Excerpt:
...each encounter was protracted, and each animal was aware of my presence and endured it. We reached a rare trans-species rapprochement, with some measure of trust on both sides. I spent much of an afternoon watching the woodpecker... remembered the woodpecker when I encountered a yellow warbler – surely among the most piercingly beautiful of birds -- in a poem by Leslie Monsour, “Indelibility” (The Alarming Beauty of the Sky, 2005):
“A whistle in the palm outside my window
Announced a yellow warbler perched there like
A feathered spark, a sun-flake with a pinto
Wing. I saw it flicker, burn, then spike
The air in take-off. Gone. And yet the bird
Remains. The world outside is not the same,
With shifting shadows, air and time disturbed;
But in my heart is locked the singing flame.”
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Addendum: 'This reminds me...."
"A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He
sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he
lives in his den for two days without leaving...
One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand
deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and
he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and
soak him off like a stubborn label.
...
I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a
weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.
Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the
quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of
shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk...
The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap
of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the
thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind
me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around—and the next instant, inexplicably,
I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel! I'd never seen one wild before.
...
The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an
enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness
twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the
key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an
overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow
to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of
brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied
our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the
world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked
at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But
we don't. We keep our skulls. So.
He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don't remember what
shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from
the weasel's brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel
felt the yank of separation, the careening splash-down into real life and the
urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited
motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he
didn't return.
Please do not tell me about "approach-avoidance
conflicts." I tell you I've been in that weasel's brain for sixty seconds,
and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and
secret tapes-but the weasel and I both plugged into another tape
simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time.
...
I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I
suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death
painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a
fierce and pointed will.
I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat.
I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held
on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We
could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I
could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on
mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair
tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is
single...
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by
the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the
other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to
stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender
and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A
weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to,
yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient,
and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp
wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how
you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till
your eyes burn out and drop...~Annie Dillard, 'Living Like Weasels'
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