field notes:

9.27.2002

egret...egret...whisper it over silver still water at dawn. Listen...it sounds like secret...secret.

posted by Lisa on 6:21 PM link |

9.26.2002

From Nature:
'The 500-year-old Ryoanji Temple garden in Kyoto contains five outcroppings of rocks and moss on a rectangle of raked gravel. Using symmetry calculations the researchers have discovered that the objects imply an image of a tree in the empty space between them that we detect, without being aware of doing so.

The finding suggests that Japanese garden designers - originally priests - "balanced forces from visual science," says study leader Gert Van Tonder of Kyoto University.'

Now we must ponder why the image of a tree subtly laid upon our subconscious is so powerful a thing. Perhaps it isn't the fact that the rocks suggest the reverse outline of a tree, but the fact that they suggest a reverse outline of some thingat all that is pleasing to the subconscious.

The soul inhabits the world like water, like smoke: moving in the places between the obvious and the concrete like a surrender. Perhaps the suggestion of an outline is always what we want.

posted by Lisa on 3:10 PM link |

9.25.2002

Walked the beach. Another low tide morning. My favorite kind of morning. This exploration is like falling in love. I get to know this one little stretch of beach, this path alongside the creek, the fern bank. My dark-eyed juncos. The splash of red where the madrone arcs through a wash of oak, green bay, buckeye, fern and redwood opposite the fern bank. The first sighting of water through the tunnel of overgrowth on the path.

Down on the beach it is bird of prey day. All the gang is there. First I spot the blue heron. He sits at the end of the pier to the south. I watch through the bins for quite a while, marveling at his ungainly exoticism. Like a foreign lovely, his stray feathers blow askew in the breeze;he is unlike other birds -- less tidy and compacted. It is a surprise each time. One of the intriguing things about the blue heron is the stark contrast between its standing demeanor and its flight. It's harsh call is enough to make you fear for your children, to look over your shoulder, to look harder into the shadows. And yet when it stands, its loose feathers cant in the breeze like a beautiful unperturbed glam girl hailing a cab at 3 am in a New York breeze. What does it want from us? Fear, respect, bedazzlement? It's a lot to ask for one lonely bird.

At the end of our pier is the belted kingfisher. He's another frequent visitor, especially at low tide. He walks about from one end of a driftwood ornament that extends from a high post at the end of the pier to the other. He doesn't seem content to watch for prey. He seems agitated at the proximity of the big blue. He plays a throaty number and then flies to the south. Instead of his usual route around the end of the more southerly pier, today he flys under it and towards that part of the cliff where I'm suspecting that he makes his home.

My dog and I walk to the north so as not to disturb big blue. A slow walk though, full of wonder and sighs. Around the first bend we are treated to three osprey. They are together, staying close and circling, one calling more than the others. I'm guessing he's the juvenille, and that this means that at least in this osprey family, the juvies haven't yet left the nest altogether - at least they haven't left the area. That is what they will do soon. Once their hunting skills have been further developed, they will leave to find their own nesting grounds.

I always want to live in or near the water. I'll never leave it.

The water has a quality today that I love. Not sure I can describe it. It's like it's all one thing on days like this. The color is grey with a blue cast to it. There is no separation in the water -- no seeing into it. The wind blows without raising much of a sea. There is that beautiful rhythmic, lulling sound of a dull bell coming from a moored sailboat as it plays in the wind; the wind plays with it. The wind plays it like an instrument left leaning against the wall that gets picked up and occassionally plucked or shaken, but never played.

Someday I'll have to leave this place. Love is a risk. My friend Nancy says that if you always remember that love is a risk, that it can always break, go away, hurt you, then you have your head on straight for being in love, for being within love.

Prisoners call it doing hard time. If you allow yourself to feel emotions, to be vulnerable, you're in for a much harder sentence than if you keep all feelings at bay except anger and hatred.

I mean to feel it here. I mean to feel it while I'm here. I mean to get hurt. Hell, it hurts every time I look at it. It's a sweet beauty, a sweet pain, a sweeter ecstacy.

(written 8.4.02)

posted by Lisa on 8:46 PM link |

9.24.2002

Scans From Nature

a wasp nest -- click it for a continent of beauty

Wasps collect wood from trees, fences, old piers, and driftwood, chewing the fibres and mixing them with saliva to form this beautiful paper. I found three of these this summer.

posted by Lisa on 6:56 PM link |

9.23.2002

pupation!

The worms are turning inwards. Following their schedule, having eaten all of the leaves on the six live oaks around my house, they are abandoning themselves as worms and reinventing themselves as winged moths. They are becoming. They slow their crawl up my walls, up the sloping a-framed ceiling and curl into themselves: whitening and hardening.

Last night I was forced to abandon my bedroom. The worms were dropping from the ceiling in groups of ten onto the subtle green flowers of my lovely comforter. My bed too creepy a place to imagine sleep so I unrolled my bag in the bathroom downstairs -- the one place in the house that has remained worm-free throughout the occupation.

In October or November they'll emerge winged to lay their eggs for overwintering. This was a banner year for phryganidia californica here in Inverness. The oaks are defoliated: barren and desolate. But they are old and will most likely live to forget this humiliation, re-emerging green.

The grace of an oakworm changing state. I'm beginning to miss them already. They inch along the floor, bulbous head raised, seeking height. When they find it they climb until the reach the top -- whether that be the 6 inches of my yoga block or the 35 feet of my ceiling's peak. If there is no food in that place, they drop on silken elevator threads until they reach the end of that line. And then they search for height once more.

Now, all the leaves have been eaten. There is no more work for a worm, but one last task for a moth. How easy for a worm to curl up and give way to the moth. How difficult for us to accept our own passages -- to give way to the necessary changes, to let go the inclination to remain.

posted by Lisa on 11:13 PM link |

9.19.2002

I'm off to an Oregon wedding for a couple of days. If there's a public computer handy I may post, but likely not. Check back Sunday (Equinox) for more field notes:.
Meanwhile, please enjoy some Rumi on me.

Infidel Fish

the ocean way is this fish way
of the water-souls of fish who
die becoming the sea. Fish do
not wait patiently for water!
In this world full of shape,
there you are with no form!
You've made a universe from a
drop of my blood! Now I'm
confused. I can't tell world
from drop, my mouth and this
wine glass, one lip. I am
Nohbbdy, the fool shepherd.
Where's my flock? What shepherd?
When I talk of you, there are no
words. Where could I put you,
who won't fit in the secret world,
or this? All I know of spirit
is this love. And don't call me
a believer. Infidel is better.

The Soul of Rumi
(translated by Coleman Barks)

posted by Lisa on 8:05 PM link |

Sorry for the double-post. Blogger trouble! and I can't undo it. I'll be switching to GreyMatter next week and will fix this and add permalinks, etc. Take note that I've changed the url and given field notes it's very own URL: http://www.field-notes.net.

posted by Lisa on 10:41 AM link |

I'm still battling the worms today (see yesterday). I'm spurred on by the thought that these caterpillars will soon transform into moths which will again lay eggs. I don't want this happening inside my house. Also, every crack that an oakworm can crawl through will be an entryway for cold come winter.

This is, after all, a case of nature coming through the cracks. We try to keep her out, to keep our lives from the messiness that ensues. The worms are compelled to crawl upwards, and likewise, they are compelled to drop down again on fine strings. The worm becomes a moth becomes a worm becomes a moth. They just crawl and eat and drop and cocoon and lay eggs and pupate.

We build walls and flooring and roofs to keep all this messiness outside where it belongs.

When I lived in Mexico we had stick walls and palapa roofs and no glass in our 'windows'. The line between outdoors and indoors was very fine. Our indoors did nothing to hold back the night. Gossamer netting was the thin line of defence between scorpions, mosquitos and us. Crabs, giant black ants, and fighting red ants marching across the kitchen counter while I prepared meals was normal; checking the bedding and clothing for scorpions routine; boa constrictors in the roof considered lucky -- no mice.

I was used to all that once, and was proud that I lived that way. I still admire that style of living. But right now I'm glad it's my front door covered in worms and not my mosquito netting.

posted by Lisa on 10:26 AM link |

9.18.2002

I'm still battling the worms today (see yesterday). I'm spurred on by the thought that these caterpillars will soon transform into moths which will again lay eggs. I don't want this happening inside my house. Also, every crack that an oakworm can crawl through will be an entryway for cold come winter.

This is, after all, a case of nature coming through the cracks. We try to keep her out, to keep our lives from the messiness that ensues. The worms are compelled to crawl upwards, and likewise, they are compelled to drop down again on fine strings. The worm becomes a moth becomes a worm becomes a moth. They just crawl and eat and drop and cocoon and lay eggs and pupate.

We build walls and flooring and roofs to keep all this messiness outside where it belongs.

When I lived in Mexico we had stick walls and palapa roofs and no glass in our 'windows'. The line between outdoors and indoors was very fine. Our indoors did nothing to hold back the night. Gossamer netting was the thin line of defence between scorpions, mosquitos and us. Crabs, giant black ants, and fighting red ants marching across the kitchen counter while I prepared meals was normal; checking the bedding and clothing for scorpions routine; boa constrictors in the roof considered lucky -- no mice.

I was used to all that once, and was proud that I lived that way. I still admire that style of living. But right now I'm glad it's my front door covered in worms and not my mosquito netting.

posted by Lisa on 10:43 PM link |

9.17.2002

You know I love nature -- I love living in a place where I can observe nature firsthand. I'm priveledged to watch acorn woodpeckers and osprey and chipmunks while I work. Today I saw river otters at play in the bay, but there's a *darker side too.

phryganidia californica

Damn them! Oak trees border my entire house and line my driveway. Thus, there are lots and lots of little california oakworms hanging around. They drop out of the sky on their silky threads. They drop on cars they drop on heads. A couple of weeks ago I'd find the occassional caterpillar transported into the house by me or my dog, but it turns out that that was just the beginning. They're really quite small and so I didn't really mind scooping them up onto the back of an envelope, opening the door and shaking them out into the world.

Sunday, I found three caterpillars on my bedspread at different times throughout the day. Hmmmm, I wondered. The first couple of times I thought that perhaps the worms had crawled out of clothes I'd taken off and carelessly laid upon the bed. But that third time I turned a wary eye up at the ceiling.

Yesterday I found that the front door and all of the outside walls of my house were covered in the little caterpillars. That was creepy. Today I came home from a day of kayaking to find the little buggers all over the inside of my house. Extremely creepy. I have scooped approximately 50 of them in the past 3 hours -- at least 6 or 7 of them from my bedroom or from the top of my bed.

California oakmoths are partial to oak although they will attack other hardwoods if needbe. The moths laid their eggs here in June and July. The caterpillars emerged in the last couple of weeks. They feed at night and during these indian summer hot days apparently they seek shade. And I'm it. A second generation of moths will occur in October or November whose progeny will hatch and overwinter as larvae on the bottoms of the leaves -- whatever leaves are left.

I've also been wondering about the small golden-colored balls dropping out of the trees. I thought that this was something the trees were shedding. I hear them falling all day and all night when I'm outdoors. It sounds a lot like a steady but slow rain. They turn out to be called frass -- they are the droppings from the voracious worms. The droppings will grow in size as the caterpillars grow. That's good to know. I'll be able to keep track of them easily.

Large oakmoth infestations are cyclical, apparently 2000 was a big year. The oaks can't take several years of heavy defoiliation in a row, and it's not wise for an insect to wipe out it's source of nourishment. I haven't heard that this is a big year areawide -- but it's a big year here at my place.

I hope I didn't startle my neighbors just now. I hosed down the outside of my house by the headlights of my truck. So much for not killing anything -- I guess I reached my limit.

*"darker side" is a bit strong. Let's just call this the less glamorous side of nature.

posted by Lisa on 10:27 PM link |

9.14.2002

My friends invited me over for an impromptu dinner of salmon and berries -- oh to eat like a bear! I declined due to a hot date with my soul tonight. Sometimes I really need a night of quiet solitude with no plan.

So briefly....lest I neglect my date.

Same friends took a swim with me late this afternoon. We wondered what it is about swimming that makes you feel so great afterwards. The water can't be too warm, but can be salted or fresh for the effect to occur. Is it something so logical as negative ions or increased endorphins? I prefer to think it has more to do with state. We are, after all, 97% water ourselves. On a cellular level we are liquid, and our cellular memory is of liquid.

When we return to the water, we leave so much of our physical legacy behind. Stepping from the airy shore we swim through a bouyant atmosphere which we can finally see. It cools our skin, we displace it as it clings and drips from us, moves aside for us, and cradles us. Floating, we defy gravity. Kicking and pulling, we abandon bipedalism.

I need water like some people need trees, mountains or desert. It's good to know what you need.

****************************

For Josef at A Blog Ringing in the Empty Sky, a kindred spirit in blogging:

Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.
Teilhard de Chardin
-a morning prayer

posted by Lisa on 8:34 PM link |

9.13.2002

my first north millerton paddle

Wind from the south today -- unusual. It really began to pick up in the half hour before I went out. It began as a gentle wash but by the time I brought all my gear down the wind was up to probably 15 knots.
I tacked upwind at about 110 degrees and then tacked back with the wind at my back. Left just ahead of the high tide.

I wore my paddle skirt but didn't attach it to the boat -- trying to take advantage of the rare sunshine. The wind was to my advantage once I reached the inlet and made it past the small mouth eddy. I was able to float with very little paddle input deep inside the little arroyo. I floated past a preening egret, cleaning his long feathers. There were lots of egrets. I could hear and see crabs scuttling up the banks to my right into the low scrubby grasses whose vines remind me of mangroves. The mud, the crabs, the abundance of life here all remind me of Mexico or the Everglades anyways.

The tide gently floated and twirled me. I closed my eyes and heard nothing, I opened my eyes and heard the wind ruffle the feathers of an egret.

There is a breach down here in the old railroad track where the tidal water was rushing in. I didn't go in cause I wasn't sure about getting back out. I suppose I could have ported back if needbe. There was a blue heron guarding the entrance, watching the flippling little fish in the short rapids. As I came near he suddenly called out and then flew across the little body of water into the wetlands between me and the bay. As I floated past the breach I could see lots of surface activity in the water beyond the old railway. It looked like small fins and reminded me of bat ray wings. But it's extremely shallow coming in here and I can't imagine how they would have arrived.

Heading back I saw a couple of cormorants, so I suppose that I could have seen the rear of a diving cormorant or two.

As I continued to drift beyond the breach I was struck by wide snakelike wounds that meandered east-west across the floor of this body of water. I was in less than 10" of water. The lines were about 8" wide and symmetrical. The angles and length between curves seemed symettrical too. They were very unusual. I guess that what causes them is the sun's heat when the water completely recedes from this mudflat. Over time the hairline cracks widen and smooth out with the constant ebb and tide of water to ease the hard angles.

This water sits on top of the San Andreas faultline. The epicenter of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is only several miles away. Could these curvey lines be related to the fault? I don't know.

I took the opposite tack coming back across so that I'd be heading into the waves for the last tack back into the beach. Saw a harbor seal pop up about forty or fifty feet off the end of the pier. Sometimes they are curious about kayakers and I waited hoping he'd surface again. This time of year there are plenty of kayakers about -- too many for a harbor seal's taste I'm sure.

posted by Lisa on 6:47 PM link |

9.12.2002

9.12.02

I can't stop listening to Rabbit Songs by Hem.
It's the best thing I've heard...

After some thought I've changed my mind about the value of celebrating the 1-year anniversary of 9-11 yesterday. I think that marking the day with some kind of personal ritual has benefit. I do feel better knowing that a year has passed and that we are still intact as humans -- it felt good to write '9-12-02'.

I watched a documentary on HBO last night that had footage from the day. I never saw too much of it cause i didn't have tv back then. It blew my mind, mostly because so many people were directly involved and affected, not just those who were in the towers or who died there, but all of lower manhattan as the clouds of destruction blew down the streets and covered everybody in dust.

The most powerful thing for me to remember is how we all felt sorrow at the same time, and that for a day or a week, most of the planet united around that.

Just as my whole life stops when my back goes out, the world stopped when it saw such horror perpetrated by fanatics against innoocents. It's just good to know that we care, it's good to remember that we do.

posted by Lisa on 11:44 PM link |

9.10.2002

9.10.02

I said goodbye to a new friend last week. She left her home of many years, and a town she loved, to live in an assisted living facility in another state close to her family.

She did this with grace and dignity that saved the parting from sentimentality. She knew that the time had come to leave her home, and she didn't rail against the unfairness, or bitterly rue the day -- nor did she break down -- at least not in front of her assembled friends and neighbors. Instead, she thanked each friend and neighbor for their contribution to her and shared a private moment with each. I can't imagine what it would be like to be driven away from my home knowing that I would most likely never see it again. What a tough passage to undertake.

It's tough hanging in. It would be so much easier to die in a sudden fashion -- by accident or heart attack. The suffering would be less. What my friend is going through now, adjusting to a new life in a new place is tough, but it's part of a long life well-lived. Truthfully, it's more fortunate to live through the sadness of moving on, to say a conscious goodbye to the people and places we love, than it is fortunate to die without suffering. Suffering is where we find out what we're made of and what others are made of. She has awed me.

I saw an old friend last week too. He was visiting from the east coast. It was like falling off a log to spend the day with him and another friend of ours. What a blessing to have friends like that -- where 10+ years can go by and it feels like it was yesterday except that we're talking about what we've done in those years. It's really been 18 years since we spent time together on a regular basis. If we keep up this rate of getting together, and live normal life spans, we only have 4 or 5 meetings left. That thought makes life seem too short.

These separations are what happen because we move. We move around the country and around the world. I've left southern California for northern. For awhile I left the country altogether. I've been keeping up a hectic schedule of driving to southern California to stay close to neices and family, but it's too hard on me to keep it up. I have friends everywhere. Hell, it's even hard to get together with friends here in the bay area. Oakland and San Francisco are an hour and a half away. The closest big towns are 35 minutes away. Time and distance make it hard to get together. I think that's why the tv show 'Friends' is so appealing -- how great would it be if all the people you wanted to be near were near?

This is why I feel a big interest today in lifeforms that don't move, or don't move much. I'm drawn to the sponges, the barnacles and oysters, the clams, mussels, limpets, piddocks and sea stars.

Did you know that a sea star can travel 3-4 miles in a month? I'm taking them off my list. They move too much for me right now. I'm collecting friends that stay put.

Sponges multiply. In the sheltered part of our beach there are few sponges, but in the cove to the north where the wind waves and the tidal action is more constant there are many. The waves must cause breakage. When a piece breaks off it lodges nearby and becomes an autonomous life itself. A sponge neighborhood is thriving along this shore.

Most of the barnacles here are acorn barnacles. They are sessile, from the Latin meaning to sit. They attach themselves to a permanent base after a short period of free-swimming early in life. They afix themselves with a cement-like glue and they stay put. Some attach themselves to a moving object, of course, such as a boat, or even the carapace of a crab like one I found the other day -- covered in little acorn barnacles. They must have really slowed him down.

At low tide today I sat and watched a part of the shoreline that was several inches below water. The water was moving but gently, and there were no crabs or other ambulatory species about. But the life force was abundant. Any given rock might house oysters, mussels, limpets, barnacles, and sponges, along with unidentified algae. The clams or mussels in the area were noisy with clicking and once a minute or so somebody was shooting a spray of water. I was never looking directly at the place where the spitting came from.

I've been wondering why I rarely see crabs walking about the flats during low tides, but I find crab bodies after every high tide. Today I stopped looking. I'm learning to take comfort from the sessile forms of life. I've never been a person who stays, but its something I aspire to. I'll watch the tidepools and the mudflats and sit. I'll just sit and watch.

posted by Lisa on 9:09 PM link |

9.04.2002

9.04.02

"Excavations in the ancient city of Ephesus on the coast of Turkey have uncovered a colonnaded marble road from the harbor where distinguished visitors in Roman times could make a triumphal entry after landing. The point of debarkation is now over a mile from the sea."
Waves and Beaches
-Willard Bascom

The sea and land perform a dance that continually alters the places where they meet. The sea adds sand to a coastline, filling in bays here, straightening shorelines there. The sea breaks down rocky cliffs then oblique currents carry the resultant sand away, leaving less land in its place.

Wind waves begin with wind over calm seas -- surface tension is created by the wind and ripples form. The sides of these small waves catch more wind and the waves grow -- absorbing the energy of the wind. The velocity of the wind, the duration of time the wind is blowing, and the extent of open area the wind is blowing over (fetch) all determine the size of waves.

The actual sea is much more confused than this. There are counteracting winds, old seas, tides, friction applied to air whose turbulence creates new wave action.

Over distance, small waves become larger, that is, their period and their height increase until a point at which the sea is as big as it can be given the velocity of the wind. Increasing the fetch or lengthening the amount of time the wind blows cannot create higher waves. This is a fully developed sea.

There are limits. It's good to know that about waves. A wave will break when it reaches a ratio of 1:7 - height to length.

Of course, sometimes those limits are beyond human capacity to survive. Joseph Conrad in Typhoon describes it like this:

"It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath...This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one's kind."

I've felt that way paddling out through mild shorebreak. Some days I feel that way just contemplating whether or not to answer the telephone.

Today I watch the small bay waves push a berm of sand beachward. A juvenile double-crested cormorant swallows a little fish pulled out of the sea grasses and shakes the water off its head. Most seas are not fully developed. Most seas come in peace and take no lives, content to move a little sand today, and a little bit more tomorrow.

posted by Lisa on 10:33 PM link |

9.03.2002

9.04.02

I've worked a long day and though I have much to say, don't have energy to say much.

I will share one of my favorite William Stafford poems, though:

Representing Far Places

In the canoe wilderness branches wait for winter;
every leaf concentrates; a drop from the paddle falls.
Up through water at the dip of a falling leaf
to the sky's drop of light or the smell of another star
fish in the lake leap arcs of realization,
hard fins prying out from the dark below.

Often in society when the talk turns witty
you think of that place, and can't polarize at all:
it would be a kind of treason. The land fans in your head
canyon by canyon; steep roads diverge.
Representing far places you stand in the room,
all that you know merely a weight in the weather.

It is all right to be simply the way you have to be,
among contradictory ridges in some crescendo of knowing.

-stafford

****

I can't write like that. Not many can. He's the best poet I know.

****

Check out this new blog by Ken Thompson: Brooklyn Memories. He's collecting and telling stories about Brooklyn. The inaugural memory is a sweet story about kite-flying and an unexpected friendship back in a time "when being an elevator operator was a skill job". I like it a lot.

posted by Lisa on 9:22 PM link |

9.02.2002

9.2.02

Today I urge everyone within earshot to add their voice to the gathering opposition to Bush's war. Move On is collecting signatures and statements to be presented to Senators. On August 28th, they hand-delivered same to Senate offices around the country. Our representatives need support if they are to stand up to Bush and his cronies. They are more likely to act if they know they have the people's say.
As politicians from Scowcroft, Kissinger, Feinstein and Leahy, to world leaders such as Nelson Mandela speak out, it is imperative that we, the american people, speak out also. Silence is a mandate of its own.
I hope that Colin Powell publicly voices his opposition to this catostrophic idea soon.

If you'd like to write a personal letter to the President, here's his address:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

posted by Lisa on 7:56 PM link |