Turning Our Brains to Birds

In the book To Kill a Mockingbird (adapted into a movie). Atticus Finch tells his children that they are allowed to shoot some birds with their air-rifles, but that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."  That directive resembles many laws in the U.S. when it was a rural society. Shooting birds such as crows in defense of one's crops was allowed, but killing "songbirds" (such as the versatile, melodious mockingbird) was prohibited.

Fortunately, birds have not been so discriminatory toward the human race.  They have blessed us in many ways, whether or not their calls have been labeled "songs" by us.

Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds (based on the Daphne du Maurier book) is an unforgettable movie in which birds attack humans for undetermined reasons.  The trailer for the movie, instead of showing frightening clips from the film, presented Hitchcock himself drolly giving a mock lecture about the history of the bird-human relationship.   As he speaks, Hitchcock casually picks up a quill pen, letting the viewer make the connection to our use of birds.  He then escalates from picking up a hat with a feather to picking up a hat with an entire stuffed bird decorating it.  Finally, he sits down at a dining table with an entire roasted chicken before him.  Throughout the trailer, his "lecture" feigns a naive innocence, wondering why birds, would ever be unappreciative of us humans.

A Pheasant and
a Bird Called Tabut
(1717  C.E.)

I was once given an insight into how critical birds have been for some cultures.  I found myself in a conversation with a group of people comparing their families' plans for the upcoming Thanksgiving.  Most people were opting for turkey, but a few had in the past sometimes eaten chicken instead.  One person then asked a member of the group who had been silent -- an immigrant from Haiti -- what kind of birds his family had eaten in Haiti.  His unhesitating and quite earnest reply was, "Any kind we could catch."  His reply revealed how, for some people living in poverty, birds have been life-savers.

Today, in highly technological societies, almost all the birds we eat are domesticated animals (which we distinguish by calling them "fowl" or "poultry.")  We virtually never see them when they are alive, even as the protein from their bodies gives life to our own bodies.

Despite that disconnect, there might be a way that the living birds singing all around us can add more life to our spirits.  That way is captured by Lisel Mueller in her poem "Why I Need the Birds."  Mueller imagines birds with their songs as traveling ahead of her throughout the day as they follow the arc of the sun.  Part of the poem reads:

"... the birds, leading

their own discreet lives

of hunger and watchfulness,

are with me all the way...."

~~~

Do you ever hear the songs of birds during the course of your day?  When?

(The photograph of the manuscript is used under a Creative Commons license,
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, by the Walters Art Museum.)
(Mueller's complete poem can be read on-line at this external link:  "Why I Need the Birds".) 

A View Without a Price Tag

The two things I remember most about the incident are a color and the movement of the people.

The color was beautiful and intense -- a pinkish, slightly purplish red.  I had never seen a sunset in which the color was more vivid.  Nor a sunset that covered such a vast portion of sky as this one did.  It felt as if it filled the entire western half of heaven.

The other thing I remember about the incident is the people.  I saw them silhouetted against the sky.  There were at least a dozen of them, and they were walking.

But here is what struck me:  Not a single person paused or even turned their head to look at the sunset.  They were instead all intent on their shopping expeditions as they walked from their vehicles to the mall, or from the mall back to their vehicles in the parking lot.  To all of them, it was if this gorgeous sunset -- a surge of redness with rippling clouds -- simply did not exist.  I do not mean to judge the people; I do not know the details of their shopping errands.  But I felt as if they were missing something that was more valuable than what is usually in most of our shopping bags.

Our society in the U.S. today seems more and more to tag us as consumers.  We may be hopelessly divided along Democrat-Republican lines, but we all shop.  Even during a recession, a question frequently asked on the news is whether or not we have begun shopping more again so as to stimulate the economy.

However, there seems to me to be a tension between basing one's sense of self on the ability to buy more desirable products, and placing ones trust and sense of wonder upon a divine Power that was around before there was human civilization.  This is why I am revived by turning my attention to Nature.

garden at
Wordsworth's childhood home

The poet William Wordsworth detected the negative connection between consumerism and an attention to Nature when, in his poem "The World Is Too Much With Us" he wrote:

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours."

Some of my happiest childhood memories are not of being in a shopping mall, but instead sitting with my family on a high lookout in Madison, Wisconsin, watching the sun slowly set.   Simply doing that provided something valuable my parents could never have bought.

~~~

Do you have a childhood memory of Nature?  Do you think there is a relationship between our society's attitudes towards Nature and toward consumer goods?

(To read Wordsworth's complete poem,

 click here: "The World Is Too Much With Us")

I’m Not a Car

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside,

 somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God.  

Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and

 that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature."

It's not that remarkable a statement.  What makes it so remarkable, and poignant, is knowing whose words they are:  They are words from The Diary of Anne Frank.  They are the words of a teenage girl who would never be able to go freely outside again, her Jewish family having hidden themselves behind an upstairs wall in a neighbor's house so that the Nazi's would not arrest, imprison, and execute them.

The family chose to try to escape death by imprisoning themselves -- by forcing themselves to never go outside.  Anne Frank's diary entry, however, expressed how deadly it was to the human spirit not to be able to go outdoors.  No -- that's not quite what she has done.  She has not expressed it in negative terms but in positive terms!  Her words are not a lament but instead a celebration of the wonderful benefits that can result from going outside.

Unfortunately, many U.S. cities today are not as congenial to the restoration of the spirit Frank describes as they might be.  (The twentieth-century author Albert Camus once complained that he would feel at home in the city if he were a car.)  Some cities are trying to make improvements, however, under pressure from joggers, walkers, bikers, and people with dogs, which rejoice even more in the word "out."

outside Franks' hiding place today

But what will I find when I do go out?  What will I do, and see, and think about as I take a walk? Will my mind still be chewing on the worries I had indoors?  Will I be focused just on the concrete and cars, or will I take time to look about and see a bush blooming or a bird flying up into a tree?

Will simply taking a walk be sufficient to cure what ails me?  Will a walk be enough to enrich me?  Or do I maybe need to find a place where I can quietly sit in order, as Anne Frank says, to be "quite alone with the heavens, nature and God... amidst the simple beauty of nature"?

Yes, we do need an awareness of Nature for our spirits to be fully enriched.  Because, as the environmentalist Bill McKibben observed:

"We live, all of a sudden, in an Astroturf world, 

and though an Astroturf world may have a God, 

he can’t speak through the grass, 

or even be silent through it and let us hear."

~~~

Do you have a favorite place to be outside?  What is it like?

(The Frank quotation is from  The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, © 1972.)

(The McKibben quotation is from The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben, © 1989.)
(The second photograph is used under a GNU Free Documentation License.)

“What life in itself can do”

For as many years as my wife and I have had a backyard, we've had squirrels in it.  Among the entertainments I indulge in (reading, viewing a few PBS shows), watching those squirrels through my window rates high up on my list.  My wife and I keep a large dish of water on a low stand outside on the deck so that birds will always have water.  That water brings doves and sparrows and blue jays.  It also occasionally brings a neighborhood cat that sometimes lies beside the dish, I suppose dreaming that the birds will return (as if they could not see a cat lying there).  The squirrels also take an interest in that water dish.  But my hunch is that they would come out of their strong curiosity, even if we never put out water.

The squirrels rarely approach the deck directly.  (Only once or twice have I seen one cautiously come across the lawn.)  Instead, they navigate a series of trampolines and trapezes that even the creator of Cirque du Soleil would be envious of.  My first clue that a squirrel will be approaching is when a branch of the fruit tree near the back fence suddenly bends down and springs back up. That isolated movement in a backyard otherwise motionless alerts me to the drama that is about to unfold. The next step of the squirrel's journey is farther up the fruit tree, even if the squirrel's final destination is the deck on the ground further away.  After ascending the fruit tree's branches like a trapeze artist climbing toward the top of a circus tent, the squirrel will leap across into an even larger Chinese elm.  Then it will negotiate along the elm's scaffolding in preparation for a bit of high-wire performance:  a leap onto the power line that slants downward from the telephone pole to our house.  After briefly balancing on the high-wire, it is onward to a second elm tree right beside the deck.  The final piece of circus acrobatics is a descent down the trunk of that elm tree, not as a human might, but instead going down head first.

Audubon print

That final reverse-position stunt is made possible by a feature of anatomy that would make the cat envious.  Namely, evolution has gifted squirrels with the ability to position two claws toward the rear, making them able to hang onto a tree trunk even when head downward in order to watch out for predators on the ground.  It is the absence of such an ability in cats that explains cats getting "stuck" in trees -- able to safely climb up but not safely down. You will never hear about someone having to get a ladder to rescue a squirrel out of a tree.

The agility of squirrels exemplified in that squirrel's complex navigation to our deck is what makes squirrels the bane of people who have bird-feeders.  It also encourages human inventiveness in struggling to build a squirrel-proof feeder:  A never-ending escalation of two kinds of ingenuity.

As for me, as I watch out my window, I feel not only entertained but also enlivened by the experience.  On a day that seems drab or too challenging, the squirrels' antics give me a bit of extra life.  I think the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart knew something about this when he said that if he were in a desert with no other human around, he "would like to have at least a living animal at my side to comfort me."  He said it would comfort him because, as he put it:

"This is what life in itself can do."

~~~

Have you ever enjoyed just sitting and watching an animal "do its own thing"?  When?

(The Eckhart quoted can be found in the theologian

Sallie McFague's book The Body of God, © 1993, p. 98.)

A Plant that Lost Its Social Status

When I was a child, there were two things my mother was most likely to comment upon when she looked out the window into our backyard.  One was when she spotted a cardinal, a hopeful sign that cardinals might be nesting nearby.  The second thing she would frequently comment upon was when she noticed a new bright dandelion flower that seemed to have suddenly appeared in the grass.  The cardinals would never allow me to approach and look at them close up.  But the dandelion flowers would.

My sister, the neighborhood kids, and I would take greater delight in the puffball that would later appear from such a flower.  The ball seemed like a toy (of a kind that no human could have ever constructed).  We were fascinated by its perfectly spherical shape made of delicate hairs so lightly attached that we could blow them off the stem.  As we watched the hairs with their tiny seeds float away, seemingly carefree in the breeze, we children had no concern at all that we might have been increasing the labor of some adults trying to weed their lawns.

The dandelion flower's ability to release to the lightest breeze its feathered seeds (as many as 50 per flower) is part of the larger story of how the dandelion has spread across the planet Earth.  The other key to understanding dandelion history is realizing that for most of its history the dandelion was not considered to be a weed. Instead, it was thought to be one of the most important and versatile gifts that Nature provided to humankind.

Going back just a little over a century, we can get one clue to the dandelion's usefulness in an 1888 U.S. Formulary of medicine.  A full 12 of the 435 prescriptions listed included an ingredient from the dandelion plant.  Although the dandelion-human connection had begun centuries earlier in Europe, by 1800 the plant had reached the Pacific coast of the U.S.  The plant had been carried westward by European pioneers and by winds propelling its puffball's seeds.  (It would eventually get to Japan.)

Over the past few decades, many writers on spirituality have been excited to discover the rich tradition of prayers and thought of the Celtic Christians.  Researchers have also found in Celtic history many references to dandelions, an indication of the roles the plant played in culture throughout Europe.  Its primary uses were as a diuretic and as a vegetable.  Because of its deeply-notched leaves, the plant (which had an ancestry of many millions of years behind it) was honored with the name "dandelion" from the Old French words for "lion's teeth."

detail of painting
by Richard Mauch, 1921

The dandelion's involvement with human society is demonstrated in its being mentioned in literature as diverse as that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thoreau, George Eliot, and Beatrix Potter. By the 20th century, however, medicines and diets had changed, and dandelion greens came to be eaten mostly by the poor who had to stretch their food budget with a free, found vegetable. In the U.S. and some other countries, the dandelion has now mostly returned to its former life as a vagabond, blown about by the wind.

~~~

Do you have any memories about dandelions?

(The photograph of the yellow flower is by Arcanewizard

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)