field notes:

9.27.2002

egret...egret...whisper it over silver still water at dawn. Listen...it sounds like secret...secret.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 6:21 PM link | comments []

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 Thompson on 3:10 PM link | comments []

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 Thompson on 8:46 PM link | comments []

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 Thompson on 6:56 PM link | comments []

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 Thompson on 11:13 PM link | comments []