Nature @ MindSay

Early Tuesday morning I got up to find my apartment and neighboring woods enveloped by fog. In the distance I could hear the loud calls of geese and the air was warm, magical. I quickly put on my coat and, still in my pajamas, went out for a walk with my camera to see what I could capture with my lens. It was amazing.



The island seemed imaginary, like a place out of Fairy tale and legend.



I love how the mist transformed the landscape. It was like I was still asleep, walking in my sleep, unsure where I would end up next, or what I would find waiting for me on the other side of the woods.



The water was clear and still, mirroring the trees and revealing fallen leaves. I could've walked across the water to still places unknown... and wet.



Evidence of other creatures appear in muddy prints on some of the rocks along the shore, a sign I wasn't alone. Those geese were out there somewhere. I could hear them call at each other, obviously aware I was there. The sound of them moved away from me in the direction I was walking. Unseen, they were a distant wave of sound breaking the cloudy silence.



There were MANY geese out that morning and they hid in the fog. You can barely make them out on camera as well as by eye sight. I regretted not bringing any bread crumbs. I bet they would've moved toward me and been less afraid if I can come with food. This was as close as I could get to them. Their feathers were evident all along the shore, so were their prints, but they dared not venture close to shore. These were wild geese, avoiding all human contact in a world all their own.



To my delight, I spyed a very large, lonely white-as-a-ghost mute swan swimming a few feet away from the geese on the other side of the island. I just stood there in awe of him. He turned to me, swam a bit closer to me, but like the geese, he didn't get too close to shore. I sang to him a wordless song. Seeing him was like falling in love. I considered his presence a good omen. The mystical swan is a source of legend, an greatly auspicious sign of grace, a poet's boon. I had never seen a swan in the nature reserve. This had me bouncing with joy. I really wanted to capture him on camera, but he appeared as only a ghostly speck of white in the mist.



I am happy that the swan appeared for me this week. He tells me that the new year will bring inspiration and success with song and poetry -- to have the swan as a spirit guide denotes the ability to see into the future, to have the ability to transform ones circumstances for good, and to recognize the beauty within myself and others. I will endeavor to create beauty where ever I go. I have a swan feather at home. Best time is now to use its medicine. The swan is a Samhain bird. He represents the soul, music, poetry, purity... power. Thank you, Swan, for appearing to me.

Foggy mornings are a quiet splendor that I'm just learning to appreciate. It's somehow warming to your spirit. At first, looking out the window, I want to hold the day close to myself, to share it only with my beloved over coffee in our kitchen*, smiling in quiet pleasure over the other's presence. Keeping the day to ourselves, quiet and happy.

_{*I'm single, and despite being a barista, I don't drink coffee}

And then I get out in it, and oh, I want to climb mountains. Get lost in woods wreathed in mist, and then climb above these clouds to look down on them. Fog is like a blending of mystery and passion - there's a passion out in it somewhere, but veiled in mystery. That's it. And the woods call me out, from everything I'm doing. In class? The trees still stand, waiting. At work? There are paths no one's walked. Meeting with a superior? The river's laughing and talking secrets to itself. Rehearsal? Leaves strewn down a hill waiting to be crunched.

I'm very much a sunshine-spirit, or so I'm told. Love being in the sunlight. Drawn to it, need to be able to see it even if I can't be in it. My spirit dies a little in windowless classrooms. Love having it spill over my skin, the touch of light can be the warmest, gentlest caress. But I've also had a love for thunderstorms, and the great power and passion at play in the sky there.

This fall, I'm gradually adding fog to that list of loves.

When I was fourteen or so, yellowjackets made a nest in the mortar of the brickwork of my window. This allowed them passage to my room, and I would come in most nights to find a pair circling my ceiling light, long legs dragging at the air in their confusion. Once one got caught in my hair, and kept trying to crawl out, buzzing angrily. I was terrified of yellowjackets and all their winged stingy brethren for years.

I don't know how related it is now. There's something in me that will sometimes see a hornet and squash it, just because it's a hornet.

And there's something in me that'll see one, and leave it alone, and watch it, and tell other people to leave it alone, until it flies away.

And then I'll find one bumbling slowly on the streetcorner of the crosswalk I take from work to my car, obviously slowed down because of the cold, where he's going to get stepped on. And there's something in me that crouches down and studies him for a bit, and then remembers that I have a sandwich box and carefully opens the box to scoop this little creation into it. And take it home with me.

I don't know why. Maybe because it's clearly at the end of life, and I think it's better to die warm then cold. Maybe because I'm tired of things dying, even when they're tiny. Maybe because I learn something from new experiences. Maybe because I think it shouldn't die because someone just didn't see it and didn't know it was there. Maybe it's the years of training that mean you help an animal in trouble.

But is it helping at all? He's more active when he's warm, certainly, and he's got food in there (assuming that a yellowjacket can make use of breadcrumbs and honey drips). But he's still going to die, at some point. Would it have been better to just relocate him to someplace he wouldn't get stepped on, but that would still be somewhat normal for him? Let's face it - Glad Plastic isn't exactly their home environment.

I'm philosophizing about a hornet as though it's a dog. All of this makes sense for bringing home a stray dog. These guys, it's a bug? Who cares? It's little, and there's billions more of them than there are of us. And they don't live long enough to invest too much time in one.

Says a girl who wants to work NICU someday.

Watching him explore around, now that he's warm enough to move properly again. He seems more like a machine than a creation - he's too perfect. Isn't that odd? I expect created things to have things wrong with them - they stumble, they get injured, they have physical quirks. If a machine is less than perfect, it gets chucked and replaced with a perfect one. I don't know enough about the species, maybe this one is somehow flawed, but I would have to observe a lot of others to know that. Weird. The fingerprint of something being made by the flawed creature is that it measures up to the design standard, and the fingerprint of something being made by the perfect is that it doesn't.

Or maybe it's the fingerprint of something being made by the forgiving. Where we'd chuck a machine that doesn't work, we're so loved that we're forgiven for not working the way we were designed, and

I've caught and held other creations. A hamster. A cricket. My beloved. My little almost-nephew. The cat. I guess you can't really hold a horse. I've dissected different animals after they're dead. And I wonder about the concept of the life-spark. How small it must be to be contained in this insect, and yet lend life throughout the entire magnificence of my beloved's body. I can't make it. I can theorize about a way of taking tissues and stretching and reconstructing them to the point of making a body, mimicking the wondrous art of creation. But I can't make life. I can probably conceive, but I don't know how to do it - what I could possibly do to make the difference between a new life and a stillborn.

Those two wings, rising from his back, barely an inch long, give him a gift that I don't have, and could never emulate. I can play the piano, I can hold a baby, I can run, and laugh. He can fly. I don't know that it's something to envy, so much as something to observe. Different abilities, but his seems all the more fantastic because it's something that I don't have, never will, and no one in the history of my species has had.

Can an insect feel joy? Anyone can see a dog's joy in running across a field, and running right back to you because you're the light in his world. Dogs have a lot of light in their worlds. I've had people tell me that I'm the light in theirs, sometimes. It's part of where the name "Phirefly" comes from. Does something so small have the same capacity for inner light, or just base its world off of the sun? Does flying bring him more joy?

It's a warm day. Much warmer than it's been all week. I could let him go today, and he could fly. He's miles from wherever his home must be, and he'll die tonight when the cold comes down again. Or he'll get caught and eaten by something else out there. I could keep him in the box for a few more days, and he'd live longer. There's some point in life-ethics where the line of quality of life clashes against the quantity of life, and you're stuck with trying to figure out which one to pursue.

I wrote most of this at noon, thinking things through. Took him outside, pried the lid free, leaving him room to climb out. Watched him take off in a big arc, legs dragging at the air, covering a huge distance for something so tiny. Felt better. Went off to Oxbow and climbed around for four hours.

This video is amazing for so many reasons. 1) It's features some of the best trails. 2) It's edited to a Descendents song. 3) Brian Foster is in it doing all types of BF shit like transferring big shit, and floating some big 3s.

Watch this you will not regret it.

fall soil from Clint Reynolds on Vimeo.

Not having a summer (among the freebirds) has been fucking with me. I keep expecting fall to end and summer to take back over. Either way the leaves are changing, winter is right around the corner and I'm pretty pissed about that. Fall is one of those times of year where you have to take advantage every moment or opportunity that presents itself. I'm planning on capitalizing on that shit.





I'm going to get a Grave Digger tattoo. Hopefully as a tramp stamp.