Spirit in the Skye

I am nothing; I see all; . . . I am the lover
of uncontained and immortal beauty.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

A week earlier, I had boarded an airplane with no company but my backpack, entrusted EasyJet to carry me from Cologne to London, and then spent the next week working my way northward to Scotland. American by birth, Scottish by soul, always inexplicably drawn to an area of the world known to me only through Robert Burns and sheet music for my oboe, I stood today on the Isle of Skye, a “thin place” between the seen and the unseen, between people and spirits, between perception and reality.

The next year, my roommate would ask me whether, when I missed Scotland, I was longing for where I had been or who I had been when I was there, but I cannot unravel the one from the other. Here, on the Isle of Skye, I am where I am; we are one and the same. Like the island, I have finally separated from the rest of my kind, independent. I am weightless, flying apart from the mainland, shackled only by gravity to the rest of the world.

I travel alone, the only person I know in the group of ten picking its way across a field speckled with dormant heather and grazing sheep, splashing across a narrow creek, sinking into the mud on the edge of the mountain. It squishes into the tread of my sneakers as I teeter on the edge of a soaring, narrow trail; I dig my fingernails into the peaty wall beside me, regaining my balance, and inhale: an expanding balloon ready for release.

Further in and higher up, I trade the mud for bare rock, scaling a thin land bridge to the pinnacle of the island, the world’s minaret, the first stop on the way to the sky, the gateway to Heaven. I have arrived.

Here I stand, the only living creature on Earth. The ephemeral clouds in the deep blue sky were created only for this moment, only for me. The distant ocean sparkles diamonds. The salty sea air blowing across the moor blends into a perfume intended, from the first, for me, and me only.

This is my land. I am this island; I am this view. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. My spirit sheds its physical constraints and rises into the sky.

Tea and Ten O'Clock

I find it easier to bird watch while seated at my dining room table drinking a mug of tea. It's more comfortable, for one thing, on these 30° mornings, and the birds can't see or smell or hear me while I'm behind the glass panes of my patio door. This morning, while nursing some steaming English Breakfast tea, I watched to see how the avian life has changed in the past two months.

The first bird I saw, of course, was a brazen blue jay, sweeping from the patio roof to drink from the bird bath on the deck railing, his wings and tail feathers spread out like a kite. The robins, newly arrived from some undisclosed southern location, were still more timid, and all week the mockingbirds have been chasing them from every corner of our yard. Their feathers flash like Semaphore flags as they fly.

Grackles then rose past the deck in an Air Force-like formation, and a red-winged blackbird preened his wings in our neighbor's tree, his ruddy shoulders flashing like air traffic control signals. I could hear the doves and a woodpecker, but it took a half-hour for the dove to appear on the garden fence. The woodpecker, however, remained hidden for the morning.

I was surprised to find no goldfinches, pine siskins, or black-capped chickadees, but then I remembered that they like food, and the birdfeeders out my dining room window are empty. A glance through the kitchen window, and I found them congregating on the feeders hanging from the clothesline.

With my tea drained and ten birds identified, I left the warmth of my dining room to walk among the neighbors who live in my backyard. I usually ramble through my yard in the evenings, and this morning walk was quite different. The birds were more active at this time of day, fighting for nesting space in our ash and cedar trees like pioneers in the midwest land rush. English sparrows bother my neighbor's tree and a starling couple bickers over the suet, the female finally winning out and eating first. A red squirrel bustled across the roof of the garden shed, skittish after a close encounter with the wookiee's front paw on Saturday.

But the active members of the garden aren't the only signs of life. The crocuses glowed in the morning sunlight, soon to be hidden again in the shade of the chimney on the north side of our house. The pussywillow buds cracked through the tips of the branches like warm, fuzzy snowflakes. The grass is still bleached from the harsh winter, but green leafy arrows shoot like promises from every flowerbed in the yard.

Two months ago, I dreaded the spring. But today, I think maybe its vibrant embrace will cushion the discomfort of another transition.

:31°F:
:clear and sunny skies:

For Amusement Only

Because most of my readers are either classmates in my Masters of Fine Arts writing program or friends from outside this program who also happen to have studied English at some point in their post-secondary education, I think that we might all find a touch of entertainment from grammatical humor in The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. (Especially for my classmates, this point in the semester tends to call for a bit of extra levity!)

Because this is my nature blog, I have chosen this sign in a tree nursery as the prime post to share. (Or should I say "tree" nursery? It does seem ambiguous.)

And now back to our regularly scheduled coursework.

Urban Birds

I may vacillate between calling my neighborhood rural and suburban, but one thing is unquestionably certain: it is not urban. I'm technically in a township -- not even within "town" limits -- and, as I said earlier this week, I have no sidewalks.

But if I were in an urban setting, I might consider applying for a Celebrate Urban Birds mini-grant to encourage bird watching in urban areas. DNLee at Urban Science Adventures talks about the Celebrate Urban Birds project on her blog, and I hope that the idea takes off.

When I lived in Baltimore, I saw plenty of surprising birds, among them a pileated woodpecker and some kind of owl, plus countless others that I never took the time to identify. I wish I had, however, and had recruited friends and neighbors to join me.

In my nature writing course, we've been talking a lot this week about finding the green spaces in a city, and by "green," we aren't necessarily talking "environmentally-friendly" places, which would include recycling centers and solar panels. Those are great (I'm a big fan), but almost more important are the spots that are literally green. Community gardens, flower boxes, and dandelions growing through the cracks in a sidewalk are all little reminders that the concrete and brick still mix with the naturally-occurring ... nature. And my classmates agree that these green moments have succeeded in restoring our selves (hearts, minds, souls) from the daily drudge.

This Celebrate Urban Birds mini-grant would encourage city-dwellers to look for the natural elements that aren't green, too, by looking up. (I've never seen a green pigeon, woodpecker, or owl!) By interacting with each other and encouraging the neighborhood kids, especially, to look for birds like some kind of treasure hunt, we city- (and former city-) dwellers could start to once again seek out the "green" within the city.

Even here in the 'burbs (or sticks) we often forget to treasure the creatures both great and small that are as much our neighbors as the family in the house next door. With or without a grant, inside or outside city limits, we can all make the effort to notice the natural, appreciate the avians, and pass on our passion so that others can have those green, restorative moments, too.

Walk This Way

I’m a sucker for sidewalks.

When I went to college, it was the first time in my life that I had a sidewalk within several miles of my home. Before, I always had to walk along the gravel shoulder of unlined country roads if I took a walk around my neighborhood. In college, for the first time, I didn’t have to compete with cars and trucks and school buses when I was on foot. I loved it.

Now that I’m back in the same house where I grew up, I miss the sidewalks, but I’m also an old pro at dealing without such luxuries, thanks to 18 years of earlier practice. Besides, there’s not a whole lot to walk to from my house, which might explain the lack of pedestrian paths in the first place. (When my mom used to give directions by telling people, “Go to the end of the world and turn left,” she wasn’t too far off the mark.)

I go back and forth between claiming I live in a rural neighborhood and claiming that it’s a suburban one. I am less than a mile away from several farms, and my house sits on what itself was once farmland. I’m no more than a ten-minute drive from the local mall, movie theaters, restaurants, and a genuine taste of (small) city life. Then again, I’m also seven miles from a woodsy state park and a wind farm.

So, I think it’s the sidewalks that will determine my choice. I am a rural resident. And that’s why I can’t really walk anywhere.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I can walk anywhere I want, if I don’t mind risking safety on the narrow shoulders of windy country roads or spending at least an hour on travel time just to get to the post office. My time in college on a small campus and in Marburg (that perfectly-sized and manageable town) spoiled me for pedestrian zones. Around here, my nearest grocery store is 3 ½ miles away, and I’m simply not going to walk there. Or ride my bike. (I mean, have you seen the hills in western PA? I’m not facing those with a gallon of milk strapped to my back.)

And this may be the biggest problem with rural and suburban areas. When houses are miles away from shopping areas, and the home is far from the workplace, people need automobiles to get to and from just about everything. When the population density isn’t high enough, public transportation isn’t even a logical option. It’s a shame that to live so in touch with a natural setting, we must also risk environmental damage in order to get to work, school, and any store.

I think I’m a townie at heart. Back in the proverbial day, I loved having the ability to walk to the post office (on a sidewalk), or pick up groceries and carry them in my backpack the quarter mile back to home. And I also loved the manageability of a town. It doesn’t carry the kinds of risks associated with a big city, and it’s possible to become associated with every corner of it. This rurally raised country girl finds it easier to breathe in a town than in a city.

It looks as though town experiments like Kyle, TX, and Celebration, FL, are attempting to provide this kind of town feeling (while also, unfortunately, making it an elite, upper-middle class WASP trap, but that’s a subject for another day). But if existing suburban and rural communities had fewer giant stores and more small and scattered shops, and if those windy country roads were just a little safer for the wary pedestrian, I think even we country mice might stop driving so much. We might prove that it doesn’t take a brand new town experiment to achieve New Urbanism.

And who knows what kind of natural camaraderie with neighbors and connection to the ground we walk and diversity of free market enterprises might sprout from simply placing our homes nearer our markets and offices? I’m sure there’s some way to keep the woodsy and residential feel of my neighborhood while making it a little easier to walk to the store. It could be that all it would take is a good sidewalk.

A Couple Images

The wookiee contemplates a monochromatic backyard.


The thermometer convinces us both to wait a few hours before braving the elements.

Finding Colors

My backyard is all a yellowish gray. The garden fence, the frozen blades of grass, the tree trunks and ivy, even the wookiee all blend together like some kind of old faded photograph. It’s obvious it was all vibrant with different hues once upon a time, but now, it’s all one ghastly, sickly shade.

At this point in the winter, my yard is in a state between dormancy and springtime. Now that the snow is gone, will the spring ever come? When I’m outside, I’m surrounded by yellowish gray, and the color brings on a sense of deepest despair.

I shouldn’t say deepest. Deepest despair came over me when musing similarly about color almost four years ago when I found myself visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland. Among the many (many, many) sights that affected me that day was a room full of shoes that had been taken from the prisoners. They were, like shoes from any era, all different colors; if you looked hard enough, you could see a red shoe, a blue one, a yellow one, but their situation in history and my perceptions standing there on some of the most unholy ground on our planet, turned everything the same dull shade of gray.

So today, while I fought off similar, though lighter, feelings toward my backyard, I sought out something—anything—to give me hope. I peeked into the yellowed flowerbed along the driveway. It was covered with yellowish-gray composting grass clippings that my mom spread there last fall to protect the bed from the winter weather. Some grayish sticks of some dead flower huddled together in the shadow of the arbor. But if I just looked closely enough, maybe …

And there it was. A purple crocus just peeking through the yellowed grass. And suddenly, my backyard was no longer a symbol of deepest despair, but instead the first sign of change to a barren and monochromatic world.

:18° F:
:partly cloudy: