blue jay calls and thoughts on earthly shaping

Thursday, February 13^th, 2014; 12:28 p.m.

I’ve had to switch notebooks because I’ve filled the one I was keeping my nature notes in. I picked another off my shelf that is already partially filled.  All of my notebooks are partially filled with different parts of my life. As I sat down on my rock to write today, I flipped randomly to the back of the book and found I had written:

Creative awareness is about waking up to life—to all the choices and possibilities for change. The basis of creative awareness is acceptance.

I try to keep this in mind as the snow falls around me and further blankets my spot. I’ve never been to my spot when it’s actually currently snowing. It’s twenty-three degrees out, but it somehow feels warm. My fingers do not freeze at all as I write. I think the snow absorbs some of the wind. The flakes fall on my page and smear my ink--natural teardrops that come as I write a love letter to my place.

Something about the snow today feels timeless. Earlier in my walk, before I had gone down the ramp and into the heart of the woods, I looked out over the white forest of Schenley as the noon bells struck at a nearby church. I felt transported to 18^th century England.

The sound took on a new quality, too. The snow mutes the sounds in some respects, but it also makes them more acute. The birdcalls seemed longer and more decipherable than normal. I heard one bird calling back and forth with another and recognized it but couldn’t place it. Cardinal? I thought. I couldn’t see either bird in the tree and then suddenly one of them moved and it was a blue jay, long and swift.

Three hours earlier, I had been talking about blue jays with my dad on the phone. I was saying how loud they are, how much bigger than the thrush or thrasher that comes to eat my suet on the back porch almost daily. Dad told me we have a blue jay living near our home in Virginia, too.

I also heard the voices of children, talking, laughing. As I continued to walk down, I glanced below me and saw them running through the snow. 

I thought how wonderful it is on this snow day that a teacher or parent told them to enjoy the snow, to touch it, to become one with it. No curling up in front of the TV, no staying inside. I want to raise my kids to be one with nature, to care about how it works, to nurture curiosity by following the lead of the Earth and its many questions. To love its animals and trees and waters.  To know where it is they came from.

I continued to walk and noticed the way the trees were collecting the snow in their crevices and angles. 

I am enamored again by the dark stream as it runs between the hard white snow banks. 

I think about how it's all just water in different forms, how we are mostly water ourselves, 60% of our bodies made of the hydrogen-oxygen lifeblood. During the Sabbath, on a farm I stayed on in South Africa two years ago, the owner blessed water instead of wine. To him, it was more sacred. I think I agree.

As I’ve been getting to know my place better, I have begun trying to identify some of the trees around me by their bark and by leaves they dropped that are still visible on the ground nearby. This is the tree I look at while I sit on my rock:

I haven’t found a match online that looks exactly like this bark. My instinct is that it is some kind of oak as that is what the leaves on the ground nearby seem to be. 

Then, I thought maybe it was a London plane tree, which I saw featured on a sign at the entrance to Schenley. 

London plane trees, according to the sign, are “the signature tree of Schenley Plaza…a hybrid of the American sycamore and oriental plane trees. It grows 75-100 feet tall and has a large spreading canopy…its most distinctive feature is its flaky bark, which peels off to reveal a lighter bark underneath. This ability to exfoliate is what makes the London plane an excellent city tree, because it constantly sheds pollutants.”

However, when I looked up photos of London plane tree bark, they did not quite look like my tree’s bark. 

Image of London plane tree from http://www.localecology.org/images/treewalk_washsqvill_planetrees_3.jpg

I would love ideas or suggestions and will keep sleuthing to identify this tree.

I also learned from the sign about the European beech tree.

It says, “This large tree native to Europe typically grows between 50’ and 60’ and lives between 150 and 200 years…bark is light grey and smooth with a somewhat wrinkled appearance.” I am thinking now that maybe what I thought was a birch tree near my spot is actually this European beech tree, but next week, I will examine it more closely. (Many pictures online of the European beech tree show brown and grey bark.) I took these last week:

The sky above me now is like faded aluminum, solid. 

The snow falls on my head and I hear it straight in my ears, like a bunched-up plastic bag unfolding itself. It may be self-centered, but on days like this when the world feels enclosed by the sky, limited by the whiteness of the snow, I feel like I might be on the Truman Show—the Pahos Show. The world feels like a movie set, unreal, constructed, like at any moment I could be told it’s all a ruse.

I’ve been thinking lately about the importance of place. Jonny’s blog post about his West Virginia upbringing and his parents’ banjo voices got me thinking of it.

If I had grown up near this place, how would it be different to me? Is there anyone else who considers this exact spot special? If we went to Arizona State University or Florida State University instead of Chatham, how different would this project be? The snow may not have been a part of our stories. But now I can’t imagine our blogs without the snow as one of the main characters. What else would we have written about?

I think about what role place has in making individuals who they are, defining their beliefs and their demeanors, deciding what they find beauty in and what makes them tick. I think about all the places that have shaped me. 

I don't come from a beach or the deep woods. I don't come from a mountain or a dense city. I come from a suburb, middle America, midwest, flat but sturdy, often plain but strong. I haven't been molded by cruel precipitation, salty air, desert dryness or hard urbanity, but something less focused and more balanced, steady. For those reasons, I don't always consider the physical landscape of my childhood as having a role in making me who I am. It is a quiet person, reserved but very present. Not gruff, glamorous, sharp-edged. It doesn't seem there are very obvious connections between its personality and mine. But, of course, there are. Of course, growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago shaped me. 

I come from wide porches and gridded streets--First, Second, Third, Oak, Elm, Maple, Washington, Lincoln, Adams. I come from calm Saturday mornings of muffled lawn mowers and soft sprinklers. I come from a quick drive to the high school and afternoons sliding into home plate. I come from July art shows on the front lawn of the public library. I come from Zingleman’s fries and frozen Cokes on Friday afternoons in Town, a two-block walk from the middle school. I come from a place of obvious wealth and some very deep, good hearts. I come from drives to the city, the sun glowing around the silhouette of the Sears Tower as we sped down the Eisenhower. I come from people stopping to chat in the grocery store.  I come from a mother with a subtle Chicago accent and a father with Minnesotan charm. I come from hot summers and frigid winters, blissful springs and soul-warming autumns. I come from light pollution, the pink of the city creeping up above my home. I come from fireworks over Navy Pier and boat afternoons anchored in front of a towering Hancock as we jumped into always-freezing Lake Michigan. I come from King Cold blintzes, bowls of homemade popcorn and Land O'Lakes American cheese. I come from Friday night football games. I come from singing and running and piano keys. I come from love. 

Other places have shaped me, too, in ways that are deep: Ghana, North Carolina, South Africa, Belgium, southern France, Greece, Paris, southern India, Turkey, Israel, Virginia, and now Pittsburgh.

In Pittsburgh, I've come to appreciate the complexity and necessity of bridges, the beauty and struggle of living right on the river. I've come to understand better the importance of putting down roots. And Pittsburgh will continue to shape me in ways I have yet to understand. 

I think about how my nature spot here has begun to shape me, allowed me to view the natural world not as something that inherently exists but as a continuous opportunity to question and wonder and challenge and admire. It has slowed me down and helped me to make a habit, a practice, a lifestyle of deeper looking.  

I think about how I could be anywhere else right now, but I’m not. Somewhere else on this planet, people are snorkeling, sipping espresso in cafés, climbing mountains. But I’m on a cold rock in a slice of forest in western Pennsylvania, USA while the snow falls on my head, on my words and in my ears.

I want to keep considering the importance of place and actively trying to understand the geography of what made me, the people I love and strangers I meet along the way. We so often attribute direct experience to how we view the world. But there is the ever-present, often silent current of the land beneath our feet, the weather in our hair, the sounds in our ears that is chipping away at us, molding and re-molding our inner selves, like a precious stone shape-shifting in the wind. 

As I sit on my rock and begin to close my thoughts for the week, the snow drifts down and collects like so many things. I feel how old the world might be--the snow, white whiskers on its chin. 

For some reason, in the falling snow, it is hard for me to leave my spot. I get up to go, turn my back to it. Then, I turn back around for one more look. Without thinking, I’m blowing my spot a kiss goodbye, a kiss on the wind to the forest, thanking it for its time, hesitant to leave, but grateful I will be back. 

Maggie