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My friend Jeff is a birder. Since acquiring a garden we've been feeding the birds. There are many Japanese species new to me, so Jeff brought his bird book over—it's interesting to give names to the different birds, learn where they migrate and nest. Birds are the only wild animals I see routinely—they fly down, hang out for a few minutes in the garden, return... Only within this microcosm do I witness "nature". We are the hosts but they choose, the liberated, eyeing the without with the speed of prey. "To create peace, you have to be peaceful." Something else enters the unknown, something wild. Where I as I am not an I, as an I which as an I, finds or disputes the universe. This isn't peace—the intrinsic heartbeat of anarchy—Wallace Stevens' "the morality of the poet is the morality of the right sensation," a creative anarchy. What Gary Snyder refers to as sensing the grain of things. Peace: often treated as a power-concept—triggering endorphins, a vision, something of a religion emanated from the wind beyond the ocean, beyond someone. Nature is not peace—does a bird have its craft, its paranoia, its experience of self. Is self-nature a self consistent, non-reflective-productive being, wedded to a vulnerable skein. Space is chosen, as a pebble enters or is pulled back at the edge of tides. Breathing in a quick stillness—extending unfelt or forgotten, daytime stars to reappear, migratory, peck, hop, flit about, weaving the grain. Peace opens up an endless dimension releasing all that is nature into its own, in sudden fear at movements beyond the periphery of a moment; fragile as the fear of shadows, disappears. Richard Gilbert |