Rare Bird

Red shafted northern flicker.
Photo: www.onegoodmove.org

Rare Bird

 

I saw a flicker yesterday. It was completely unexpected, as I was on the homestretch of a run shortly after sunrise on New Year’s Day and feeling a little peckish. First I saw a pair of red-headed woodpeckers, their circular doorway cut high up on a utility pole. A few feet down the wire sat this fat, spotted flicker, unmistakable, and further down, a few mourning doves.

The flicker is not a particularly rare bird; in fact there are so many that their status is “of least concern.” But it is only the 2^nd one I’ve seen in Carpinteria in almost 20 years, and the first was so surprising, and so beautiful, that I’ve never forgotten it.

Sometimes when we see something common, it loses its magic. Or perhaps we lose the sense of wonder we feel when we see something unexpected or unusual. We forget to pay attention to how beautiful it really is, common or not.

Channel Island Pelican, www.kimsnyder.net

In Harold and Maude, one of my favorite movies, Maude tells Harold, “Dreyfus once wrote from Devil's Island (where he was wrongfully imprisoned) that he would see the most glorious birds. Many years later in Brittany he realized they had only been seagulls... For me they will always be glorious birds.”

Here in Southern California, Brown Pelicans were once nearly wiped out from the pesticide DDT. I remember how thrilling it was to spot one when we first lived in California when I was a child, because they were so rare. After DDT was banned in 1972, the birds made a remarkable comeback, and today they are common along the coast. But to me, they will always be glorious birds - especially when they fly in formation along the crest of a wave.

 

My friend and fellow artist Kim Snyder paints birds here in Carpinteria – many of them are common on our coast, but when captured in a painting, they are indeed glorious and through art they become symbols of something more than just birds.

 

Perhaps this is the power of art: to transform the common into something rare, and beautiful, that calls out to us to notice. Maybe we need art to remind us to look - and to allow us to see - those things that are so common t us that we forget to notice how glorious they are.

 



The little pond in the potager.

A New Year: Please Take a Look

People have been making resolutions, prayers, or promises for the new year since ancient times, when Babylonians vowed to repay debts and Romans swore to Janus (of January), whose two faces looked both backward and forward in time. Their dreams and desires were no doubt both similar to and different from ours; historians have noted that over the past century, American resolutions have evolved from resolving to do good works into supplications to be thinner and better attired.

Expressions of gratitude have become trendy of late. For me, gratitude is best when it’s internalized, not promoted as a lifestyle or publicized as a token of self-fulfillment. We live in a world filled with beauty, and yet we spend many of our days not noticing. As a painter, my job is to look. As a teacher, my job is to teach others to look, and to see, with uncluttered eyes. It is the easiest and quickest way to find that gratitude.

 

Most mornings I walk out in my garden, which is, in its own way, a work of wild art. If I look, I can always find beauty there. Overlooking weeds, slugs and snails, and my gopher-ravished vegetable bed, there is always the beauty of nature, and of nature altered by humans in our own attempt to create beauty. We have a little pond, with a little statue, just outside the dining room window, and it is often the first thing I really see in the morning. When the morning light shines through, it is something I find beautiful, along with whatever is growing in the potager - herbs, vegetables, and a few flowers.

I am hoping 2013 will be a year filled with beauty for all of us, and that we will take the time to look and make the effort to see. Bonne année et bonne santé – happy new year to you, and good health.