Goodnight Majik (nature journal 20/II/11)

From the trail we clamber down to the beach. Garnet tinged, purple sand flows through the normal white stuff. Violet brush strokes swirl around green jade look-a-like rocks. Not an average beach.

Noël finds a perfect little abalone shell on the sand, slaps it in my hand and calls it my paycheck. A big rock shelf means radical tidepools, some deep and wide enough to paddle around in. Vast hermit crab and anemone civilizations have thrived in these shallows for centuries, and yet no monuments or temples have been erected, at least none that I can discern. Maybe the temples are in the shells, or maybe the whole place is a temple.

A seaweed-filled ravine cuts right down the middle of the rock jetty. It seems just the right kind of place to find another abalone shell, and lo-and-behold there’s a great big one a few feet away. When I tell Noël that I saw the shell before I actually saw it, she says matter-of-factly “why does that surprise you at this point?” Sometimes I forget about the world’s majik until it is dropped right in my lap.

Around the bend we find a tiny cave. We sing inside it, playing with the tones, feeling out which ones resonate in the space. The song brings on slow languid movement, and rock on rock drumming. Every sound and sign just right for the moment. Good shamanism, which is to say: good playful and loving engagement with the spirit of that place, with our spirits in that place. A fine gesture of cave/man love.

We’re all smiles when we get out, I hope the cave smiles too. I stare at the sky and it subtly flashes, kind of a “yes” flash, affirmative pulse from the sunset. Behind us a weird mark is set in the sky. A vertical cloud line, like the vapor trail from a plane, but upright, like a rocket’s trail. An optical illusion, a meteor, a spaceship? The trail/cloud is gone in a few minutes, evidence wiped clean by the wind. Aliens, meteors or men: the Sky is indifferent, and, come to think of it, so am I. Cavesongs seem so much more important.

The trail fills up with scattering bunnies for the hike back. Polyphonic owl hoots sound majikally from a eucalyptus grove, a three-tone hoot that boggles my mind. My first thought is of a giant spectral owl. Eventually the mystery unravels. There are really three owls hooting in different pitches. Somehow they managed to call out in perfect unison, giving the impression of a supernatural hoot. Amazingly this happened twice in a row before the band broke up.

A skunk waddles at full speed in front of us, zigzagging – evasive tactics. He leaves just a splash of mercaptan (skunk spray) behind him, just in case there was any confusion. “Don’t know if you noticed the stripes chums… can’t be too careful.”

A fox dashes across the highway as we drive home, barely more than a flash in the headlights. Our last visitation from the twilight kingdom. Goodnight Majik.

Surfing Crow

There was crow flying with a stick over the dunes. He held a piece of drift-wood with his left foot and cruised on the off-shore wind, dropping out of sight low behind the dunes, and then rising way up into the air. He flew from left to right, and right to left, but did not travel down the beach, nor did he land. What was up with this little bird-fellow and his stick?

Noël and I set about speculating. “It must be making a nest,” I said with ludicrous confidence. But he never put the stick down, nor did he make his way any-which-way, he simply danced in the air with the stick. “Maybe his leg is caught on it somehow?” Noël asked aloud. Instead of saying “nope, that's not it” the crow just grabbed the stick in his beak and then switched feet, holding it with his right foot instead. “How strange,” I thought, “he must be deranged, he’s lost his little bird brain.” Then he grabbed the stick with both feet, and cried out in apparent triumph, surfing with the driftwood above the sandy hills. And this thought struck my narrow mind: he is playing.

My first impulse is to think of animals (and by extension the wild) as practical, with all of their actions having “purposes.” Having ruled out the practical, we believed the crow to be in need, imagining him caught in some plastic soda-ring and drift-wood garbage trap… revealing my arrogance and guilt: seeing nature as fragile, and man (and myself) as careless and destructive. After ruling out a man-made danger I pronounced the crow insane for simply not adhering to the austere image that I had projected onto his ways.

Now however, I believe this crow was really marveling at his own crowness, as we sometimes delight in our humanness, or relative animalness. He was delighting in his grasping talons, his dexterous toes, his strong and able beak, and his magnificent wings. So too he seemed to give thanks and friendship to the wind, as they played together, crying out for joy as he surfed the stick with both legs; laughing like a child (or younger crow), surprised by each gust of wind, and his own marvelous game.

Have I seen this event clearly now? Certainly not, I am working with assumptions again, but to some extent I have seen my own thoughts more clearly, revealed a pattern of small-thinking that had essentially gone unchecked. Who am I to limit a crow, or conversely to proclaim its nature more complex? It is not my place to do so, but believing the wild to be at play is to see it with a wider view. Certainly it is a wider view than to consider the non-human world to be without play. Play is, after all, liberation… presence and movement without destination, action without wanting anything outside of the action itself… something a surfing crow can know without contemplation (I am assuming).

And there’s the final lesson from the Surfing Lama Crow, we don’t need to figure it all out, accepting the mystery is both humbling and illuminating. As Keats said: “The point of diving in the lake is not to immediately swim to the other shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of the water.” So it may be said that the point of a game is not to immediately complete it; nor is it most beneficial to deconstruct and examine the mysterious actions of a crow, perhaps better just to feel amazed… so now, I’ll shut up.

(image notes: a nice looking painting that I did not make but found somehow on the internet)