I live about 60 meters above the sea, facing southeast on the side of a mountain that is covered in Douglas-fir trees. My mornings at this time of year begin with light in my windows by 5am and the air full of birdsong. Up here, we are perched in the canopy of the forest and if I look out towards the sea, I am looking through to tops of tree that are 40 or 50 meters tall.
As I have grown older, my eyes are not as good as they once were and while I can spot movement in the canopy, it is hard for me to see details on little birds that live there. But becasue I am a musician, my ear is very good and I can hear and discern the many types of birdsong that fill the morning air. I am a bird hearer now rather than a bird watcher.
My mornings often begin with a 1.5 kilometer walk down to the sea through my local neighbourhood. And this time of year there are three distinctive movements to this walk.
In our canopy, Swainson’s thrushes, chickadees, the Townsend, Wilsons and Yellow-Rumped Warblers, sing from the tree tops. Ravens and bald eagles soaring above and through the forest, often silent expect for the wing beats of the raves. Robins are everywhere, towhees and juncos scratch on the ground in the garden and Ana’s hummingbirds visit the flowers. Pileated woodpeckers,northern flickers and red-breasted sapsuckers drum their mating calls on the trees above us on the mountain.
On my walk down to the sea, I descend along a road that has houses on either side, large ornamental trees like chestnuts and dogwoods and more gardens. The birds change midway down, and there is a small flock of starlings and a very large flock of pine siskins drawn to the bird feeders. Stellar’s Jays, patrol the mid-layer, chattering between the calls of song sparrows and white-crowned sparrows. Black headed grosbeaks at this time of year sing their rapid, nervous ringing song. A Pacific-slope fly catcher can be heard catcalling from the thick deciduous bushes and from out of nowhere comes the powerful rollicking song of the Pacific wren.
The final stretch of my walk takes me on a gravel path down to a beach. This is the territory of bald eagles who call and whistle from ancient perches and nest sites. In the little cove where i sit, there have been eagles for generations and beyond, and the bald branches at the tops of their look out trees are worn smooth by their talons. By the water there are sea ducks like scoters and goldeneyes, mallards, cormorants, glaucous-winged and short-billed gulls, and a crow that patrols the beaches and the cove and sometimes mimics the far off sounds of geese that softly honk as they forage around the rocks and beaches.
If I’m lucky here I might sea a seal of a sea lion coming up for air, or catch the call of oyster catchers moving around the rocks.
In a month or so, once the nesting is done and the warblers have begun to head south again, the sound will change and soften. Songs become calls, the resident birds (except, this year, the nuthatches) take over and the mornings are quieter with robins, towhees, juncos and chickadees providing most of the music.
“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.”
— from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros
I love writing born of direct experience, born of the insight of a moment, or generated from the passing inspiration of the glint of sunlight on the sea seen through an open window. I love writing that arises from the quiet encounter with spirit or the contemplation of a mind that finally slows down and stretches out. That is writing of authentic voice or even the super-voice that all writers know, the voice we chase for its clarity and ease. It sometimes takes a long pounding away at the keyboard or days of scribbled lines before that voice arises somewhere below consciousness. In that moment you become merely a vehicle for it, in service to something. Your word choice become less ham-fisted, the cadence of the words more natural, like a jazz musician, you become open, trading fours with the muse, offering a lick of style or form and being rewarded with an image or a connection that you could never see before.
I’m enjoying A Philosophy of Walking. It is a testament to obliquity in the arts and philosophy, about the way a walk frees the mind and opens the heart. Today I’m heading out on y first work trip since February 15 2020 and I’m appreciating the way my thinking slows down even as my body is in the stop and go rhythm of ferry travel. There is spaciousness, time to kill, time to read or write or just peer out at the sea and look for whales or sea lions. Travelling on the coast means moving at the speed of the ferry, and the best way to do that is to travel on foot, at a human pace, free of the frustrations of being confined to a car, presented with options at every turn; a crossword, a book, an album, a blog post, a nap.
Have a read this weekend of some cool things I’ve found on the web. I’ll see what ideas and thoughts bubble up from this little trip to Vancouver Island.
- The Limitations of “Performance.” With a great quote from Tim Galloway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”
- Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis. An account of a radically open community development approach from Tunisia called Tamkeen. Lots in this piece to think about. Ht: Marcus Jenal, whose newsletter always delivers fantastic stuff.
- The Northern Ireland Assembly met, this time with simultaneous interpretation of the languages of English, Irish and Ulster Scots. More on these languages and dialects in Ulster on this beautiful video playlist from the Open University
- The Sultans of String record “The Power of the Land,” a poem by Duke Redbird set to some great music and visuals of some pretty impressive landscapes, including, at 1:36, a view of Nexlelexwem/Bowen Island and the south end of At’lka7tsem/Howe Sound, which I live.
- A discussion of Orthodox Christianity and theosis within the natural world, courtesy of Dave Pollard’s monthly link post.
- A fantastic list of mostly books on encountering silence in the Christian Contemplative tradition from Carl McColman’s blog.
- Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith on the history and practice of Loving Accountability
Enjoy your weekend as we move towards midsummer. I heard my first Swainson’s Thrush today, which means the better part of the season has begun.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the nuthatches have disappeared from my home island this year and how I was missing their little calls.
Today,fromt he other side of the world a friend shared with me a watercolour he made inspired by that post. And so, through relationship and connection across time and space, one nuthatch has re-appeared on Bowen Island, , early on a holiday morning.
It is apparently International Tea Day, and my friend Ciaran Camman sent along this beautiful twitter thread describing tea culture across the Muslim world. It put me in mind of some memorable cups of tea I have had in my time:
- I fell in love with Turkish tea culture sipping tea from tulip glasses in Istanbul, during summer downpours in Taksim, by the side of the Bosphoros, or in the quiet back alleys of the old town as the calls to prayer echoed through the streets. Or on a gullet in the quiet waters off Demera, or in the mountains of Selçuk.
- A impromptu stop in for a gorgeous cup of tea and a perfect scone with my beloved beside the Ouse in St. Ives in the UK on a summer day, pictured above.
- Developing a deep love of the cornflower flavoured black tea that we used to buy from The Tea Merchant on the Byward market in Ottawa.
- Endless cups of Dilmah tea with my lovely mother-in-law. She introduced me to Dilmah, and I’ve never gone back. A lovely Ceylon tea, from a great company.
- Drinking dark thick, bitter tea from a huge pot boiled for hours on a woodstove in a hunting cabin on the tundra of Nunavik as a group of Inuit polar bear hunters sat in circle and discussed their futures over caribou stew and bowhead muktuk.
- Making an impromptu tea ceremony with So Yoshida and friends in a small tea house in a little park near the Tokyo harbour.
- Watching used Irish Breakfast tea bags pile up in a little plate in the kitchen of a cottage I shared with Chris Chapman and Anthony McCann by the shores of Galway Bay in Ballyvaughn, Co. Clare as a kind of metric of the conversations and stories we were telling.
- Sharing a pot of tea with Simon and Julia Lucas back in 1989 when a group of us Native Studies students travelled to Hesquiaht in Clayoquot Sound with Sennan Charleson to spend a week immersed in the community. It was my first trip ever to BC, the first time I ever got to meet Simon and Julia and it was a memorable afternoon, listening to stories of the community, the culture, the language and the plans for the future.
- Drinking rooibos outside our meeting space while watching giraffes carefully pick their way around small dialogue groups during an Art of Hosting at the Heia Safari in South Africa.
Grateful for these experiences and connections.
That statement will either mean something to you, or it will mean nothing to you. It might mean nothing to you if washy space-y pretentious prog rock wasn’t your bag in the 1980s. But it was mine.
I have always had an eclectic taste in music and back in the early 1980s when I was 15 my friend Aiden, who was a couple of years older than me got me into all the British prog rock bands like Yes and Genesis and Pink Floyd and Emerson Lake and Palmer who had all done their best work in the previous decade. As a devotee of Queen, I was a bit suspicious of synthesizers, but I have also always had a penchant for drones and atmospheric washes and mystical poetry and stuff like that. Bands like Rush were doing all that, even if Queen, until 1981 anyway, was explicitly rejecting it.
Anyway, my love of Jon Anderson’s voice and Vangelis’ notoriety for the Chariots of Fire and Bladerunner soundtracks led me to an album that for a couple of years was a staple in my Walkman. “Private Collection” was bliss to listen to through the headphones. The following year, they released “The Best of Jon and Vangelis” and that was the extent of their discography that I owned on cassette.
Here is “Horizon” from from “Private Collection” in all of its 23 minute long glory.
Headphones on. Bliss out.