Last night I mistook buttercups for fireflies, in the gray
twilight in the meadow. Bright despite approaching dark, my mind drew an
unexpected map. This error was error not in being, but only in light and
unmattering category. Mistaken sight is sight, and often illuminating (this is
the work of metaphor, to complicate or cross the assumptions of regularly worn
pathways, to undo habit and inspire seeing). In early May I took up my field guides and binoculars again,
and for a week or so I did not go anywhere without them. There is so much to
find and file, to seek and name. Quickly, though, I started to leave them
behind.
The paradox of knowing and understanding is cloudy. This
past year I’ve read and written less than I have in a very long time. Perhaps
it’s simple dormancy, but there’s something inside that wishes to shed instead of add. The arc of learning is long, and the stages are hard to see except
from a distance.
Some of the best birding advice I’ve read was,
interestingly, to put down the books and just keep looking. There are times on
walks that I wish I knew less, despite the relative little I know. To sink into
presence, to still the wheeling of mental classification, which requires
distance from the current phenomenon in order to plumb my memory stores.
Like the Christmas tree. Glasses on, the details of the
ornaments and individual lights are clear, each readily identifiable. Glasses
off, it becomes a radiating whole, boundaries are let go and the whole merry
thing sings to you at once.
Besides the bliss ignorance of, say, invasive species would
bring, I often wish I could blur the scenes I walk through in order to see more
clearly. To stand like the cottonwood, who cannot name a warbler, its toes in
the riverbank and arms in the sun. To have the wind empty me of what is
inconsequential. Leaving space, becoming the reed who sings not of beauty but is sung through, without name.
