A Morning Moment

“Accustom yourself every morning to look for a moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labor. You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed…you will have for the rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a touch of coexistence with nature. Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights.” – Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse

I found that quote in an article and it struck me as a kind of found poetry. Hermann Hesse, renowned German-Swiss author and Nobel Prize laureate, wrote poetry in addition to his more famous novels and essays.

Hesse is best known for novels such as “Siddhartha,” “Steppenwolf,” and “Demian,” bet he wrote poems throughout his literary career. Not surprisingly, his poetry often explores themes such as self-discovery, spirituality, nature, and the human condition. Those are the philosophical and existential concerns found in his prose writings. His poetic style is characterized by its simplicity, introspection, and lyrical quality, reflecting his deep contemplation of life’s mysteries and his quest for meaning and enlightenment.

His poem “Stages” appears in his last novel The Glass Bead Game. With that novel, he won the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1946.

STAGES
As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.

The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slave of permanence.
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

He also wrote poems about more common themes, such as love or loss.

WITHOUT YOU
(Translated by James Wright)
My Pillow gazes upon me at night
Empty as a gravestone;
I never thought it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Not to lie down asleep in your hair.

I lie alone in a silent house,
The hanging lamp darkened,
And gently stretch out my hands
To gather in yours,
And softly press my warm mouth
Toward you, and kiss myself, exhausted and weak-
Then suddenly I’m awake
And all around me the cold night grows still.
The star in the window shines clearly-
Where is your blond hair,
Where your sweet mouth?

Now I drink pain in every delight
And poison in every wine;
I never knew it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Alone, without you.

Animal Sense

Elephants moving to higher ground.

Do you remember back in December 2004 when giant tsunami waves slammed into Sri Lanka and the India coastlines? One story that kept getting retold was that wild and domestic animals seemed to know what was about to happen and fled to safety. Eyewitnesses reported that elephants screamed and ran for higher ground, and dogs refused to go outdoors, flamingos abandoned their low-lying breeding areas, and zoo animals rushed into their shelters and could not be enticed to come back out.

I was reminded of this while watching the new Netflix film Leave the World Behind (oddly produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company known more for documentaries). In the film, flamingoes, deer and other creatures seem to sense that something is wrong in he world.

Do animals possess a “sixth sense” that allows them to know in advance when natural events such as storms and earthquakes will occur? The first response to this question is generally that animals’ more acute hearing and other senses might give them a big advantage over humans.

After that 2004 tsunami, relatively few animals were reported dead. In the world’s most earthquake-prone country, Japan, researchers have long studied animals in hopes of discovering what they hear or feel before earthquakes in the hope of using it as a predictive tool.

Since earthquakes bring vibrational changes on land and in water and storms cause electromagnetic changes in the atmosphere, some people believe animals use their sense of hearing and smell to determine something is coming.

Did humans also have this early warning sense at one time, but lost it as they evolved and moved away from nature?

I posted years ago about something I saw on the Small Farm Life blog (no longer active) by Fritz Nordengren where he wrote that on a June day he was  mowing when he noticed that his ducks had returned to their pen earlier than usual. Then he saw that a flock of geese changed direction over the farm and set down in a pond that they don’t normally go to.  His dog, who usually watches him mow from under the deck, followed him back and forth in the field. He went inside and checked his computer for local radar and found that a tornado had struck about 30 minutes from his farm.

Many animals sense a change in pressure and other atmospheric factors. An old nature watcher told me when I was a kid that I should watch birds. he said some, like swallows, will fly much closer to the ground prior to a thunderstorms.  Fly fishermen know that insects would fly lower and the birds followed to feed on them. 

I saw  a post that said that a survey done via Google Earth imagery showed that across the planet cattle and flock animals tend to face north.  Do they sense the earth’s magnetic field?  It makes sense. Researchers have shown that many birds do.

But scientists are not totally on board with animals having a living Doppler radar system.

I have written about a variety of nature signs that some people believe can be predictive, especially about the weather. The little woolly bear caterpillar supposedly predicts the severity of the coming winter locally. Perhaps that is more weather lore than science, but it is worth remembering that rather silly traditions such as Groundhog Day go back to a time when the careful observation of animal behaviors was predictive for things like planting, harvesting and even migration to warmer climates.

Surveying the Landscape

We know Henry David Thoreau for his writing but he did other things that are less well known. For example, Thoreau earned a living as a land surveyor.

That is interesting training for a writer. We all “survey the landscape” sometimes. Landscape is everything you can see when you look across an area of land, including hills, rivers, buildings, trees, and plants. I also think of “surveying” in a more figurative way. When we survey the landscape or “survey the scene” we are looking for more than the things before our eyes.

You enter a big party and survey the scene taking in the people and the room, but also making some judgments about things like the mood and how friendly the crowd will be for you.

Thoreau first traveled into the Maine woods in 1846 during some time away from his second summer at Walden Pond. He wasn’t a hermit trapped in that little cabin. “On the 31st of August, 1846, I left Concord in Massachusetts for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine.”  That’s the opening of Thoreau’s The Maine Woods. As Thoreau explores and surveys Mt. Katahdin, Lake Chesuncook, the Allagash River, and the East Branch of the Penobscot, he writes about the land and about himself.

Thoreau’s maps of Maine marked the coasts, rivers, and hills, and it was work that must have given him some mixed feelings. Surveying took him into the woods and gave him the chance to observe nature closely, but his surveys were moving that nature towards human intervention, settlement, and land sales.

Ultimately, surveys often lead to the destruction of the landscape. I wonder if that bothered him. It must have had an impact on his observation skills and it must have influenced what and how he wrote. I don’t have any evidence of that at hand, but I suspect some Ph.D student has written a dissertation about it.

“Plat of that part of R W Emerson’s Woodlot and Meadow by Waldon Pond contained within the Lincoln Bounds; the woodlot being a part of what was known in 1746 as Samuel Hapwood’s ‘pasture’ and deeded by him as such to his ‘son Jonathan, tanner.’ Surveyed by H. D. Thoreau March 1850.

Through the Eyes of a Child

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” – Baudelaire

Isaac Newton saw his world-changing discoveries as something he did when he was “like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Photo:Diego F. Parra

Yesterday, I spent the day with my two grandchildren, ages 3 years and 9 months. Those times are when I often come closest to recovering from my childhood moments of discovery and a different way of seeing the world. We use the word “wonderful” for many things that are not full of wonder – or perhaps, they are filled with wonder but we fail to see it. Think of looking up at the night sky, or at a wave forming and crashing or a plant blooming or making fruit, or a young bird testing its wings. Wonderful.

I came to these thoughts from our play time yesterday and noted them because of an article on The Marginalian (a website often filled with wonder). It was mostly about observing as done by John Steinbeck. He is an author that I read very intensely in my teen years, but have read much of late.

The book that was quoted is his non-fiction The Log from the Sea of Cortez which I had not read. This somewhat forgotten book of his (as compared to his Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden) is about one of his marine biology expeditions in the Gulf of California, but in some ways, it is a book on how to observe and how to think.

Here is one excerpt:

As always when one is collecting, we were soon joined by a number of small boys. The very posture of search, the slow movement with the head down, seems to draw people. “What did you lose?” they ask.
“Nothing.”
“Then what do you search for?” And this is an embarrassing question. We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another, as this young man searches for a warm light in his wife’s eyes and that one for the hot warmth of fighting. These little boys and young men on the tide flat do not even know that they search for such things too. We say to them, “We are looking for curios, for certain small animals.”
Then the little boys help us to search.

Though it seems like the boys and the adults were searching for different things, they really were searching for the same things.

My title makes me think of the dreamy Moody Blues song, “Eyes of a Child.” It is on the album To Our Children’s Children’s Children. Those will be my great-grandchildren who I don’t expect to ever meet. That concept album is mostly about the world we leave the generations after us. I also think it is about how we see the world and the idea of observing it through those childlike eyes that see wonder and are full of curiosity about the what, why, and how of so many things.

I do sometimes think that my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and beyond might one day read things I have written – on paper or online. Some of those words are about me, our family, their grandfather, their father, and even about them in my imaginings. Although many of those words are through the eyes of an adult and now an old man, I hope some of them came from the place that I once was as a child too.

“We dismiss wonder commonly with childhood. Much later, when life’s pace has slackened, wonder may return. The mind then may find so much inviting wonder the whole world becomes wonderful. Then one thing is scarcely more wonderful than is another. But, greatest wonder, our wonder soon lapses. A rainbow every morning who would pause to look at? The wonderful which comes often or is plentifully about us is soon taken for granted. That is practical enough. It allows us to get on with life. But it may stultify if it cannot on occasion be thrown off. To recapture now and then childhood’s wonder, is to secure a driving force for occasional grown-up thoughts.” – Charles Scott Sherrington

The Full Moon Is There Even When It Is Not Here

The May 2023 Full Moon made its appearance on May 5. It did not appear to me in Paradelle because it was cloudy and rainy. But the Flower Moon was there and this weekend will be filled with flowers as the temperatures finally climb into the seventies. That was the second Full Moon of this spring and the second after the spring equinox. There was also a Penumbral Lunar Eclipse at the same time as the Full Moon. (Technically 9 minutes before its peak.)

The May Full Moon is in Scorpio. The predictions don’t sound very good for those who believe in such things. One source says, “Scorpio rules the eighth house of sex, death, and transformation as well as the reproductive and excretory systems and the sacral chakra. The focus here is on what is buried, and themes of rot and renewal, endings and beginnings…Scorpio is the patron sign of obsession (sorry, not sorry) and this eclipse points to patterns, compulsions, and behaviors that we repeat but reap no reward from. This eclipse wants you to cut that s–t out. Scorpio is about what we keep hidden from others so these obsessions, underlying energies, personal pains, and anxious attachments are for us to identify, expose, politely thank, and heartily cast out.”

As with all astronomical and celestial events, happenings in nature, and many very human events around us, things go unobserved. Our view of the stars and planets shirt. The sun rises in a slightly different place each morning. Trees, leaf out, bloom, and produce fruits and seeds during spring whether or not you take notes. People you don’t know die. People you know get depressed but for whatever reason you never noticed. People, nature and the universe doesn’t always announce themselves to us. You have to be observant.

Will 2021 Be A Mast Year?

Image by klimkin from Pixabay

Acorns have been bombing my home’s roof and deck and pinging the roof of the metal shed in the backyard heavily since late summer. The quantity of acorns seems to vary from year to year. This year might be what is known as a “mast year.”

I had to look up what a mast year means.  The fruits, nuts, berries, and buds produced by trees and bushes are called “mast.” Things like walnuts, pecans, hickory nuts, hard seeds, and acorns are called hard masts, and berries and fruits, and buds are soft mast. A mast year is a year when the amount of that mast is unusually high in number,

Since my first association with the word “mast” is with a sailing ship, I had to check the etymology of this botanical usage. It comes from Middle English and earlier Old English mete similar to mæst in Old High German where it meant food. If you think of an acorn as food (many animals and some humans do) then inside that shell is the meat.

Can we predict these cycles of acorn plenty? Do we know why they occur? There are theories but it is still mostly a mystery.

These mast years seem to occur in irregular cycles of two to five years. An abundance of acorns is often said to be a nature sign of a bad winter. The folk belief is that squirrels, chipmunks, mice and other animals somehow know that they need to stock up for a bad winter and that nature somehow knows to increase the supply chain of acorns. But there’s no real science behind that folk wisdom and weather lore. that they need to stock up. The Farmers’ Almanac – which has lots of folklore around weather – seems to indicate that if acorn numbers mean a bad winter then almost every year is a bad winter.

But I continue and observe and write about signs of the seasons in nature and keep a nature calendar.

Squirrels, mice, chipmunks and deer feed on the acorns in my neighborhood.  When the trees produce smaller crops for a few consecutive years, they are in effect keeping the populations of these animals in check. But during a mast year, the trees produce more food than the animals can possibly eat.

This abundance causes a boom in the populations of smaller mammals. It also guarantees that some acorns will survive and grow into new trees. Producing nuts slightly stunts the tree’s growth, but as it happens in cycles the tree gets a chance for growth in the non-mast years. Living things generally live to reproduce.

Chipmunks hibernate in cold weather and so in Paradelle, they spend most of the winter sleeping in their dens. I read that one chipmunk can gather up to 165 acorns in a day.  But those cute little Disneyesque critters don’t just eat acorns. Along with seeds and fungi, they will eat grain, fruit, nuts, insects, and worms. I was surprised to find that though they don’t hunt for bird eggs and even nestling birds and baby mice, they will eat them when they find them. They also love to dig in my outdoor potted plants, so cute as Chip and dale might be, they are also pests around here.

In 2020, the chipmunk population locally was insanely large. This year I barely saw any – until the acorns started to fall in late August and now they are all over my backyard and deck. Where were they all spring and summer?

In reading the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers and some other research as a follow-up. I learned a lot about trees. For example, most people probably believe that trees compete with each other for sunlight, water, and nutrients. That isn’t true. In fact, in most settings, they communicate and cooperate.

With acorns, temperature and moisture are probably factors in these cycles, and now it is theorized that oaks might be sending chemical signals to coordinate their production. In my part of the country (Northeast) last winter and spring were generally mild winter and so white and red oak trees are able to produce more of them when they start creating seeds in the spring. A harsh winter or cold spring or freeze can mean little acorn production, or sometimes none at all.

There are still mysteries in all this. How trees communicate with each other is still being explored. We can’t predict when any one species will have a mast year.

but we do better understand what causes it. The weather certainly has a part to play. To produce a healthy crop, the trees need the right combination of temperature and rainfall in the spring.

Phenology is the study of the timing of natural events in relation to the weather. This is the scientific version of weather lore and the studies continue.

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SIDEBAR: Can humans safely eat acorns? Yes, they can be used in a variety of ways. They can be eaten whole, ground up into acorn meal or flour, or made into mush to have their oil extracted. Once you’ve safely leached the tannins from your raw acorns, you can roast them for 15 to 20 minutes and sprinkle them with salt for a snack. I haven’t tried eating yet, but maybe this is a good year for it.

FURTHER READING ON TREES 
The Overstory: A Novel
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate
The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature