Birds Art Life

1. Grief takes strange forms and can lead to seeking new ways of seeing.

Anticipatory grief, I was surprised to learn, demanded a different image, a more alert posture.

Facing a father's illness. The author describes the onset of anticipatory grief following her father's strokes and the discovery of an aneurysm. This grief wasn't just sadness; it was a constant state of vigilance, like a "widow's walk" scanning the horizon for doom. This unmoored her, making her usual creative work feel difficult and pointless.

Seeking guidance. Feeling broken and lost, the author craved guidance and a way back to her art and equanimity. She considered drawing lessons, remembering its simple pleasures, but ultimately felt drawn to something bigger, something that would hold her wandering mind. This search for direction led her to the musician who loved birds.

Finding a new focus. Meeting the musician and seeing his bird photographs sparked a new interest. His love for the imperfect, struggling birds in urban landscapes resonated with her. This unexpected connection felt like a potential anchor, a way to feel alive and present beyond the constant bracing for loss.

2. Finding freedom and spaciousness is a daily practice within life's confines.

It actually takes a daily effort to be free.

Cages and limits. Reflecting on a teenage attempt to run away, the author realized her freedom and creative work needed pressure to resist, limits to overreach. The question shifted from escaping to finding space within her current situation, especially as an only child caring for aging parents.

Abundance in scarcity. Inspired by artists who created in cramped quarters, she became interested in generating abundance with modest resources. The musician, who found spaciousness birding in a crowded city, seemed to embody this. His aviary visit, though initially unsettling due to the birds' confinement and her own invasive presence, highlighted the tension between captivity and the instinct for liberty.

Choosing freedom. Freedom isn't a one-time jailbreak but a continuous project. We are often captive to habit, fear, or expectations. The story of Phoebe Snetsinger, who pursued birding fervently after a terminal diagnosis (which proved premature), illustrates how a crisis can provide impetus and permission to break free from self-imposed or societal limits, even if it means embracing vulnerability.

3. There is profound value and audacity in focusing on smallness and everyday nature.

I like the perverse audacity of someone aiming tiny.

Rejecting the grandiose. The author finds satisfaction in small things and everyday nature, contrasting it with the "grandiose" overreaching of big nature travel and Western culture's drive for bigger and farther. Her symbolic pilgrimage to a city marina, a "birding hot spot" that looked like a scene from WALL-E, reinforced this preference for the minuscule over the epic.

Beauty in the ordinary. Sitting among resting ducks and swans, observing juncos and chickadees, and finding a tiny screech owl hidden in a tree, she discovered beauty in the ordinary. This focus on small birds and small moments felt like an antidote to the artist's ego and the pressure to individuate, offering the relief of disappearing into the crowd and practicing a "God's love" kind of attention—adoring and democratic awe without expectation of gain.

Small art, big impact. The musician's decision to name his album "Small Birdsongs" resonated with her. She reflects on her own preference for compact stories and small-scale work, arguing that external smallness can lead somewhere internally large, like a "small, tough explosion of exactitude." This preference is partly a defense against cultural pressures for bigness and a search for alternative models of artistic success outside the market's gaze.

4. Cultivating attention through waiting and stillness reveals hidden beauty and tempo.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

The discomfort of waiting. Waiting, whether for a bird, inspiration, or in a hospital ER, is often uncomfortable and feels like a "malady of stillness" in a life of too much motion. The author's experience waiting for a rare western grebe highlighted this, contrasting her own agitated stillness with the musician's effortless calm.

Learning to be present. Birding teaches the practice of waiting without itinerary or guaranteed outcome. It requires remaining stationary, minimizing disturbance, and becoming part of the environment's baseline conditions. This patient attention allows one to encounter the reluctant and well-hidden things, revealing that the realm of birding is also, sometimes, the realm of miracles.

Slowing down. Waiting forces a desynchronization from productive time frames and the chronic sense of being late. Like the legendary birder Starr Saphir, who continued long bird walks despite terminal illness, waiting can help slow time and shift focus from the goal to the process of being present. It is about being attentive and awake, having confidence that closeness to nothing is more than that.

5. True knowledge blends book learning with direct, embodied experience.

Die knowing something.

Bookish vs. real-world knowledge. Growing up, books were the author's escape and constant companions, providing vast vicarious knowledge but leaving her ill-equipped in practical situations. She reflects on the contrast between her book-bound life and the musician's practical knowledge of birds and the physical world.

Shedding secondhand impressions. Initially, she resisted looking things up, wanting a "pure, unfiltered experience." However, the musician's injury prompted her to read bird books. She discovered that encountering the reality of birds helped shed her secondhand, pop-culture impressions, leading to a "molting" of her preconceived notions.

Integrating knowledge. The best approach, she found, lies in the "sweet spot between poetic not-knowing and scientific knowing." Learning specific facts, like how urban birds change their songs to rise above city noise, enhanced her appreciation. The book world and the real world are not antithetical; knowledge, when pursued with pleasure and curiosity, can be a conduit for passion, revealing the wilderness at the edge of all knowing.

6. Vulnerability and faltering are inherent to being alive, for birds and humans.

There is no life without adversity, failure, and frailty.

Fear of falling. The author connects her son's fear of falling from his bicycle to a broader existential chagrin: all striving may lead to suffering. This resonates with her husband's discomfort watching sports or opera where perfection is the aim and faltering is painful to witness.

Embracing imperfection. Artists like Bill Viola and Bas Jan Ader embrace "falling" or failure as essential to the creative process. The author sees faltering in Pina Bausch's dance, created after a loss, recognizing that sometimes we falter not because the ground is unstable but because it's exhausting to keep going.

Nature's fragility. The vulnerability of birds, especially migrating ones facing extreme weather, predators, and human obstacles, mirrors human frailty. The display of birds killed by colliding with city buildings highlights this. The author reflects on the "shifting baselines" phenomenon, where collective forgetfulness allows us to tolerate environmental deterioration, making it hard to grasp how much has been lost and how vulnerable even seemingly robust species can be.

7. Lulls and periods of inactivity, though uncomfortable, can be restorative undercurrents.

In some weird way, the spaces between the work are what’s really interesting.

Filling the void. The author observes that most people, including herself, try to fill lulls—periods of quiet or inactivity—with busyness and distractions. This discomfort with emptiness stems from various sources:

• Superstition about losing creative momentum.
• Capitalism's pressure for constant productivity.
• Existential fear of facing the void or losing one's identity as an artist.
• Using work as an escape from difficult emotions or life demands.

The understory of quiet. A meditation retreat helped the author glimpse an "understory" of quiet beneath her busyness and social roles. This "quiet feeling tone" of the body is like the grebe place that withstands modernity's onslaught. Birdsong becomes an entry point to this understory, offering a sense of simple continuity and calming anxiety.

Neither fatal nor glorious. Lulls can be terrifying absences or potential spurs for creativity. The author suggests imagining a lull as neither fatal nor glorious, but simply a lull. Like her cat luxuriating in sunlight, finding peace with inactivity means not fearing a dearth of events or the lack of narrative, allowing oneself to simply be without constantly doing.

8. Roaming and embracing side loves can lead to unexpected discoveries and self-understanding.

What drew me to you... was this quality of intentional roaming.

Side loves as wellsprings. The author is drawn to people with "side loves"—passions outside their main profession, like Nabokov's lepidopterology or Cage's mycology. These intense interests can be powerful wellsprings, cross-pollinating artistic lives and offering unexpected paths to knowledge and rapture.

Intentional wandering. The musician's "intentional roaming" and "fence-jumping knowledge" of birds, despite not being a specialist, is what initially captivated the author. This quality of pursuing a passion alongside one's main work felt like a model for finding one's path, especially for someone like the author who felt no single category ever fully fit.

Finding a roomy marriage. The author reflects on her fifteen-year marriage, built with a fellow solitary who tends toward optimism. Their relationship, though sometimes involving roaming far apart, provides a "decent bedrock" and an "earthed feeling" that allows her the freedom to float away and pursue solo adventures, knowing there is someone to welcome her return. This mutual protection of independence is a key element of their love.

9. Regret often arises from inaction or prioritizing caution over impulse and connection.

I regret the instances I have turned to others for guidance even when I already had a hunch of what to do.

The fated goldfinch. Finding a fallen baby goldfinch sparked a strong impulse to rescue it, but the musician's logical argument against interference ("survival of the fittest," "don't get sentimental") led her to leave the bird. This decision became a small but lingering regret, highlighting her tendency to defer to others and fear being seen as overly emotional or "sentimental."

Regretting inaction. The author reflects on other regrets, particularly moments of "tepid and timid response" when faced with suffering or the chance to act on instinct. She regrets not being more propelled by impulse and nerve, and the part of her that is deferential. This connects to the Rosh Hashanah tradition of casting away regrets, contrasting her own small misgivings with her mother-in-law's lifelong, tireless fight against injustice, which leaves her with little to regret.

The cost of a defended life. The author wonders if there's a cost to living a defended life, prioritizing skepticism and caution to inoculate against disappointment. Her regret over the goldfinch, though small, feels significant because it represents a missed opportunity for a "small triumph against death" and reinforces the attitude that little things will take care of themselves—an attitude she feels no longer rings true in a world facing biodiversity crisis.

10. Art and nature are necessary, not superfluous, offering solace and perspective in crisis.

A talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

Art in difficult times. During her friends' imprisonment in Egypt, the author's bird appreciation dwindled, feeling unnatural and even shameful when faced with human suffering. This echoed Bertolt Brecht's sentiment that talking about trees feels criminal when horrors are unfolding. Yet, her imprisoned friends made art and provided medical care, demonstrating that creative and vocational instincts persist even in dire circumstances.

Nature as necessary. The story of Rosa Luxemburg, who found solace and sharpened her observations by watching birds from prison, challenges the notion that a love of nature is a middle-class luxury incompatible with social justice. Rosa believed that aesthetic experience was necessary for fulfilling human dignity and that politics should embrace the beautiful.

Holding opposites. Birding, especially in the city, became a way for the author to hold opposites in tension: beauty and conscience, small gestures and big actions, hope and despair. Birds, even common ones, became reminders to "Stand up. Look around. Be in the world." They limned the vastness of the nonhuman world and offered a counterpoint to human suffering, proving that nature and art are necessary, not superfluous, in navigating life's difficulties.

11. Endings are part of a continuous flux, and guidance ultimately comes from within.

If we’re lucky we learn by watching others make it through, still standing and smiling.

Becoming guideless. As the year of birding neared its end, the musician's enthusiasm waned, leaving the author feeling like a "lousy tagalong." His shift back to focusing on his music highlighted that his birding passion might have been a temporary refuge. This ending to their structured time together meant becoming guideless, learning to let go of the idea of being led by one person.

Finding resilience in others. The author reflects on her father's resilience in aging and illness, his "bottomless hunger for headlines" and acceptance of his "minor scale." Watching him navigate his diminishing capacities with effort and dignity, like a stammerer dancing around gaps, inspires her. She recognizes this valiant effort in herself and others—microstands against forces that upend us.

Twoness and adaptation. Birding taught her to live in a "twoness"—holding conflicting feelings and realities in tension, like the peregrine falcon symbolizing both recovery and ongoing loss. Life is a flux of adaptation, filled with obstacles. Ultimately, guidance comes not from a single map or leader, but from watching others, embracing the "mongrel space" between hope and despair, and finding grace in the continuous motion and effort of simply being.

Last updated: May 23, 2025