Tag life

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.”

 

 

 

Wings and water: A life in motion

Nancy Crowe 2 Comments

“Blue Heron Woman: Poems,” by Gail S. Burlakoff (2014)

This is not a review per se, as the author is a friend and former neighbor. Call it an observation.

“Blue Heron Woman” is the name given to Gail by a Cherokee-Cree medicine woman, the author bio explains, “and the name suits her; she has spent much of her life wadingBlue Heron Woman through one thing or another, watchfully waiting for the next adventure, moving from one place to another, defending her young, and surviving.”

The poems tell her story, from Hawaii just before and just after World War II to summers in the Ozarks; Panama; boarding school and college; as a “corporate wife” in St. Croix and Peru; and the end of that life and the beginning (and continuation) of another. It’s like a home movie with images that flicker by before taking off again, gradually forming a mosaic of a life.

It is not a fluid journey. There are stops and starts, joys and pains and choices. There is, Gail writes in a poem near the end of Part I, an itch to move on to something that will certainly be better — but the voices of the also well-traveled generations before her interrupt: “Halt. You are where you are for a reason. Stop, think, breathe, and be aware of who we are, Where we came from, Why we came. You are one of us, A courageous woman. Bless you.”

A blessing, indeed. I read the Kindle version of this book, but I recommend paper and ink for poetry. With an e-book I am never sure if the stanzas and line breaks are as the author intended, or if what I am looking at is simply where it all landed on the digital page. The photos, too (by Nikolai Burlakoff) would of course show up better in print.