What Goes Around Comes Around - Musings from a Disjointed Year

 Or is it the other way around?

One evening in mid-March my husband remarked that there was something resembling,"a mocking bird on steroids," in the Simpson's Stopper. It was dusk, and all I saw was a dark silhouette flying off. I reckoned that it must have been a bluejay, though I really wasn't convinced. 

A few mornings later I had my answer when I startled a pair of brown thrashers that were searching for food by vigorously tossing bits of mulch with side-to-side, sweeping head motions. By the way, they made pretty deep holes. They left sometime in late April or early May - my last recorded sighting was April 27th.

We were visited by a pair of brown thrashers for the first time, as far as I know, in the winter/spring of 2018. The region was still recuperating from a direct hit by Hurricane Irma in September, 2017, and I attributed their presence to a general natural disruption. 

I hadn't seem them in the intervening years, but that doesn't mean they haven't been here. For one thing, our garden and the ones of our adjoining neighbors have recovered and filled out considerably, so these shy birds have a much better chance of hiding. 

For another, I haven't been outside as much. I injured my elbow cleaning up after Irma, so there are times that I physically can't do the down and dirty gardening I love. Increasing age and decreasing agility also meant giving up our beloved day-sailing activity. Instead of spending more time outside to compensate, I retreated indoors.

 For reasons that are not clear to me at all, I virtually stopped sketching outside. Botanical illustration requires an attention to detail largely unavailable in field sketching, but analyzing and depicting a part of a plant indoors doesn't produce the whole story. Field sketching includes context - what else is growing, what the weather and seasons are doing, what animals may be skittering around. After you've sat sketching for a while, birds either don't notice you, or decide you're not too much a threat to go about their business nearby. Small snakes have such a ground-level perspective that they just slither over my feet, but of course, disappear quickly when I jump from their touch. 

And field sketching, like sailing and gardening,  not only gets you out of the house - it gets you out of yourself, away from your own belly-button. It becomes a sort of meditation - not a meditation about anything - just a state of mind without thoughts - a pure sort of concentration on conditions around you at the moment. 

Encyclia tampensis 'alba' - Bloomed in May

Blame it on COVID isolation, politics, world events, old age  - whatever - I recently realized that instead of heading out into the yard with my coffee and sketchbook before and after breakfast, I turn on the computer to read about the most recent disasters. That has to change, but bad habits persist, while good ones are hard to re-establish. 

Apart from tanking my productivity and contributing to a general sense of malaise, this virtual life I've been leading has deeper implications. 

When I stopped recording the version of the natural world that exists in our own backyard, I lost touch with something bigger. Edward Wilson's philosophy in his very personal account Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (1984), proposes that  our very humanity  is rooted in our co-evolution with and along with all other life forms. In that sense he arguess that conservation should be understood in terms of, "protection of the human spirit." (p.140). According to Wilson, and borne out by my own recent experience, we need to maintain contact with the natural world to feel fully ourselves.

The increasing digitalization and virtualization of our daily lives threatens dire consequences. How  much of the alienation behind homelessness, dropout rates, mental illness and even murder can be linked to our increasing estrangement with the organic world in which we evolved? The computer is sometimes called a "window on the world," but have we forgotten about just looking out a real window at a real universe? Tethered to our devices, we risk floating thorough our lives with no anchors at all. 

Simplistic sloganeering or "back to nature" campaigns won't do it. But somehow, as a society, we need to unplug from the sterile, technological ersatz world in which we've started living, and establish a connection and appreciation for what's left of the real. 

Ludisia discolor - Terrestrial Orchid (not native)

Back to local reality, we've had our annual visitation by flocks of Southern White and Florida White butterflies. The swallowtail kites graced our skies with their acrobatics, and too soon, returned to South America. Songbirds like the thrashers visited on their return migrations northward. The Jamaica Caper and Seven-Year Apple are again covered with fragrant blooms, and the brilliant red-orange blooms of royal poincianas justify their Spanish name, "Flamboyant." 

There is something deeply comforting in these rhythms and patterns. As much as we try, we still haven't quite destroyed the natural world. Weeds, even flowers, still sprout in cracks in the concrete, and the Gaillardias have reseeded faithfully in what I euphemistically call the garden. Winters are too warm now for my native iris to bloom, and rising tide levels are killing mangroves. But the tides still rise and fall acccording to their rhthyms, not ours. 

Not everything in the garden is lovely, but at least there still are fragments of that original garden, and if we only will go out and look, we may be graced by glimpses of it.