Tuning Up

Think of this as one of those tune up runs, when you haven't been running. Thoughts unspoken, unwritten, seem to pile up, turn in on themselves, get cramped up. Thoughts need to stretch out on a page, screen, become words, and let new ones step up.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...," I have had those lines from Yeats in my head. He goes on:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

But revelations aren't so easy to come by. At our best we don't know what we're doing; at our worst we do it madly anyway. How many of us are lucky enough to find and recognize those things, people, that we can hold on to; centres that hold?

The writer who has been most on my mind of late is C.D. Wright. She is on the short list of my favorite writers, but in a span that lost Lemmy of Motorhead fame, David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Grizzly Adams, Wright's death is relegated to New Yorker postscripts and Arkansas retrospectives. Her words are back roads rural, gritty and high-minded, deep and soaring, sexual and erotic, fragmented and confusing. She is one of the writers who taught me that you can put words and thoughts together that you didn't think made sense together, in the gumbo of language and life, and they can touch someone deeply. Her words:

My first words--I've been told--were obscene. My highchair was handed-down and painted over white. I remember the hard heels of my white shoes chipping at the paint of the rung... Throughout my childhood I was knife-sharp and aquatic in sunlight. I read.

I didn't read. That came much later for me. But I play back childhood memories frequently, collaging them with new experiences into this morphing, changing, yet constant self.

Whew, glad to get that shit out. If I don't run or write, it's easy to go bat-shit crazy in the between time. And I've been wrestling with some guilt over how to carve out my creative time. Reading and writing time has shifted, for now, to learning lines and trying to get my head around a character. 2016 brings with it my first shot at being on stage, as Dr. Corey Phillips in The Tred Avon Players' production of "House on the Cliff."

Words are easier for me to write than to speak. It is not easy or natural, but I am glad to stretch myself in new and different ways. Yoga for the soul. I like the notion that William Esper evolved from Sandy Meisner, "Acting is doing things truthfully under imaginary circumstances." And talking about creating a character as, "where an actor alters his or her native behavior so as to become unrecognizable from his or her normal persona, yet still be one hundred percent truthful," Getting into my head in order to get out of it. Or something like that.

Today has been a quiet gift. No alarms set. Coffee. Shoveling walks and clearing bird feeders. On the year's first snow day, Cedar Waxwings found the pyracantha bush out my window. The other yard and feeder birds today have been cardinals, robins, various sparrows (with fox sparrows, who I have come to dig seeing over the past week), red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, juncos, chickadees, mourning doves, and blue jays.

I've hardly spoken an actual word, though they've danced in my head, and come through my fingers.

Thinking of Shakespeare's thoughts of the world as a stage, one we perform on daily, ourselves as the role we want others to know us as. But I've spent more time with Camus than Shakespeare, so we'll close with Albert and not Bill:

...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.

Okay, well, not that serious ;)

Bluebirds, Buntings & Paying Attention

2015 has been the year of the bluebird. It's been the year of paying attention. It's been a year of listening to life and of finding happiness in work, relationships, and home. That makes it a fairly banner year thus far.

Eastern Bluebirds have clearly been on Maryland's Eastern Shore for probably all of my 43 years. But I can't say I saw and noticed one prior to this year. And we've been over my thing for the color blue here before. Seeing bluebirds while on a run and coming home to look them up was my first "birding" experience (says the guy with the Great Blue Heron tattoo on his forearm).

Following that, I set up some feeders and sat and watched. I wasn't actively going out birding, just looking at what came around. It helped to be living at a veritable bird haven, but out my windows and while out running on Baileys Neck,  I saw the aforementioned Bluebirds, Cardinals, Red-Bellied Woodpeckers, Northern Flickers, American Goldfinches, Cooper's Hawk, Red-Tailed Hawk, Bald Eagle, Ospreys, Brown Thrashers, Blue Jays, Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, and Pileated Woodpeckers. Enough to pull me in to wanting to see more.

But it's more than just seeing birds. Author Lynn Thompson, in her memoir, "Birding with Yeats," gets it:

Sometimes I think that the point of birdwatching is not the actual seeing of the birds, but the cultivation of patience. Of course, each time we set out, there's a certain amount of expectation we'll see something, maybe even a species we've never seen before, and that it will fill us with light. But even if we don't see anything remarkable--and sometimes that happens--we come home filled with light anyway.

I'm not that good at patience. But when it comes to finding reasons to be outside and look deeply at the beauty around you, that's a lesson I've taken to heart.

Walking and (nominally) looking for birds at Assateague Island and Pickering Creek over the last couple weeks, the subject of the Indigo Bunting came up. A bird more blue than a bluebird, but not seen as much. Tractor beam on. Pulling up pictures and reading about them, they are around in the spring and summer, and winter in Central America. Hhhmmm... maybe it's time to go visit a friend in Costa Rica :)

But I've got it in my mind, the first bird I want to go seek out and find is an Indigo Bunting. But now I have to wait until spring to do it? Do you have any other buntings? Why, yes. Yes, we do. How about a Snow Bunting?

Mission confirmed. Buntings it is. I don't have a life list of birds; I'm not interested in just going out and checking off one after another. Whether trail running, hiking, biking, longboarding, paddleboarding, or bird watching, I'm of the John Muir mindset:

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

Being outside, the looking goes both ways: outward and inward.

Returns and Beginnings

This may well be the summer of the bike. Tuesday night, the girls and I rode four miles around Oxford. They had no idea how far they'd been, just that they were exploring main roads and back alleys and learning the town. They've been to Oxford plenty, but they've just begun calling it home. It makes a difference when you get to know a place on foot and by bike and know your house is there.

[Note: I can only tell a story from my perspective; Easton is also the girls' half-the-time home, and they love it there, but I'll stick with new beginnings and such]

I love going down a side street, the girls following close, not knowing where they are going, only to watch recognition click in... "the church!!" and they have connected the grid. They ride by the field above and see grass and trees in front of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. When I ride by the same field, I see the church lot where we played football after school, where the trees were the sidelines and end zone and it wasn't unheard of to get tackled into one.

There are the parts of town that don't seem to change. And then there is the new. I spend most of my time in the new house in the sun room where those west-facing windows are. From there, or the balcony above, the sun sets over the boat yard next door. I'm getting my bearings with what birds frequent the yard (mostly Cardinals, Blue Jays, Grackles and Chickadees), mulching gardens, cutting grass, which is a welcome return.

Moving is barely ordered chaos. Once your stuff is put mostly where you want it and you are relocated, things still don't feel settled. It's establishing a rhythm. I've walked or ridden my bike to work everyday since living here. I smile the whole way there and back in the evening. I've run and paddled and biked as workouts on some mornings. I've taken an outing or bike ride each evening, to stretch my legs and mind. There has blissfully been no television hooked up yet, though I do miss having the Washington Nationals playing in the background.

Oxford and the new house are full of familiar things. Personal and family artifacts, artwork, books, furniture; aspects and trappings of home. The move has been a return and a new beginning. I walked around the block last week, telling stories and sharing memories of what things looked like growing up, and who lived where. I dig telling stories, But I like just as much making new stories, ones that the girls and I will tell for years to come.

Spring Reigns

Every September/October, I declare fall my favorite season. Something about the temperatures cooling, the reds, oranges and yellows painting themselves onto trees. Playoff baseball and football season starting. And while I dig the changing of each season, I've held on to fall being the greatest. Until this year.

After a winter of self-imposed hermithood, of cold rain, of dismal lack of color; the rebirth of spring feels different this year. Walking the same roads of Baileys Neck and Jeffries Road, the world is different. You can look at the same tree (above) or down the same lane (below) and they are not the same as they were two months earlier.

Cracking a beer, with burgers on the grill, and walking up the yard, the sun and the dandelions smile in silent conversation with each other. The girls break out bare feet, lacrosse sticks, and a cheap bouncy ball and invent a sport somewhere between badminton and balloon tennis.

The spring has been full of Eastern Bluebirds, American Goldfinches, Northern Flickers, Blue Jays, and Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds at the feeders and along the road. And last spring, as I was descended upon by Cardinals when I ran, it was a phenomenon I noted but didn't understand. There was some Cardinal connection, but I couldn't place it. This spring, the Cardinals still divebomb, they still say hello every morning and evening. I see them when I walk, or when I run, or at the feeders. The difference is that this spring I know why. And knowing is half the battle. #YoJoe

Warbling

The sun is preceded by streaks, sharp smears of light across the sky. It likes to be announced before coming on the scene.

If you're quiet, frogs and birds are deafening in this last gasp of dark. It's like walking late into a cafeteria, impossible to follow any given conversation through the noise.

My new-found fascination with birds does not lend itself to fast running times. I stop to take a picture, or watch a red-tailed hawk in the tree, or see where a cardinal or eastern bluebird lands. It does lend itself to some unexpected interval training.

I'm more obsessed with warblers these days than personal running records. More taking in and being part of my surroundings than running through them. Which is not to say I don't feel transcendent when quick-stepping down winding singletrack trails, or dropping the throttle for the last mile or half-mile of a run.

There is something to walking out of breath through the back door, pouring a water, and grabbing Peterson's Field Guide to cool down on the back deck and try to figure out what bird I saw in the brush along the road; or trying over morning coffee to ID the yellow-headed newcomer to the feeder.

Forrest Gander's "Science and Steepleflower" has been on my bookshelf for a couple years. I've started and stopped in it a few times. Books open themselves at the right time. Gander goes vertical, deep into things. He knows the names of things, but doesn't lose their wonder for the science.

... Can you smell
where analyses end, the orchard
oriole begins? 

I dig the notion that getting at the thing itself, the sublime nature of something, comes on the other side of science.

I have no idea what it is about warblers or if I have ever seen one. Certainly not consciously and been able to name it. But that seems to be where I am with this whole bird thing--learning, fascinated, possessed by a beginner's mind, curiosity, and opportunity. And it doesn't hurt that I can walk the yard and the treeline with a Dale's, a notebook and pen, look and listen, and breathe in sun and sound.

It's not that I am getting older

It's not that I'm getting older. Or slowing down. But I walk more. I still run, still push myself. Hey man, I'm still hardcore, haven't gained weight in the past year. I still know how to earn sweat. I walk to notice the things I only ran by. I walk to keep up with the girls.

You can't build forts if you're too busy running. You can't stare into nesting ospreys or cardinals playing hide and seek. Only lying on your back can you properly discuss cloud formations, what color blue the sky is, or imbibe the cosmos via stars in the night sky.

I heed the same elders:  Hass, Snyder, Merwin, Merton. I've maybe added a few to the list: bluebird, woodpecker, hawk, At this time last year, I wrote this on turning 42. The view has changed, but I try to live each of those things everyday, the best I can.

It's not that I'm getting older, but life feels deeper this year. Like I've had a year submerged and am getting back in touch with the air.

I have no new advice this year. I'm not generally one to give it, and not always to take it anyway. But I still think Gary Snyder got it right when he advised:

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

I don't dare to add to Gary's simple mantra. But if I were, I might say:

find your people
watch the birds
go for walks

Hibernate. Thaw. Wake.

This winter I have hibernated. More than any other time in my life. I have rested, recharged. I have run a bit in the cold, ventured out, but largely stayed inside. Read. Binge-watched. Thought. Felt. Connected. Being between jobs lent itself to hibernating. So did having time on my own every other weekend. I am not sure I dig hibernating, but somehow it felt necessary.

Hibernating is temporary. After the slumber, comes the waking up. This winter has been cold. Frozen. Snow has stuck around for a time to finish off February. Now comes the thaw. Snow abates, the ground finds the sun again. Rebirth. Spring brings to life.

I wake to abundance. Baskin-Robbins has nothing on the flavors in my life. A new job. Two beautiful girls each with winter birthdays starting lacrosse season. Inspiration to fill a notebook everyday for two months and counting, since the beginning of the year. Blue eyes, open to see themselves looking back. Bluebirds of happiness.

This is the first winter I haven't lived in or on the edge of town. I've dialed in on birds. I've been overrun with Blue Jays and Cardinals; I've noticed Eastern Bluebirds for maybe the first time; I've had several remarkable Bald Eagle encounters. The girls and I watched a Red-Bellied Woodpecker show a handful of Blue Jays what time it was at our tree-hanging feeder, then saw one hanging on the side of the road going to school a day or two later.

A few nights ago, we stopped the car in the road to watch a Red-Tailed Hawk go from lane to tree for a perch. This morning, I watched from the kitchen sink as the same type of hawk changed trees along the lane. I geek out by grabbing my Audubon Mid-Atlantic Field Guide and feel giddy looking up birds. Even Cobain knew there was something to "an illustrated book about birds."

And from time to time I grab "Animal Speak," to see what Ted Andrews has to say about a new bird popping around repeatedly. How about the woodpecker, Ted?

The red found in the head area of any woodpecker reflects stimulation of the mental activities... It reflects a stimulation and wakening of new mental faculties... it will become increasingly important for you to follow your own unique rhythms and flight... When woodpecker comes into your life, it indicates that the foundation is there. It is now safe to follow your own rhythms.

 And the Red-Tailed Hawk?

This powerful bird can awaken visionary power and lead you to your life purpose. It is the messenger bird, and wherever it shows up, pay attention. There is a message coming... This bird is the catalyst, stimulating hope and new ideas. It reflects a need to be open to the new or shows you ways that you may help teach others to be open to the new.

I'm not calling Andrews and his animal speak gospel. But I find it interesting, illuminating, and in many cases spot on with a message inserted seemingly right where and when one seems to be speaking itself in other ways into life. Maybe the birds are onto something.

In the meantime, winter is wrapping up. Hibernation is coming to an end. The yard thaws. And it is time to wake up.

Finding My Bluebird

I feel like I am reasonably in tune and observant. But sometimes I don't notice things until I do. I've talked about herons, and being divebombed by cardinals, and this fall having blue jays making themselves known.

At the end of last week I was running on a back road, along the edge of woodlands, when a couple birds much deeper blue than a blue jay were playing from tree to tree, branch to branch. Brilliant blue on their backs and wings, but a ruddy brown on their bellies. They were all I could see. Why have I not noticed these birds more? They can't be that uncommon, I know they've been here all along. Why have I never honed in on them? I was given an "Audubon Field Guide to the Mid-Atlantic States" for Christmas. I thought about those blue birds for the rest of the run. Folks who know me, or return readers here know I am obsessed with the color blue.

I put the field guide to its first use: Eastern Bluebird. Sialia sialis. Thrush family. "Male brilliant blue above, chest, and sides rusty orange; ...sits upright on snags and wires. ...Habitat: fields, woodland edges, farms."

On Sunday I ran my longest run of 2015 to date. At about the halfway point, one of my all-time favorite songs in general, and favorite running songs came on: Zeppelin's "Ramble On." I've heard it hundreds of times. In my head I can sing along with most of the words. It resonates deeply with me. But as the song was ending, I heard Robert Plant sing, "I can't find my bluebird." Another goddamn bluebird I hadn't noticed before, though I've clearly heard it over and over again.

What's up, bluebirds?

I dug around. Bluebirds are often taken to mean happiness. Contentment. Joy.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes a bluebird is just a bluebird. And I can just dig them for being another opportunity for the color blue to say hey. But sometimes I also like to dwell on things and see if the Universe is continuing its ongoing conversation. A book I have on hand at the house, "Animal Speak," by Ted Andrews, did me some justice talking about herons (my main bird totem), cardinals and blue jays. What has Ted compiled and curated about bluebirds?

When bluebirds show up as a totem, it should first of all remind you to take time to enjoy yourself... can be symbolic of a need to work hard and play hard... symbolic of a passage, a time of movement into another level of being... a new confidence and happiness in coming into your own... If a bluebird has come into your life, look for opportunities to touch the joyful and intrinsically native aspects of yourself that you may have lost touch with.

Where I am in life these days, there is some deep resonance going on there. Reading elsewhere, there is even more focus on bluebirds and transition. Yep, that's there too.

Happiness. Contentment. Joy. Transition. Work hard. Play hard.

Robert Plant can't find his bluebird, so he is rambling on. Right now, I'm finding my bluebird.

Of Books, Leopards and Birds

The Snow Leopard is Peter Matthiessen's story of a 1973 epic trip to Nepal with field biologist George Schaller. They were going to study Himalayan blue sheep and, if possible, catch a glimpse of a snow leopard. Matthiessen was studying Zen Buddhism. Trekking across mountains in winter snows for five weeks, he also hoped to find the Lama of Shey at a Buddhist Shrine on Crystal Mountain. So it was a spiritual quest for him as well. His wife died the previous winter of cancer. He had some shit going on.

The Snow Leopard is also a book I didn't finish. I got 80 pages in, dug the hell out of it, and chased some tangential SQUIRREL! thought and haven't gotten back around to it. And yet Matthiessen is a rock for me. I've read essays, I've read about him, he and Gary Snyder are the models of the kind of writing life I aspire to live. Not that I can write like they can, but that they experience the great and full lives they write about. Matthiessen died earlier this year. If you don't know him, Men's Journal did a phenomenal story about him that is well worth your time to get a sense for one of the truly great writers of our time. More on Matthiessen and his snow leopard in a bit.

Herons are a spirit animal for me. A totem. That's about the best way I can put it. We've been over it on here a few times. Seeing a heron in flight or on the river both calms and inspires me. Seeing one while out on a run gives me instant energy. It's weird, but it's there. I have a heron tattoo on my right forearm both to acknowledge my connection to and fascination with herons, but also, selfishly, so I can look at one whenever I need to.

I was recently talking herons with a friend, who pointed me to Ted Andrews book "Animal Speak." Among other things, Andrews goes into characteristics of different birds and the people who are drawn to or connected to them. When I read what he had to say on herons, I was a bit dumbstruck.

In places, he describes my personality, my life, and how I operate, when I listen to my heart. It's pretty intense stuff to read someone closely describe you based on an animal you feel connected to. Herons are the big, integral bird for me, but this spring and summer, I noticed I was being seemingly stalked by cardinals when I would go for a run. Andrews says that cardinals pop into our lives to point us to "renewed vitality through recognizing self-importance." He goes into more, but during that time, and what I was going through, that was a pretty big message.

Over the last couple months, both at home and on runs, it's been blue jays. Yesterday there were blue jays starting in through the fu**ing front door at me, directly outside the door, and then one who swooped with me on my lunch run. It was like a Hitchcock movie. Alright Andrews, out with it:

The blue jay is a reminder to follow through on all things--to not start something and then leave it dangling.... The blue jay reflects that a time of great resourcefulness and adaptability is about to unfold, You are going to have ample opportunities to develop your abilities. The jay does not usually migrate, staying around all winter, so look for there to be ample time to develop and use your energies to access new levels.

I constantly leave loose ends dangling. I got you, blue jay. Point taken. Resourcefulness and adaptability. Today is my last day working for the Coast Guard. It's the second job I've had there, working there the last almost five years. This last job was not the writing, public affairs, communications fit for me that the previous one was. It sapped me, as has the four plus hours of daily commuting. It's time for a change. What that change is or brings, remains to be seen.

Don't start something and leave it dangling. Finish what you start. Look for my life's direction. Like a journey. Like a spiritual quest. Like finding a snow leopard. This is a good time for me to re-start, to continue, to finish, to find the snow leopard on my own. I don't mind taking Matthiessen as a guide:

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

Bring on the books. Bring on the birds. Let's go find a snow leopard.

On Air

Air is possibility. We don't even notice it until it adds voice and motion as wind. When air becomes active. When I run I can't drink in enough air, filling my lungs, clearing them, repeat. When the big shit in our lives happen, when heavy or tense or anger or sad happen, we instinctively take deep breaths, looking for air, but not naming it.

Before we got too smart, the ancient Greeks, pre-Socrates, had the Universe broken down into air, water, earth and fire. The elements. Now we've named everything so fancily, we can't even get our minds around it. But we can breathe.

I'm being bird stalked when I run these days. Mostly by male cardinals. For a couple months now, every time I run, I get swooped by one. Almost always when I've forgotten they are watching me, and a fastball of red, or maybe it's a sinker, I don't have a batter's eye anymore, swings by, standing out against green trees and air. Once one lit for a second on a fence right next to the rail trail, nodding as I went by, and I smiled at him. Birds have air figured out.

Air is part of what my heron tattoo is about. The heron inhabits both air and water. Maybe he looks at home in both, or maybe not quite in either. I wanted to make sure both elements were part of the design. Herons inhabit and invoke both.

Wind is air at its most vocal. Air that says, don't fu** with me. The big bad wolf has nothing on wind. I lie in bed and I can hear the wind talking to the trees, unsure who speaks louder in that conversation. I drive over the Bay Bridge to work and feel wind push the car, which when you're that high above the water, that slight reminder says enough. Be kind wind. Be kind.

Brenda Hillman writes the elements. She is working through books on each. Her "Pieces of Air in the Epic," moves through air. She reminds us how cut off, out of sync we are with air:

Wind will rend the suburbs
With information seeking nature

or more depressingly:

They were mostly raised
in tanklike SUVs called Caravan or   Quest; winds rarely visited them.

When we're inside, packed away in our house, or seat-belted comfortably in our cars, we forget that air can be wind. That we absolutely need it to live, to breathe, but it doesn't need us. What if we get so comfortable, so cut off, that the winds rarely visit us? That would suck. No, that would blow.

Hillman brings us back with writing. I think Air is why I run. Elemental Air, filling my lungs to bursting, on the final mile home, Jimi Hendrix's "Stone Free," in my ears, heart pounding, talking to Air. In conversation. I'm not sure who is speaking, who is listening, who is breathing.

I wonder

I am back to Hass, who says this morning that,

It must be a gift of evolution that humans
Can't sustain wonder. We'd never have gotten up
From our knees if we could.

And I am with Bob on this as "Wonder" has
always been a wonder of mine. It stamped itself
known and unknown on me since before I heard
Aristotle posit that "philosophy begins in wonder."

As I sit with the taste of coffee strong on my lips and tongue
I overhear a conversation between a clock here in the room
and a morning chorus of birds chatting up the sunlight.

Clock and birds are incessant cacklers and I wonder
how long they've been having this talk and
who will grow silent first