision before I got there.  [This of course, was a prediction, and has not come true yet, but if it does, the part about it taking a long time and being a sometimes difficult process is a grand slam]

She said that I prefer to be a worker to a leader.  [True: I am not comfortable in leadership roles.  However, I also very much dislike abandoning my freedom and self-will to anybody else, and can get surprising defensive when I am asked to do things that I am not comfortable doing.  Ideally, I like to work in small groups of creative equals, or alone on personal projects]

Power is not of much concern to me.  [Absolutely true.  Otherwise I'd be president]

That's all she said, or at least all I wrote down.  

Still not sure what to make of the whole thing after all these years (15 years ago!!!)

Have a great day!

Global warming - a moot point?

Okay, here's my rant of the moment. As a card-carrying member of the left-leaning environmental movement, I believe in global warming. I believe that it is happening. I believe that it will have a profound effect on the way of life of many, if not most, people around the globe. These will often be difficult, if not disastrous, changes. I believe that the practices of human beings over the last couple of hundred years have contributed to global warming. I also believe that the Earth has climate cycles of its own as well, and we are probably in one of those, and so I think global warming has many factors and variables which will be completely impossible to fully parse. I believe that trying to figure out who's to blame, us or the planet, is probably a pointless exercise.

Most likely, whoever's to blame, we are well into the cycle and would spend our time much better trying to figure out what actually is going to happen and how we can best deal with it. You may wonder if this means that I don't care about reducing our carbon emissions. In answer, I think reducing our carbon emissions and our use of oil is probably the most important thing we need to do right now. I just think that global warming is not the most important reason. Our planet is starting to run out of oil, and we need to start using less of it because eventually we will need to learn how to get by without using it at all. It would be well worth our while to try and figure this out now while we still have oil to fall back upon, than to consume the rest of it in great big gulps over the next few decades and then go cold turkey. Barring a miraculous technological development, that would mean catastrophe. And if we cut back now, the oil will be there for us longer.

Counting on a new energy technology coming through in the clutch is very risky, and I personally don't think it's going to happen, at least not on any level that will replace the type of growth our civilization has been capable of the last century because of our exploitation of cheap, abundant oil. I think that within five years we'll be paying three times as much as we are right now for oil. Than in itself would mean huge shock waves for every economy on Earth. And almost all of our potential other energy sources depend heavily on oil for their entire infrastructure, development and construction. We use fertilizers and pesticides derived from petroleum products in order to grow corn for bio-fuels.

We need to use less oil, to learn how to do things without it. This will mean a lowering of our standards of living as we currently understand them. But if we consciously choose to take these things upon us, thoughtfully and with good intentions, we may find silver linings here and there. I'm in the lucky position of living only three miles from where I work. However, until recently I have rarely walked or biked, choosing instead to drive, which takes less than fifteen minutes. But a month ago I started walking regularly. It takes me fifty minutes unless I really hustle. I listen to music or birdwatch or just think about things, and I get a decent piece of exercise. Sometimes I walk part of the way with friends I work with who don't own cars and have enjoyable conversations with them. I feel good when I get home and sleep better in the evening. Biking only takes about five minutes longer than driving, and is also good exercise.

I'm no saint, and I don't expect to walk every day, maybe not most days. But two or three days a week is something, and all in all, more enjoyable than being in my car. I'm glad I live somewhere that this is possible.

Okay, I'll stop now. I apologize for getting up on the soapbox and preaching, but I really think this is something we're all going to have to deal with, sooner than we think. Hopefully not sooner than I think, because I think it's coming soon.