All posts in category parts of the whole

furthest

I’ve made it to the end of another of my work weeks. There’s something that seems not quite right about this drive to “make it through another week.” Shouldn’t we be treating every day as an amazing gift, not something to slog our way to the end of? People say, oh, if I can just make it to Friday. Yeah, well, you made it…so what are you going to do now? Get drunk for the next two days? Try to forget your crappy job and live your “real” life for a brief moment? What a sick system we’ve built for ourselves here. I generally try to spend Fridays in the woods, away from people, but the blizzards and general crappy weather have hampered that often in recent weeks. I guess you could say I’m ready for Spring.

Back when we had our work retreat, during one meal I was eating at the same table as our facilitator. Someone commented on how this one guy had hardly been seen at all outside of the work sessions. Well, the facilitator said, some people are introverts and it’s hard for them…they need to be by themselves and recharge. She said that actually she herself was an introvert, and, in fact, that she would probably opt out of the scheduled “social time” after dinner that night (so she could recharge, I suppose). [I wrote more about this night in an earlier entry]. Anyone who knows me is, I’m sure, well aware of my introverted status. Sometimes I feel like I never recharge, though. I often can’t spend enough time by myself. But other times it feels unhealthy, and I get to the point of craving companionship. I spend so much time alone that I can drive myself to the breaking point, where I just generally feel crazy and by then it’s too late to be around people because I would just feel and act too weird. I often find it much easier to connect to sounds, smells, and textures, than to carry on a conversation with a person. Music is an important interface for me to explore emotions and just generally function in the world. And clearly nature is integral to my life. Even though technology surrounds me and I use it every day, I would always choose the natural world over the manufactured world. Every single time. So…that’s where I’m at right now, here nearing the end of this week. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. I’m supposed to go look at the stars tomorrow night. Peering out into the night sky at those celestial bodies so far away. It sounds pretty perfect, actually, and the forecast looks mostly clear.

2 Comments

by sean on March 5, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in existence, fridays, human behavior, inner life, introversion, parts of the whole, solitude

Posted by sean on March 5, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/03/05/furthest/

wind watch

We are under a Wind Watch. So this morning I watched the wind. It was snowing and the world outside looked like a snow globe shaken by a vicious god. The relentless wind blew the flakes in every direction, hardly ever allowing them to touch the ground. The vent on the skylight rattled, and I found a feather that had blown in through it and landed on the bathroom floor.

I listened to Fahey’s “America” and watched the frenetic flakes dance outside the window to the rich, odd twanging of steel strings. The coffee went down smooth, as did Heinrich’s ruminations on a winter spent in Maine’s woods. There was a certain synchronicity to my morning that doesn’t often visit.

I fed the birds and repotted a few plants. I recorded my dreams of the night before. Everything seems to be in order, for the moment.

2 Comments

by sean on February 26, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in dreams, existence, fridays, john fahey, parts of the whole, synchronicity, wind, winter

Posted by sean on February 26, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/02/26/wind-watch/

serendipity

It was quite birdy this morning! Although Larry, Moe, and Curly (the three squirrels) brought along a friend (Shemp, perhaps?) for their now-daily assault on the feeders, there were still a lot of birds waiting around in the crabapple tree and up on the power lines for their turn. Unfortunately, squirrels don’t know how to share (even with their own kind), and so there was more squirrel feeding going on than actual bird feeding. Surprisingly, later on a European Starling appeared at the feeder tray while the Mourning Doves were having a go. I think this may be the first time at the new house that I’ve seen one at the feeders.

The two highlights for the morning, though, didn’t happen at the feeder. The first one occurred as I was preparing to leave for work. I took one last look out the kitchen window and my jaw dropped as a Great Blue Heron flew low not far above the roof lines across the alley and then over the house. Perhaps it was heading for Lake Montebello? Although I haven’t been over there recently, and it may be frozen over. Not much other open water nearby. But it’s always a good sign when my spirit bird appears. And a new yard bird, as well!

The second highlight happened during my morning commute. Today was the first day I biked to work after the double blizzard. As a result, I had to alter some sections of my route due to traffic congestion and ice-covered roads. Inconvenient as it may have been, I was unexpectedly rewarded when I turned onto one road and heard the “kee-aah, kee-aah” of a Red-Shouldered Hawk. It was so loud that I just about fell off my bike! I navigated through some snow onto the side of the road and had some good looks at this noble bird as it surveyed the urban landscape from its perch high up in a tree. I wonder if it was the same one I saw on Sunday, soaring above the neighborhood?

redemption

Yesterday, I decided to salvage what I could of the day and left the house, observing curiously as the late afternoon blossomed unexpectedly before me. As fate would have it, during its period of disuse, the chain on my other bike (meaning not my commuter bike) had achieved a patina of rust and gunk that prevented it from making a successful circuit around the drive-train. So I crouched next to the back door, generously oiling the links and massaging them back into working order, until one of my neighbors arrived home next door. I hailed her, and we spoke pleasantly at length. When she went inside, my neighbor from the port side hailed me and we engaged in a discussion of a less sprawling, though just as neighborly, nature than the previous one. It is good to be friendly with the neighbors, I thought to myself, and I am lucky to have such affable and considerate ones! With that, I was off on my bike across town to my old birding and exploring haunt where I spent a couple of happy hours tromping through the woods, restoring the waning energy levels of my soul and communing with the natural world. As the sky darkened, then, and I wound my way reluctantly forth from the woods, the sweet ethereal song of the Hermit Thrushes rose surprisingly from the forest floor and carried through the trees, as if to ease me ever so gently back toward the main road, and harsh traffic, to that which I always must return.

1 Comment

by sean on January 16, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in birds, nature, neighbors, parts of the whole, redemption

Posted by sean on January 16, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/16/redemption/

halting the aversion

The holidaze has come and gone, a blur of mostly family and some friends, a lot of eating, a touch of music with an old compatriot, some reading and sleeping, and a long, luxurious respite from work. I traveled by train and car, but have been off the bike for far too long now. Worked out at the gym, tried my hand at pedal steel guitar, cooked and ate with some of my favorite people. I received an unexpected gift intended to enhance my birding, which I haven’t done in about a month now, besides car birding, and some very meager backyard birding. Christmas Day did unexpectedly bring to the yard jays, cardinals, doves, sparrows, and even a junco or two. We’ve seen glimpses of a hawk (probable Cooper’s) in the trees across the street. Meanwhile, with the close of the old year and the dawn of the new comes the inevitable reflection. I don’t make resolutions, but it’s hard not to stare ahead at a blank slate of 365 days before you and not scratch around in your head for some ideas of what you want to see rise up from that expanse of time. Personally I know I need to stop treading water and start making headway on the changes I yearn to see in my future. No more averting the eyes. My passivity knows no bounds and the time to corral it is way past due. I need to spend the afternoon, as Annie Dillard says, because I can’t take it with me. There is a path that I am supposed to be on and I will claw my way through the brambles to get to it.

2 Comments

by sean on January 3, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in annie dillard, change, growth, life, parts of the whole, time

Posted by sean on January 3, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/03/halting-the-aversion/

3:33

Wake up uncertain, through blurred eyes reach out, unmask the dread box full of time: 3:33 AM. I am untethering; I feel this, yes, I do. I float above myself all day, drifting, occasionally deleting Russian spam, wondering when this gossamer thread shall fray, then sever, to release me. I remember being young, staring at the ceiling, imagined walking on it, stepping over door frames to enter rooms; it seemed better up there. My thoughts upside down, always, then and now; my records all broken, need to melt them down, re-groove with new sounds and words.

1 Comment

by sean on December 16, 2009 • Permalink

Posted in creativity, inner life, parts of the whole, time

Posted by sean on December 16, 2009

https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/16/333/

far corners

In motion, we are immunized against lassitude. Working muscles open the vessels for more oxygen to enter. Don’t want to stop, don’t want to sit still. When you do, extremities lose their warmth; thoughts dull to a sluggish tempo. But outside, even as the wind wipes the smile from your face, the crows revel in it, swooping and soaring on currents we can’t even see. Later you glide on one of those currents in your mind, as the mood pendulum swings in your favor, without the benefit of active motion, but this time with the slow warmth of drink and easy talk. But when all that is over, quicker than you’d like, you still can’t stop the mental projectiles shooting off in every crazy direction, moving too fast to follow, all with holes burned through like the strip of caps you carried in your jeans pocket as a kid, one after another spark-cracking under the strike of a rock, as you watched and inhaled the acrid plume of smoke drifting up. Reach up quick to snatch them down with inked lines onto bleached white paper, but they are too elusive, having turned to vapor, damp and transparent like late night fog hanging over an empty field.

routine

Drinking cold coffee and thinking about routine. Do you love or loathe it? I’m conflicted, myself. Stepping outside of routine allows new perspective to flood in, the cracks and gaps full of seeping insights. But without the comfort of familiarity wrapped around us, we are vulnerable. There is exposure to the unknown. There is loss of control. The older I get the more I think about this. Do I want to walk along the boundaries, toeing the lines, free to move across them at any time? Do I want to take those risks that seem less appealing with each passing year? Does being grounded have to shut off the tap to the creative flow, or even merely reduce it to a trickle that barely hydrates a parched mind? Is there a way to squeeze a pulsing ribbon of liquid life down to those potbound roots? Perhaps I have not struggled fiercely enough. Maybe there is a balance that I just have not yet discovered.

1 Comment

by sean on December 8, 2009 • Permalink

Posted in age, creativity, parts of the whole, routine

Posted by sean on December 8, 2009

https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/08/routine/

from the bottom of the roiling pond

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the previous name of this blog had nothing to do with the content. It was just a nod to a type of wordplay that I enjoy. I think that many disappointed web searchers arrived at the site as a result. The new name is actually an old one, the title of an essay I wrote many years ago. It’s about a common thing that happens between people: you bond through shared experience, but as the vaporous passion and overstimulation of youth burn away over the slow dull coals of maturity, you perceive the true tenuous nature of that bond. Either what we need from other people changes as we grow older, or it just takes us awhile to figure out what we needed in the first place. Then again, with human beings it is rarely a matter of one option or another. Sometimes other people simply stop giving us what we need, either consciously or unconsciously. Or we tire of seeking it out from them, realizing we’d sooner squeeze blood from a stone. I suppose that, in the end, it’s usually a blurry blend of all of the above. Often when I look around and try to figure out what’s going on in the world, it’s like I’m peering through a jar of cloudy pond water. I see signs of life and movement, but what it all points toward is beyond me.

corroded contact points

Sometimes we disappoint ourselves, in either the short or the long term. Sometimes both. Not much has left my head lately and traveled to the page. Other life things have taken precedence. Which is fine, but I’m getting anxious for them to be resolved. As refuge, I’ve taken to the woods when spare time presents itself. Many of the birds have finished breeding already, and fledglings are out and about: rambunctious teenage woodpeckers, even tinier than usual chickadees, not-as-wary young catbirds. A couple of weeks ago I saw a female Wood Duck with 12 fuzzy little ducklings following her en masse. At the same time and place, I saw two adult Bald Eagles. These birds are truly majestic, so much so that perhaps our country doesn’t always live up to the pure ideals that they have come to represent.

Meanwhile, change looms ahead and I suppose when the transition completes, I will remain the same. But perhaps not. Certainly the opportunity to learn new things will follow. Certainly the chance to reorder and rearrange my life will dangle in front of me once again. And armed with a little steel wool, I can clean the corrosion off of these contact points in my head. Perhaps then the clarity I seek will reach its target.

1 Comment

by sean on July 6, 2009 • Permalink

Posted in birds, change, ducks, inner life, nature, parts of the whole, writing

Posted by sean on July 6, 2009

https://sd-stewart.com/2009/07/06/corroded-contact-points/