un-knowing, and putting the guidebooks down

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.