Category Nonfiction

Listening to the birds

Nancy Crowe

29868587Birds bridge the ordinary and the unknown as few other creatures can. In Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation, novelist, essayist, and children’s author Kyo Maclear details a year of urban birdwatching and life shifting in her home city of Toronto.

While coping with her father’s illness, the married mother of two young sons happened upon the photography of a musician and urban birdwatcher, and was riveted. “These birds lived in gardens of steel, glass, concrete, and electricity,” she said, but the message in the photos was not one of environmental sins, but of love for “the dirty, plain, beautiful, funny places many of us call home.”

The musician (as he is known throughout the book) became Maclear’s guide on a number of bird walks throughout the year. As so often happens when we take up something new, ostensibly to distract ourselves, the insights that emerge bring us right back to face the music, if we are willing.

Accompanying the musician to his father’s aviary of finches, for example, and feeling like a “galumphing invader” among the tiny, captive creatures, sparks reflection on the quality we most associate with birds: freedom. We are all captive in some way to something, Maclear said — such as the cages of ego and habit we may or may not recognize. A small birdwatching excursion to a marina on the edge of the city not only teaches her how to distinguish among trumpeter, mute, and tundra swans but becomes an almost meditative experience of simultaneous waiting and experiencing.

As she began to talk about the subject of this book, Maclear was surprised by the number and diversity of people who shared their own bird stories and passions — rich hobbyists, former POWs, people who traded the bottle for binoculars. “They had lost something, hoped for transcendence, wondered how best to live this life. Birds spoke to their irrevocably blue parts, their hopeful parts.”

The birders she encountered in books and in the world shared little except this, she concluded: “If you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.”

 

 

 

Horse sense

Nancy Crowe

512fUSHSArL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_When you don’t know what to do, or even when you do, sometimes the key is simply to be. Author and animal Reiki instructor Kathleen Prasad’s book, Heart to Heart with Horses: The Equine Lover’s Guide to Reiki (2017: Animal Reiki Source), illustrates this beautifully. As one of Kathleen’s students, I was already familiar with her work, but a desire to learn more about working with horses led me to this book, her latest.

Reiki, a Japanese stress relief and relaxation technique that also promotes healing, is not limited to hands-on practice, especially with animals. A practitioner can give a Reiki treatment from across the room or just outside an enclosure or stall. It’s all about energy and presence, to which animals are much more attuned than humans. Horses in particular are very intuitive and sensitive creatures. You do not need to use the traditional Reiki hand positions, or use your hands at all, for them to “get it.” In other words, instead of “doing” Reiki, try “being” Reiki, Kathleen suggests, and she offers several ways to do this.

From her own experience and a sprinkling of guest authors’ stories, Kathleen teaches animal Reiki as a meditative practice which creates space for healing … whatever healing might mean for that horse in that moment. The practitioner does not have to know “what’s wrong” or direct how healing will happen. Sharing Reiki energy helps set up the conditions for whatever is needed — the clearing up of an infection, a peaceful transition at the end of life, insight into a behavioral issue, or none of these.

The practitioner’s state of mind and heart is the real key, Kathleen says, and a daily meditation practice helps with this. It’s also important to let the animal choose to participate in the treatment, or not. She says horses will often test the practitioner by declining (moving away or showing signs of irritation or aggravation), just to see if it truly is up to them. Once the horse knows he has a choice (and, I might add, that you are not the sort of healer who pokes, prods, or gives shots), he is more likely to be receptive. A horse may even move closer and position himself near you, perhaps pushing a hip or shoulder into your hands. Then you can offer some gentle hands-on work, but that should always be at the animal’s initiative, Kathleen says.

We humans have ridden horses into battle, made them schlep us and our stuff over great distances, and more. Heart to Heart with Horses offers us a respectful, compassionate way forward  — connecting with these magnificent animals and allowing them to be our teachers.

Salem: Which was witch

Nancy Crowe
TheWitches

See stacyschiff.com

As we have seen, especially in recent days, fear makes people do crazy, horrific things.

It’s the same old crap we dealt with three centuries ago. The people of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 were nothing if not scared. They lived in a new, untamed land under constant threat of Native American attack and abduction. Their Puritan beliefs had them either righteously lording it over others or falling miserably short despite their best efforts and greatest sacrifices.

The notion that there were witches among them — women (mostly) who had signed a pact with the devil and were torturing people like 12-year-old Ann Putnam — gave all that free-floating fear a place to land.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff helps us see and feel this brief but devastating chapter of American history in The Witches: Salem, 1692 (Little, Brown and Company, 2015). In particular, she helps us see the day-to-day realities that allowed it to unfold.

My interest in the Salem Witch Trials increased a few years ago when I discovered a genealogical connection to some key players. Deacon Edward Putnam is my seventh great-grandfather, and he was among the accusers whose testimonies sent several innocent people to their deaths. His older brother, Thomas Putnam, appears to have been a ringleader, and Thomas’s daughter Ann was one of the young girls whose bizarre behavior set the whole mess in motion.

This was a rare moment in history in that females, and young ones at that, were calling the shots. Betty Parris, daughter of the Reverend Parris, and her cousin Abigail Williams began to have convulsive, screaming fits. Soon Ann Putnam and other girls showed similar symptoms. A doctor said the girls were bewitched, and the girls began to name a series of local women as their tormentors, also claiming to see ghosts, spectral versions of the living, and the devil.

It was a reality show-worthy spectacle, by all accounts. Then, as now, nobody does drama like a girl on the threshold of womanhood. Then, as now, people at the bottom of the heap are apt to misuse power when they suddenly find it in their hands. If one of these young ladies accused you of witchcraft, you were as good as convicted. The only defense against an accusation of witchcraft was a good offense — shifting the accusation onto someone else.

Schiff notes that young Ann Putnam predicted future events and recalled others that predated her birth. And without question, Thomas Putnam had suffered many losses at that point in his life — inheritance, land, and children. It’s not hard to believe he was motivated to use the force of the law to settle some scores. However, as Schiff says, “Putnam had a much-loved, perceptive, desperately convulsing twelve-year-old at home. He was soon to have a deranged wife as well. It is difficult to believe he had a long-range strategy at the start.”

Thomas and his wife both died in 1699, leaving Ann to raise her younger siblings. At age 27, Ann, seeking full church membership, apologized to the Salem village congregation for her significant role in the events of 1692. Out of the 19 who had been put to death, she had testified against all but two. It was a “devil made me do it” apology, but it was more than any of the other accusers offered. She died a decade later.

If you’re looking for the Cliff’s Notes version of the Salem witch trials, or easy answers, you won’t find them in this dense, detailed work. You will, however, find the humanity behind this surreal chapter of America’s story.