Many years ago, my wife and I took up bird-watching (or "birding"). A close friend of ours had been a long-time birder, and offered to take us out, and we were at a point where we believed that some sort of joint outdoor hobby would be fun. So we got in the car, picked up John, and headed to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. John had a specific lake in mind and, once we parked and got out of the car, he told us not to look at anything until he pointed. Walking across the street without "looking at anything" was a bit of a challenge, but when he told us to look, we were looking at . . . a duck. Well, that's what WE thought; it certainly looked like a duck. John told us, "I wanted you to have THIS bird as #1 on your life list. It's a Eurasian Wigeon." That was the first of about 50 birds we identified that day, driving all over the San Francisco Bay Area. And it was the beginning of a life-long hobby.
We were so surprised by the variety of birds -- ducks, gulls, hawks, pigeons, songbirds. And the diversity of colors -- astonishing! We couldn't believe that we'd never really noticed before! But something else happened; I think we realized it a few weeks later walking through some meadows at the Pt. Reyes National Seashore (north of San Francisco). In our efforts to locate elusive birds, we started noticing other things: butterflies, snakes and frogs, different kinds of grasses. In other words, once we started paying close attention to one "family" of wildlife, we started seeing a lot of other things . . . and, of course, the variety there was equally astonishing.
Our experience was not unique, of course. While living in North Carolina, we learned that a lot of birders turned to butterflies during the summer when bird life was slow and "predictable". And, of course, it's helpful to know an aspen from a ponderosa pine when following someone else's directions in where to locate a bird. Then I learned earlier this week from a podcast from the American Birding Association that, given the portability of lots of field guides (i.e., on one's smartphone) many birders are branching out beyond avian life.
The realization, however, that by carefully looking for one thing, one finds many others was a bit of a surprise. We've asked ourselves numerous times, "How could we have been so inattentive?" The easy answer, of course, is that we weren't trained to pay attention.
I've had a similar set of realizations as I've become more obsessed with fly-fishing. I'd seen "rivers" before; I grew up in Portland, OR where there are a LOT of rivers, big and small. But what I'd never noticed were all the various characteristics of the rivers: pools, back-eddies, places where the current was faster than others, the slack water behind boulders, etc. All of those hold (or don't) fish. But it goes beyond that -- there's the whole question of the water's depth, and whether the fish are holding towards the bottom, or if they're taking food from the surface. AND, there's the question of what they're eating. One way of checking that is to seine the water with a fine mesh net. One finds twigs, insect larvae, perhaps a minnow. There is A LOT of stuff going on in the river that I never noticed . . . until I started paying attention.
The other day, I started to think about this in the context of a "life", in particular, my own. I can look in the mirror and see . . . me. Yet if I start paying attention to what's going beyond the "big picture", I can see that there are "eddies", "swift currents", "twigs", "larvae" that are also significant in making me who I am. I'm going to have to take time to really pay attention to understand what all those things have contributed to who/what I am. I hadn't thought that there's a River Running Through Me.
We were so surprised by the variety of birds -- ducks, gulls, hawks, pigeons, songbirds. And the diversity of colors -- astonishing! We couldn't believe that we'd never really noticed before! But something else happened; I think we realized it a few weeks later walking through some meadows at the Pt. Reyes National Seashore (north of San Francisco). In our efforts to locate elusive birds, we started noticing other things: butterflies, snakes and frogs, different kinds of grasses. In other words, once we started paying close attention to one "family" of wildlife, we started seeing a lot of other things . . . and, of course, the variety there was equally astonishing.
Our experience was not unique, of course. While living in North Carolina, we learned that a lot of birders turned to butterflies during the summer when bird life was slow and "predictable". And, of course, it's helpful to know an aspen from a ponderosa pine when following someone else's directions in where to locate a bird. Then I learned earlier this week from a podcast from the American Birding Association that, given the portability of lots of field guides (i.e., on one's smartphone) many birders are branching out beyond avian life.
The realization, however, that by carefully looking for one thing, one finds many others was a bit of a surprise. We've asked ourselves numerous times, "How could we have been so inattentive?" The easy answer, of course, is that we weren't trained to pay attention.
I've had a similar set of realizations as I've become more obsessed with fly-fishing. I'd seen "rivers" before; I grew up in Portland, OR where there are a LOT of rivers, big and small. But what I'd never noticed were all the various characteristics of the rivers: pools, back-eddies, places where the current was faster than others, the slack water behind boulders, etc. All of those hold (or don't) fish. But it goes beyond that -- there's the whole question of the water's depth, and whether the fish are holding towards the bottom, or if they're taking food from the surface. AND, there's the question of what they're eating. One way of checking that is to seine the water with a fine mesh net. One finds twigs, insect larvae, perhaps a minnow. There is A LOT of stuff going on in the river that I never noticed . . . until I started paying attention.
The other day, I started to think about this in the context of a "life", in particular, my own. I can look in the mirror and see . . . me. Yet if I start paying attention to what's going beyond the "big picture", I can see that there are "eddies", "swift currents", "twigs", "larvae" that are also significant in making me who I am. I'm going to have to take time to really pay attention to understand what all those things have contributed to who/what I am. I hadn't thought that there's a River Running Through Me.
Namasté,
Gary
No comments:
Post a Comment