What happens in that moment before writing, when you are looking at the bright laptop screen, or gazing out of the doorway, into the yard, because there is nothing to write?
We could look up at the clouds, and take photos of the gray and the white, tag them according to the time the observation was done. Or, we could be like Kyo Maclear, in her book, Birds Art Life. A Year of Observation, and learn from birds the wisdom of waiting.
Maclear’s journey is her own—a sick father, a family, and a career that makes her ponder. We cannot follow her path but, it seems, what she saw of birds and the sky they have made their own, have more to teach us than merely flight and freedom. They have given us the consciousness of the perpetuation of seconds.
“To wait is to be close to nothing, to feel that closeness to nothing and to have confidence that it is more than that,” says Kyo Maclear.
It is one thing to be in rapt attention as you grab with your gaze the emptiness around crown of trees, hoping that you would be able to spot a little bird—and remember the yellow streaks on the breast or the song coming from the tiny mouth, as it is another matter when, in that solitude of inspection, inside your heart, a pain is reserved for someone deathly ill or suffering from untold sadness. These are the lessons of a book about birding, a tender treatise on living.
It is easy to be with Maclear in this book: she is not the intrepid birder who travels to jungles and forests for vanishing species; she deals with the ordinary birds, the kind that lingers at the ledges of your home, or those easy to ignore. What is not easy is gaining confidence in waiting for that moment where a bird is seen.
“The hardest adjustment for new birders is the waiting without itinerary or guaranteed outcome” is another line from this book about birds, art and life.” Maclear continues: “Most of us don’t have time for the malady of stillness. Life is too short for longueurs. The idea of sitting for hours on end, on rocks or bits of log, in the cold, for a bird, is the definition of lunacy and stillness.”
However, birders have a different concept of time, according to the book. As people have different notions about living and dying.
Last year, about this time, amidst the lockdown, we became new birders. Or maybe earlier than last year. Something was different though last year: there was no hope yet the isolation was going to end. Then there was our loved one—a big sister, a mother, a teacher—who was close to leaving us forever. In September, she was still with us as we fed the tiny birds that visited our garden. When the birds did not come, she wondered where they went. While she knew the maya lived under the eaves of the home she cared for, noting the fragile (for us) nests that fell endlessly around us, carried by the stormy wind, she always wondered where the bigger ones hid when the rains became strong.
By October, I noted a fragility in the way she walked to the porch. I wanted her to be moving. I prayed she would be strong enough to teach online again. I missed having her puttering about in the kitchen, as if the tasks were never ending. In earlier years, she would have made me feel lazy; that month in October, I just wanted her to breathe on, to wait for birds.
By November, she was gone.
The author says: “I had read somewhere that up to 50 percent of migrating birds die on their journey.”
This is common among sons and fathers, uncles and brothers, male members of a clan: we always, to borrow the graciously keen words of Kyo Maclear, look at “the sight of a woman who is always on call, always in heightened state of watchfulness and awareness, momentarily checking out—zoning into her own internal infinity.”
In those months of feeding birds and looking at them, waiting for their appearance, what did we learn? What did we know about afflictions that recurred, and the death that hastily came after them?
In lines contemplative but not detached, buoyant despite the sorrows lingering behind acute phrases, Kyo Maclear writes about the sentient ways of birding: “If you hope to see something, especially the notably elusive, you will learn to wait, like a devotee or a sanguine lover.” The writer goes on: “The goal in birding, you will discover, is to become as quiet and invisible as possible, and the easiest way to do this is to stay in one place, minimizing your wake of disturbance. When you stop with your fast movements… the birds may begin to respect you, by which I mean ignore you.”
Most propitious of all the thoughts Maclear has shared are these: “Even though you will inevitably discover that not everything within the spectrum of human desire is instantly available to you, your patience may be rewarded. You will encounter the reluctant and well-hidden things. These things may be fleeting and fading and without obvious ‘payoff,’ but you will discover that the realm of birding is also, sometimes, the realm of miracles.”
As with life and as with that stretch of moments when breathing leaves us all and our last glance is at the widening horizon or, when at nightime, the last in our human life, the sky, dark or starry, finally tells us the whole business of existence is waiting, and waiting, and knowing that, at junctures, there are pit stops for love, remembrances, some joys, some guilt, surpluses of pains, knowledge, bits of regrets, tossed anger, loss of senses, transcendence—all for one to either choose, question or ignore. Or write about.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano