Alexandersmap

    Category: Wildlife

    • See What Unfolds

      The Barred Owls have returned. There is a mating pair that moves through the trees, hooting it up to check in on each other while they each hunted in different places in the woods surrounding us. I’m told that Barred Owls hunt independent of each other, eat what they eat and catch up again later. “So how was work today?” “Fine, had hoped for a baby bunny but only caught a field mouse.” Romantic stuff.

      Also developing in the neighborhood, a large beaver has moved in to the stream, wading about just after dusk above the bridge. It’s been a few years since I’d seen a beaver in the stream, and I’m wondering if the drought had dried up its previous nest. Beaver will move on when their food source is used up, not unlike the owls. We’ve all got to eat. While the owls are big talkers, the beaver works in silence most of the time.

      We’re seeing yet another bumper crop of acorns this year, which explains the abundance of animals that feed on them moving back into the neighborhood (along with the animals that feed on the feeding animals). It’s been a hot dry summer after a wet spring. I wonder what that means for the fall foliage this autumn, but I don’t wonder enough to look it up. We all have the world at our fingertips, don’t we? We ought to let a few things simply unfold before us just to keep the magic in our lives.

      I’m finally reading a paperback version of Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen, based entirely on the recommendation of Rainer Maria Rilke, mind you. I’m at a point in my life when I look around and find most talking heads haven’t got much to add to the conversation, so I dig deeper. Don’t just stop with the work of an author or poet or artist—seek out the works that influenced them. What challenges and transforms us, collectively?

      Today’s world is unfolding exactly as I anticipated when the elections went the way they went a year ago. We are where we are because people believe what they want to believe, and feel emboldened to behave the way they behave because others do it so it must be okay. We too may choose how to react in such times. How do we want to navigate this world that we live in?

      My advice, since you’ve read this far, is to seek out the timeless over the trend whenever possible. Things will come and go in a lifetime. We mustn’t forget that the lifetime in question is ours. We must do the best we can with what unfolds before us. There is more to this world than the madness swirling noisily on the platforms of choice. Go deeper and see what unfolds.

    • The Ecstasy

      “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
      This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”
      — Jack London, The Call of the Wild

      I witnessed the ecstasy on the face of a two year old mutt with mascara eyes turned shrewd hunter. My carefully-planted garden was no match for the hunter, nor was the fence—designed to keep rabbits out but not the chipmunks, and not the joyful leap of youthful hunter, straining after the food that was alive. And so I scolded her without success. I barred entry only to have her run to the other side. And finally I brought her in, if only as a reprieve until the fence could be raised.

      The ecstasy isn’t something we’re aware of nearly enough when we’re riding that high. When we’re in peak form it feels like it will always will be so, if we ponder such things at all. Nowadays I hunt for moments in the zone, where I may perform at my personal peak, striving for arete even as I understand how evasive that level of personal excellence will always be. The writing offers a taste of that hunter’s zeal, and sometimes work offers it too. And I realized, placing fence pieces atop the garden fence between paragraphs of a blog post, that the garden has offered its own version of complete forgetfulness. At least before it was shredded by youthful vigor.