I was sitting on the backyard patio this morning, soaking up sunlight, when a squirrel skittered across the lawn, back and forth like a pinball. Eventually, he came to within 10 feet of me. I sat stock still, and he stared, twitching his nose, standing on hind legs like a deacon. After about a minute — which can feel like quite a long time — I must have blinked, because he jumped, startled, and took off running away.
I often sit in the back yard, to hear the birds and watch the clouds. It feels like an unmediated soak in existence. I sit trying to notice everything, the birds singing, the clouds moving, the wind making the trees wiggle in random motion, and until recently, the incessant noise of the cicadas, sounding like the A Train rushing through the 81st Street subway station. I felt the breeze in my hair, saw the bluish greens of the iris plants and the yellower green of the grass, I enjoyed the warm concrete on the soles of my bare feet and the incipient sunburn on the backs of my hands.
Bill Moyers once asked Joseph Campbell about the search for meaning, but Campbell switched focus: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
And so, I sit watching my back yard, the trees that line it and the sky above it. I can feel myself breathing, wiggling my toes and being alive, and what is more, recognizing the world being alive around me. For a moment, there is no boundary between my existence and the sea of being in which I swim.
A wren flits down and sits on the steps to the shed and moves from one position to another with no apparent intervening motion, as if it were a jump-cut in a movie. A really bossy mockingbird runs through his repertoire of bird calls, claiming this patch as his own. A cardinal flies from my left to land on a bush to the right. A white butterfly bounces on the air waves to disappear behind the bushes.
I’ve seen so much life in this tiny patch of ground, it sometimes astounds me. I cannot count the birds. Crows, even a raven. Way up in the sky, I’ve seen up to a dozen buzzards at a time circle as they catch the updraft coming from the river and up the bluff to this house.
There have been cottontails and many squirrels. Two years ago, coming home from a trip to Maine, as I pulled into the driveway, two bear cubs were climbing up a tree at the back of the property. We watched them having their fun, and then mama bear climbed up behind them to encourage them to come back down. A dog barked aggressively from somewhere down the neighborhood and the bears all dropped to the ground and ran off. I’ve seen bears waddling through the streets here, and long ago learned not to put the trash out until garbage delivery day.
A groundhog has crossed the back yard so often, he has left a permanent trace in the lawn. I have seen him multiple times harrumphing his way along. If he spots me sitting, he will take a moment to stare and consider his next move, but then run faster than you think he can move, back where he came from.
Then, there are the bumble bees, the honey bees, the wasps and the ant lions — their little sandy funnels in the dirt of the front garden. Big black butterflies, and their yellow and orange doubles light on the hedges and weeds. Ants build their nests in the cracks of the driveway, leaving tiny ridges of dirt where they have dug down.
Yesterday, as I was headed out the back door to have my daily sit-down on the patio, before opening the door, I saw the groundhog plopped down right by my chair, butt-flat on the concrete and motionless as a garden gnome, while an angry mockingbird jumped in a half-circle around him aiming “Cht-Cht — Cht Cht” at him. They continued this performance for a good two minutes until I must have made a noise and the great, heaving woodchuck became disturbed, turned its head my way and waddled off to hide under the shed and the bird, having had its way, flew up to a tree and quieted down.
When I was little and visited the Bronx Zoo, I was impatient to see the animals, who sometimes hid in the shade at the back of their enclosure, or sat behind some rocks, and if I did not have my interest piqued in the first five seconds, I moved on to the next animal. But my father told me to wait. Just watch. Eventually something would happen. I didn’t understand that then; I do now. I find myself in my yard patiently waiting for the next miracle.
(Many years later, I worked at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, and saw crowds of impatient kids moving from exhibit to exhibit. And it is only worse now, in an era of cell phones and digital immediacy.)
Writing in the Fourth Century, the Christian poet Prudentius identified in his Psychomachia (“Battle of the Souls”) his version of the Seven Deadly Sins, and the corresponding Seven Virtues, at war with those sins, and among the virtues was Patience.
I don’t know if I learned it from my father, or inherited it from his DNA, but, like him, I have become rather patient. Or maybe I’m just sluggish. But, I believe it served both of us well. The old man was slow to judge, slow to anger, and would never think to get outraged at traffic. Being raised that way, I, too, am willing to wait, when waiting seems either inevitable or purposeful. In fact, I can sit quietly in a chair neither talking or thinking for ages at a time. When I’m being philosophical about it, I call it meditation.
In the 1950s, the aging photographer Edward Steichen rarely left his home in West Redding, Connecticut, and began photographing a serviceberry tree (he called it a shadblow tree) through his window. He watched the seasons shift across the face of the pond and the tree and pictured them in all seasons and hours of the day, under varied weather, and made a case you could spend an infinite amount of time in a single place with a single subject and discover everything. As Yogi Berra once famously said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”
And it is the little things, carefully watched, that won’t happen again. The flow of the world is that it won’t happen again, all in constant forward motion and I sit to watch it move past me, and take me with it.
I just want to sit and soak, to sense the universe around me without thinking. We tend to glorify rationality, and the power of our brains to think meaningful thoughts, and we diminish the value of pure sensation, the sensuous awareness of colors, shapes, earthforms, clouds, birds, song, rhythm, touch, smells, and tastes. But these things are primal and exist before thought. Sensation is primary; making sense is an afterthought.
And so I sit, trying to lose myself in the larger pattern.
But, damn it, I can’t help being a writer and so I need to belittle what I enjoy, turning it all into words, into capsules of meaning that when read by others will be turned into ideas about sensations. Words not experience. And so, I can’t stop myself from writing this, hoping you share some of that delight when you step outdoors on the right day, with the right breeze, and the right mockingbird and crow squawking, and can see the trees dancing and the sun moving slowly across the sky blotted with whatever variety of cloud you have that moment.
Richard Nilsen 