An “Island” Larger than Land

Some of my most delightful opportunities to see the other-worldliness of Nature have been when I've gone to certain restaurants.  No, it was not the samples of Homo sapiens I was watching (although people-watching can be interesting too).  Instead, these were restaurants that had a saltwater aquarium on display for the entertainment of customers.

After dining, I spend time peering into this saltwater world, watching for movement so that I can spot the life-forms other than the obvious fish.  Did I as a child think of all animals as being symmetrical with a right and left side?  Here, in this salt-water world, that idea is disproved. Here, circular is the game.  Circularity allows creatures that have no obvious face to be sensitive to the world in a full 360-degree perimeter.

I spot a sea anemone, its innumerable tiny arms ready to grab some passing prey.  Most camouflaged is the coral, which has taken evolution's advice to look like a rock most seriously, building its own rock-like castle for a colony of nearly microscopic beings to share.  Eventually, I have to leave this bit of ocean world trapped behind glass and come back to our human world of restaurant and city.

Of course, I have a number of times gone to the beach.  But those seashells strewn on the sand are only stone monuments to the dead, the living organisms that once inhabited them having passed on.  Those seashells are merely hints of the life that lives out beyond the water's edge.  They are only inanimate fragments hinting of the life beyond.

I did once get a closer glimpse into ocean life than an aquarium provides when my wife and I visited the tide pools on the Pacific coast of Olympic Natl. Park.  Roaming the beach, we stopped at each small depression of sand that held some temporarily trapped seawater with living inhabitants.  The best find were tiny starfish with five 1-inch arms.  However, as we examined the life-forms in the tide pools, we knew they would soon be covered over with the rising tide, thus being taken back into their rightful ocean home.

The oceans on this planet are to me something like giant tide pools, pocketed away from our life here on land.  The oceans are like isolated islands of life, even though they cover a greater area of the Earth's surface than does land.

Locked away in their own world of life, the oceans whisper to me some message of eternity for a reason I cannot quite explain.  However, Rachel Carson heard, I think, the same whisper when she wrote:  "To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides... is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.  These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean .... They continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man's kingdoms rise and fall."

~~~

How has it felt to you to go to a beach or the ocean?

(The Carson quote is from Under the Sea Wind, © 1941.)

Billboard Birds

In the shopping-center parking lot outside the family-run donut shop near where I live, there is a large billboard.  The sign stands three stories up on a massive pole.  To the pigeons who sit atop the large billboard in the morning, the sign has no purpose as an advertisement.  To them, it is a launching pad for their morning practice expeditions.

When I occasionally have coffee at the donut shop, I have a full view of the sign through the large plate-glass window.  A couple dozen of the pigeons will start out on the top of the double-faced billboard soon after sunrise, probably having roosted there during the night.

Although we city-dwellers call them "pigeons," I know they are, to ornithologists, descendants of "rock doves". The species has readily adjusted to city life because their ancient ancestors evolved to survive and nest on the narrow ledges of rocky cliffs.

Periodically, a large group of the billboard birds will spring off the sign, taking a brief practice flight to test either the day's air or their wings.  As they fly out and back, they swirl into a large horizontal wheel, slightly tilted, silhouetted against the light sky.

When I get back home, I think I'll get out the bird guide.  No so much to read about the birds as to leaf through the book's photographs so that I might get a close-up look at the birds' colorations, which I cannot make out at a distance.  So that I might enjoy the polished-stone smoothness of the rock dove's wings when folded back.

I hope my own day will be as smooth as the circular sweep of those pigeons in flight.  And maybe somebody will experience some beauty through something I do today -- some beauty I cannot so easily see in myself.

As my mind shifts to thoughts about myself, lines from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke come to my mind.  The lines, I know, are prompted by my seeing that horizontal circle the birds made in flight as they prepared themselves for their journey further out into the world.  Rilke wrote:

"I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world....

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?"

~ ~ ~

What memories of birds do you have that you would like to hold onto?

(The lines by Rainer Maria Rilke are from his Book of Hours,
 published in 1905, trans. by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy, © 1996.)