2003 Summer

1-2-3-4-5-6...

...and on until I catch myself and stop counting. It is a compulsion that I have, and it only surfaces when I'm swallowing liquids. I count the gulps. It only lasts a few beats, but, for some odd reason which perhaps I'll discover here, I do nothing to fight the compulsion. When I do catch myself and stop, it is most often with a chuckle, as in, "It's amazing how this habit got rooted so deeply in me."

Luckily, I know how it took root. It was (seemingly) indelibly imprinted on me around the time I was six years old. That was an even tougher year than the ones preceding it. From the time I was about four and a half until six, I found it almost impossible to keep food down, and promptly vomited after each meal. When I was finally weaned from this behavior, it was done by filling a book with columns of little sticky stars; one for each meal, and, at first, another for each hour I was able to keep my meal down. So many stars in a row and I'd get a toy. It was then that I began counting the number of swallows that I kept down. Apparently, the compulsive counting of food swallows has faded away over 45 years, but this is not so with liquids.

Last summer, after forty years on the planet, including five living in what is virtually a bird sanctuary (and many others in settings that come close), I finally awoke to a basic fact: not only am I surrounded by amazingly beautiful avian singers, but I can actually learn more about them. Suddenly, saying to myself "oh, that familiar bird song--I have no need to know who the singer is," or "I've probably seen that bird many times--but I don't care about the name," became unsatisfactory. Having just traded eyeglasses for contact lenses, I also found myself able to use binoculars easily for the first time in my life. As has often been the case, the more careful attention I paid, with all available senses, to what surrounded me (in this case, the world of birds), the more intriguing it became, and the more deeply I felt its interconnections and its connections to the larger whole.

I live with three chickens; layer hens to use the barnyard parlance. I also live with a daughter teetering on the cliff edge of womanhood. The hens and the daughter, Emily, are a team. She understands and uses "hen speech" and is periodically found perched on the arm of the couch. The hens willingly stay in her arms for hours or are content to go on field trips to the woods with Emily as their guide. Frank Perdue is their common enemy.

Emily has researched chickens with the diligence of a scientist. She inspects their vents (the egg laying orifice), analyzes their excrement, records behavior, and has consumed what little material has been written about chickens. I like having Emily spend time with the "ladies." They are industrious, social, and take good care of themselves and each other. They will screech out a call that we have come to understand means "I've lost the other hens!" Emily then carries the lost hen to the others and all is quiet again. They seem to need the presence of one another even though most of their time is spent beak to ground looking for tasty grubs. They particularly enjoy physical contact with one another at night. When we close the coop door at dusk the hens are clumped together so that they resemble one very large hen. When one of the hens finds an especially nice patch of bare ground, just right for a dust a bath, we hear her call the others as if inviting them for a dip in her hot tub.

If I were to recommend one new book as essential reading this summer, it would be Sobonfu Some's Falling Out Of Grace: Meditations on Loss, Healing and Wisdom (North Bay Books, El Sobrante, CA, 2003). On nearly every page I found pithy, profound passages so startlingly applicable that I needed to share them immediately with friends--words that often pertained exactly to a discussion I'd just had with someone, or to a situation we'd been pondering.

A member of the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, Sobonfu first emerged from traditional life in her tiny West African village very reluctantly, at the urging of her elders, who recognized her gifts and destiny. She remains deeply connected to the life of her village and to her elders, sharing the profound wisdom of her own ancient traditions while learning to navigate the perilous, promising, inevitable interface with "modernity." Her thought-provoking insights and observations have proven popular around the globe. Her first book, Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient Teachings in the Way of Relationships has been translated into five languages. Alice Walker recently cited Some's second work, Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community, as her favorite book. I myself devoured that one in about 48 hours, and found my world forever widened.

Rhizome--a system of interconnected root-like stems, usually growing horizontally under or along the ground and sending out roots from its lower surface, and leaves or shoots from its upper surface.

Yesterday, August and the lawn mower were in cahoots and their respective sweat and grass were convening on my back. On a whim I threw down my clothes, hauled up on the handle of the hydrant and crawled cringing underneath to wait for the water. In seventeen years, I'd never tried this before. Gravity driven, my cold experience worked its way up the pipe, the stuff that the windmill pulls from deep down for us to use. There was a sharp moment of wonder about the sudden and involuntary restructuring of my breath when water hit skin. Who allowed that gasp to get through? Dripping and unhindered by time, spectator, or clothing, and with more than a little glee, I pulled a warm towel off the line.