On a few small acres in the hill country of central Texas, we live by watching, feeling, and waiting. Together, we come to know by loving and love best when we care enough to understand. Our Loves: limestone, leaf-vein, scales, feathers, friends, and all their shifting reflections in the waters of a small Creek.
Here's what we've been hearing many of the early mornings and evenings. If I am wrong in calling this an Eastern Screech-Owl (Otus asio), just let me know. I've learned that the bird has plenty of calls (barking, screeching, tremolo, whinny--depending on its location, sex, threat level, nesting status, etc.). This individual appeared to have been in the large oak tree.
They try to lift out of the creek bed and fly the way of dried sycamore leaves in a gust.
But water molecules that are held together by their hydrogen bonds stretch out across the surface of the morning pool, and as the crests of the waves are pulled down by gravity and the tension across the surface, the troughs of the waves are pulled back up--how gravity can lift something upwards. Like a bed sheet held at either side by a pair of country children and lifted up and down quickly.
Then when the wind's energy drops, molecular friction brings the troubled waters back to something near calm.
A gray morning as complete unlike the past hundred and fifty or so days as one could imagine. September 29, 2012. Photographs captured mostly during the morning's eight o'clock hour. Rain gauge showed not more than about an inch of collected rain, but more must have fallen upstream because we were able to hear Creek waters from up the hillside.
Again, a casual look at this dried out countryside would not suggest such an abundance of flowers. One might even be persuaded to believe that simply walking slowly with camera in hand could be the cause of so much sudden efflorescence.
We hate this invasive species in the garden,
but this morning all sins are forgiven.
That’s what we were seeing the gray morning of September 29, 2012. These are the images of flowering plants, textures, and patterns one sees on the last rainy Saturday morning of the month. A slow-falling rain drizzled throughout the night before, leaving leaf and petal with its reflective remains. The purpose here is simply to record a few brief moments of visual observation. (One could do less with his solitary time on the bank of a drought-shrunken hill country creek. In fact, one could do way less with his entire intellectual life. A cataloging of honest observations is the beginning of any hopeful search for wisdom. Its opposite is beginning with what might be called prescriptive or normative thinking. That’s the sort of thinking that places the thou-shalt cart before the here’s-what-is horse and ends up with any one of scores of fundamentalisms. We can only imagine a world in which children are exposed to descriptive-thinking prior to prescriptive-thinking, for we have painful experience with its alternative. Fundamentalist-thinking simply forgot to describe our situation in the world. What is nature? What is human behavior? Instead, it not merely jumped ahead to telling us what to do with nature and other human beings, but in telling us what to do it actually thought it was telling us about reality. If we are not careful (in ethics, politics, religion, education, science), we will be prescribing and ordering when we think we are describing, and then we will miss out on what reality is and ironically, then, how best to prescribe. So we practice learning to see. Seeing and then cataloging the things of our world into an undifferentiated single list is a place to start again each day. It may be one of the only remaining rational antidotes to the fundamentalist-thinking infecting our personal and social lives in political, religious, moral ways.)
