Eye on the Sparrow

It was one day early in summer, before the hot haze had settled into the peaks and valleys of the concrete landscape, before we planned our days around the bearable early hours and the windows were still open to breezes that refreshed rather than choked. I approached the back doorstep of our ancient brick-walk-up, and stared at the rubber welcome mat. There was something on the mat. Besides "Welcome".

There was a piece of brown fluff. A murmur of pity came to my lips. Another one of those baby birds that had fallen from the perilous nests that clung desperate to the side of the building, most likely. It had stormed a few days previous, and we'd found a pathetic skeleton or two. His eye is on the sparrow, nonetheless.

When I crouched down to try and figure out what to do with the poor little thing, I found to my shock that he was still alive. Very, very still - but still tremblingly alive. One of his minuscule eyes blinked at me. Could he still move? I poked him gently with my house key, and he tried to inch forward, but tumbled onto his side. Injured. He wouldn't last a few short hours in the cruel city - between car, bold squirrels, and stray cats. Should I let nature take its course, or-?

I glanced around, looking for other birds. They say that they'll take care of an orphan, and that old story about the "human smell" apparently does not hold true. So I kept an eye on him from the nearby window, and scrolled through articles about care for baby birds on my phone. No rescuers came by. I waited. After a time, an orange tabby that I'd  never seen started slinking against the back wall of the garden. He would make quick work of my little friend. I just couldn't watch it happen. Against all I've been told about the survival rate of wild animals babies in well-intentioned but bumbling human hands, the cosy shoebox being the last thing they experience of this wide wide world, I took him in.

And put him in a shoebox.

He was so frightened by whatever total nightmare he had already lived through (also fallen from a  nest during the stormy winds, I figured) and was continuing to live through, that he was completely silent. Not a peep. I read up quickly on food, since he was obviously very weak. Hardboiled eggs, dog food, mealworms - these sufficed. How to get him to take food from me, though? "Tap the beak with tweezers," one site claimed. "The beak will open instinctively, since it mimics the mother." Really. I was a little skeptical, but I gave it a try, and-

Whoosh! His beak flew so wide that the rest of his head disappeared. Everything about his little body was screaming "Feed me!" though he was still mysteriously silent. He gulped down the wet kibble I had hurriedly purchased in a dusty can at the corner grocery. When I paid for it, I eyed the large, mustached proprietor and wondered if he ever imagined why he had stocked that can of dog food, where it was end up.

Well, over the course of about a week, in the stomach of a very hungry baby house sparrow.

A few days later, he began to peep, first a little. Then a lot. Early in the morning, he knew when the sun came up before we humans noticed, and reminded us from the shoebox next to the bed that it was feeding time. Cheeeep. Cheeeep. Cheeeep. We grew fond of his insistence. You would think it would be irritating, but somehow it wasn't. It was just fun. We learned about the crop, the first stomach where they store food, because we noticed a swelling and became worried at first. He was so pre-feather at that point, you could see the color and texture of whatever he ate right through the thin, tightened skin on his neck.

We fed him, on the hour in the daytime. And he grew, in stature and feather. And out of his shoebox into a large shipping box. We called him Oliver. (Please sir, may I have some more?) We brought him to the green grass so he could learn to hop. And eventually, flap his wings. No two parents could be prouder than we to see him flutter for the first time. He came eventually to the habit of perching on our shoulders (or heads), and I think he saw us as some kind of magical combination of his flock and his favorite tree. He did, as they say, imprint on us. Or what it the other way around? We were both, somewhat inexplicably, devoted to this little creature. As I have said, it was downright fun.

A week or two later, we could release him to hop and fly a bit and then he would come back to be fed. We had a special call that he probably thought was hilarious (the other birds surely did), a kissing-sort of sound into the air that he always responded to, cheeped right back. Even in the woods of Wisconsin (we figured we couldn't leave him alone yet, when a family cabin trip came around), he would come back to us after an hour or so of exploring. We bought him his first seeds there, taught him as best as we could to crack them open, the awkward human parents that we were. Our niece christened him "Olive-bird" in lieu of Oliver. It seemed to fit.

One night at the cabin, Olive-bird did not come back before dark. And a storm rolled in. We both paced up and down the wet deck under the eaves, calling for him long after it was clearly futile. I tried not to worry myself sick. We eventually went to bed. In the morning, he appeared on the patio, bedraggled and drenched, but nevertheless alive. And very pushy about his breakfast. Cheeeep! Maybe, we reasoned, if he could learn to feed himself, he would make it as a wild sparrow after all, having weathered such a storm. Goodness knows he probably had all kinds of baby birdie trauma from that fated night he first fell from the nest. 

Here is Oliver, as he rode to and from the cabin on the headrest by Karl. 

A week back in our familiar backyard, and he finally began to make good friends with the other birds. We fed them all seeds, filled a glass pie pan as a makeshift bird bath, and hoped that he would be popular because of his human connections who seemed to make food and water appear out of no where. It seemed to have worked, because one day, about a week ago now, he was no where to be found. This bird had flown.

We're still a little wistful about the fact that he hasn't come back to visit. We wonder if he's okay, or if something in the course of cruel nature eventually got him in the end. But rather than dwell on these things too much, it is good to thank the One who has His eye on the sparrow. All of them, all of us. What a gift to see one of His creatures - the lowly house sparrow, usually reviled for their commonness - up close and so dear.

And sometimes I just pretend that he's away at college, and he'll inevitably show up for handouts every once in a while when he runs out of other options.

Cheeeeep!

Novel in a Month

National Novel Writing Month (once confined to November) has now begun to spread its fingers into the rest of the calendar year, and I  finally signed up after all these years of telling myself I would. The gist is this: you get 30 days to write 50,000 words. So, by the end of June, I will have one messy, unedited (but completed) novel. Here 'goes nothin'! Or everything. In the words of Annie Dillard: 

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.” (The Writing Life)

Luminous Details

Poet Ezra Pound apparently spent time on the lookout for what he called "luminous details." 

For him, these were "any small fact that casts light on larger realities". 

His poems are esoteric, strange, impenetrable even - but they often turn on the dizzying accumulation of many such particulars. 

These could be objects, words, persons, names, but they must have a certain quality that glows and pulsates with a life all their own.

 I find this to be a mesmerizing and joy-filled understanding of language and our world.


In other words, he could see enormous significance in the tiniest of details. 








Like yesterday, when I went out after the storm.

Cold lilac scents, damp sharp chill of fallen pine.

Bedraggled branches broken off for their unbelief. 

The sun fierce and sharp. 

Confetti petals in the street.

Puddle-mirrors back-illuminating the late afternoon.

Like it does in cities with canals, like Venice or Amsterdam. 

Pure light released on my eyes (almost) unmediated. 

Some Things from Spring

An anything-but-comprehensive list of the delights of the past week, which is to say Spring Break.

 

Sunday. We are the Easter morning people. We expand the dining room table by two leaves to fit in family, then friends. Our first snips of chives spice up spring salads, and we try to figure out how many different meals we'll be able to make from the leftover eggs, ham, and fruit. (It turns out there are quite a few.) The feast moves out later to grilling in Minnetonka, with nieces ferreting out eggs impossibly-hid, blooms and sunshine everywhere, and a leisurely white wine on a sunny deck. 

 

Monday. In just two hours, Mom, little bro, and I combine our energies with a burly Lacrosse team from St. Thomas and pack up 95 boxes of food to Haiti. That's over 20,000 meals! Pray for the victims of the cholera epidemic; the situation is still quite grave. 

Tuesday. Cookies and cousins for breakfast. Delish.


Later, the art & food date with my mom-in-law, a.k.a. awesome friend.The Russian Art Museum instructs us in the post-Stalin release of artists to greater creativity, and we celebrate craftsmanship of another kind at Patisserie 46 with tasty French morsels. Miam, miam.

Wednesday. I lose my head and an entire morning to wisteria and sunshine. The perfume of blossoms on the trees out front combines with the musty pages of A Room with a View, and I am transported to early 20th-century Italy and the swoopy, swoony advenutres of a tidy young woman brought into contact with real  

Thursday. I bike all over creation on the bright green bikes and end up at the Midtown market to eat holy gyros of heroic proportions with the taller of the bros. What could be more luxurious than to waltz over on a shiny day to be with someone I just love to hang with?

Friday. Husband comes home from work and we take off for a new Belgian-French movie at the Edina Cinema, Le Gamin au vélo (The Boy with the bike). Breaks then warms the heart.


But who ever wants to stop there? 


Followed by a honest-to-golly jug band ("complete" with washboard, donkey jaw, tap dancer, and fife, among other things...) performing the late show at the Dakota. Como Avenue Jug Band, as generous as they are talented, and I get a free album. Sweet.

Projects

I have always been a project person. My little brother used to say proj-deks. It makes me feel like a failure when I cast my eyes about looking at the myriad things I've begun and abandoned. But I'm starting (it's one of my projects) to get more comfortable with the unfinished.

It's funny, my students figured out that cras means tomorrow in Latin and is at the heart of procrastinator, but fortunately they haven't applied it to homework all that much. I cannot say the same. Let's see. A shifting pile of tests to correct. Tangles of yarn wrapped carelessly around some needles...there was a vision in there somewhere. That novel deep in the recesses of computer memory. Good thing machines and paper can hold our place for us. I keep incessant lists. Sometimes I scribble out the things I didn't get to on a given day, which is different (in my mind) from crossing out. That satisfying arrow shaft run straight through the heart of a task is reserved for those things I actually accomplished. I gave no idea when I began this scribble vs. crossing system. But what bothers me is that a good deal of these tasks are things I love to do. So why the negating? Maybe I need to add on to a list when things happen and watch it g r o w. Or move it from one side of the paper to the other. Or take the phrase bake bread, and rather than bake bread, bake bread! Exclamation point! Bread! In my kitchen! Eat! bread

Oh all these frayed edges. I try to tie up the loose ends at the end of each year, taking stock. Did I do what I set out to do? I heard a long time ago that successful people put themselves through these sorts of machinations: making goals, poring over lists, even mission statements, etc. And yet, what is more compelling to me lately is the fact that a great many people I admire thrive in that very tension of not-yet-completed. But who says unfinished means unsuccessful? Look at the "unfinished" symphony, "unfinished" poems, and extraordinary paintings displayed that are technically unfinished. Genius is often not vindicated in the lifetime of the un/fortunate bearer. We are all mere mortals, straining under the weight of a desire to make something immortal, and yet often end up passing it on to the next generation.

That was a bit grandiose. We're just talking about a loaf of bread here, or maybe a pastel drawing. Or are we?

My art teacher purposefully encourages us to have several projects going at once in order to keep fresh eyes and sane mind, which would probably not happen if you stared at the same graphite drawing for hours on end. By design, the creative life lives with a holy mess of works already-not-yet perfected.

Which gets me thinking: how am I any greater than my Lord, the One who began a good work in me? It is far from done, but He will be faithful to complete it until He comes back. Really, my life is one extended, unfinished project, projected far out there until only-He-knows-when. Someday. And that someday hangs upon those words which only He could say:

It is finished.

Old-Fashioned Ski Holiday

Making Images

One of the biggest perks of my job is that the faculty are encouraged to keep learning, growing, and thinking. This objective is fulfilled by a great many things on the gritty, daily level and also in terms of soaring mission and vision. Near the end of last semester, I shyly sidled up to one of the art teachers and explained that I've always liked drawing and painting and would like to deepen my skills. With sharp eyes and warm smile, she responded with a hearty invitation to attend her class the next semester. Most of us have two hours carved out of the six-hour day as preparation time, and I would trade in one of those to sit in the large-windowed art room with eighth grade girls once a day, surrounded by the comfortable smells of acrylics, charcoal, and hard work.

As it happens, spending an hour a day staring at things - well, changes your eyes. And if you're like me, it makes you think about how those changes affect the person, the human being. What if my eyes, in turn, change the world? What does it mean to look at a thing and copy it? Are there moral implications to the way I crouch over a piece of paper and scratch a piece of charcoal over it? If this seems overly thoughtful, I am not the first one to find this process worrisome. We are told that the Israelites, for example, received the following command:

"You shall not make yourselves a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them for I the Lord am a jealous god." (Exodus 20:4)

Similar (though not identical) preoccupations haunt Plato's Republic. My senior high students and I are read about the philosopher's uneasiness with the way that art imitates real things. His argument is based on different reasoning than that of the second commandment. Plato thinks that this world (trees, people, etc.) are already a copy of the True Reality (or Forms), so copying them again through art makes them even weaker, like when you make a photocopy of a photocopy and the quality diminishes. The Lord God, by contrast, is Reality, and so is His creation all around us, but He does not want us putting those two realities on equal footing in terms of worship. Either way, it seems as if art is anything but a neutral activity.

I bend over a piece and scribble in the bus, trying heard to make the peel of the orange "pop out" from the rest of the drawing, when a gentleman asks if I am an art student. I respond with a half-smile - "in a manner of speaking". He looks at what I am doing, copying from a magazine cutout, and says: "That's cheating." My eyebrows heighten. "Oh?" "You're going from a two-dimensional source to a two-dimensional drawing. The real thing is to copy from a three-dimensioned thing." I mumble something about how we do still-lifes in class, but inside my head the wheels are turning. Cheating - why does he think that? Rather than offended, I'm fascinated by his reasoning. Like Socrates, is he saying that if you copy from a copy from a copy from a copy-?

But sir, every student starts with this. Copying. And doing so changes your eyes.

Last Sunday, I noticed the carpet in church for the first time in eleven-some years. It is a grid pattern, made to look like swaths of woven strips. The color is a deep grayish purple. I listen to the sermon and imagine how I could blend that color with poppy red, indigo blue and white. The details in wood grain, and shapes of shadows, and the lines that define someone's face all leap out at me as details that my usual, big-picture take on life would normally gloss over. You know how most humans read - they see the first and last letters of a word and the brain deduces the rest. I normally do that with everything. It's an integrated, cosmic way to look at life, but it is good to learn how to be a careful observer, too.

In that vein, I have been appreciating the wise words and life of Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist and writer. I came across a collection of his writings in a thrift shop this week. This man led a deeply-observant life, deliberately confining himself to his home in Provence during the final 40 years of his life. Weary of the dry, dead specimens in the laboratories that had marked the first part of his career, he chose a spot where he could be surrounded by the living, buzzing flora and fauna of his neighborhood. He writes to an imagined group of former colleagues:

"You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labor in a torture chamber and dissecting room, I make my observations under the blue sky to the song of the Cicadas, you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life." (5, The Passionate Observer, italics mine).

Some would argue that to hide oneself away and study only the forms of life located in one's backyard is tragically provincial. However, his voluminous writings - both delightful to read and scientifically well-respected - confirm that careful, minuscule considerations of the reality that immediately surround us can be of utmost importance.

Back in the art room, I turn the paper upside-down to change the perspective, to get a fresh look. But I'm still wondering. When I create a picture - whether it be in the deliberate arrangement of words that make up this blog post or with the strokes of a pencil that somehow call to mind a sleeping woman at a table - what am I doing, exactly?

It is a heady thought, yet inescapable: like my Creator, I create. Does this sound presumptuous, especially given the stern Exodus warning? Here is mystery, but a sure thing. To make images is to participate in the divine nature. First we observe and we see what God has made. Leaves, noses, insects, mountains, color, shape. Then comes the remarkable leap. As Christ said of himself, we "do what we see our Father doing." To copy things is not to reduce them, like Plato said. Rather, we bring the Creator glory; like all symbols, our rendition points to His handiwork. Or, as Mark Noll writes: "for believers to be studying created things is to be studying the works of Christ" (Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind). I would add that for believers to study and copy His masterpieces is to be an apprentice to him and share in his labor. Perhaps we can become more like the students of the great painters, our words and deeds bearing the name of our Master's workshop and not our own.

Loca-Voracious

There was something about this past year that brought what was near more into focus, and let the stunning faraways remain a pleasant blur for a while. What is this place called home, and what is our needful commitment to it as humans? Annie Dillard's words come to mind. We are here on earth to "explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that have been so startlingly set down, if we can't learn why"(Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Fill the earth and have dominion...and what about my particular corner of the world?

One of the ways to keep yourself to the neighborhood is to accept limits. This kind of discipline is unfashionable, but one wonders if an occasional fast from the frenzied travel so popular in our time might be good for the soul. The Amish seem to think so, not accepting any technology that pushes them beyond the reach of their own arms and feet. We are far from bonnets and hand plows in downtown Minneapolis (though horse-drawn carriages do meander through Loring Park at time). Still, our chosen means of transportation this year really did circumscribe our pathways to keep to the local. We exchanged international flights for buses and bikes, continental high-speed trains for the occasional car trip. We barely crossed state lines (thank you, Wisconsin) and what was the result?

A teensy bit of adjustment. "Oh my word, can you believe we haven't boarded a plane in six months?" Mild twinges of jealousy while eying passengers of the light rail with large suitcases, obviously headed for an airline terminal and some other magical place. Gratitude does not come easy to us humans, but practice does help. Once we quieted ourselves, took a deep breath, and looked 'round about for contentment - well.

There is a veritable feast of beauty in Minnesota and its environs. We climbed over rugged rocks, ruddy with ore lines along Superior's North Shore, striking color against that vast, wild stretch of tumultuous blue. That lake is never the same exact hue two glimpses in a row - you can swing around once, train your eyes upon it again, and it will have changed. (Try it next time. )

Everywhere you turn in this land there are mirror pools upon the tens of thousands, reflecting city and forest by turns, souvenirs from the glaciers' laborious, behemoth voyage over the earth so many millennia ago. And the southern edges of the state that were somehow missed by those massive patches of ancient ice, leaving dizzying river-bluff

drops. It was a lazy summer afternoon in July, floating in an inner tube on that winding, green strip of water, looking up for eagles and down for agates. Not far from there, vintners try to capture the cool, wild mineral flavor of our native homeland in bottles, with increasing (surprising!) success.

Maybe Minnesota has a sense of terroir after all.

I've been reading lately about how other people think about a sense of place. Wendell Berry, the farmer and essayist, manages to be sharply critical and warmly endearing all at once. He writes in Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000):

"The standards of our behavior must be derived, not from the capability of technology, but from the nature of places and and communities. We must shift the priority from production to local adaptation, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift. We must learn to think about propriety in scale and design, as determined by human and ecological health. By such changes we might again make our work an answer to despair" (12, italics mine).

This is timely advice for a whole constellation of societies facing enormous odds economically. It is also timeless, I think. Technology is not a despicable thing by any means (bikes and books are technologies just as much as cars and Kindles are). But writers like Berry push us to carefully consider how the innovations presented to us might change our ways of thinking and dependence, and how they might cause us to reach beyond what is our proper realm and manner of dominion in God's world. I like that...even as I find his words massively challenging.

Another writer who has approached this question of limits from a culinary and personal point of view is Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal Vegetable, Miracle (2007), an enjoyable account of her family's adventure of eating only local for a year on their farm in Appalachia. She writes with conviction, but balanced with enough self-deprecation and realism to make her less preachy and than some (shrill organa-crusader Joan Gussow comes to mind). Kingsolver takes obvious, lavish delight in creating meals that are faithful to her specific patch of ground. It was a sorely-needed reminder for me to turn my attentions again to the significant gratification of making home, whether baking bread, selecting local squash for a soup, or carefully setting the table. The closer we are to the labor that we partake in ourselves, the less separated we feel from the product and the greater our satisfaction. (It's about the only thing Marx and I can agree on.) Moreover, it's all gifts from above: the ability to work, the pleasure in consuming, the sharing with our neighborhood, the wise rule of creation.

David wrote in the psalms to "trust in the Lord, and do good. Dwell in the land and feed on faithfulness." (37:3) I expect as long as we keep our eyes and mouths wide open, they'll be full to the brim, with everything from bread to beauty, abroad or in the backyard. Yum.

saturday stroll