Month: April 2015

A colleague said that her very young daughter thought she only had a butt-crack but no butt-hole. She could see her butt-crack but she had no reason to think anything was in there.

All the more evidence that children are "little scientists!" And that they have a healthy, inborn skepticism as well. Essentially, her attitude toward whatever was on her backside was "I’ll believe it when I see it."

In other news I found a dead northern flicker (yellow-shafted variety) a few feet from a glassy University of Minnesota building, the Ted Mann Concert Hall. The building is a wall of glass right next to a wooded corridor overlooking the river. There are absolutely no bird-friendly measures there, not even cheap stickers on the glass.

The bird looked like it had broken its neck just like the warbler I found next to another UMN building last fall. These people should know better.

The weather is fantastic. Saturday and today I walked for hours and hopped on and off Nice Ride bikes and light rail cars because I couldn’t soak up enough daylight. Whenever I thought it was time to head home I looked up and realized the sun was still high in the sky and there were still fields and nooks and vistas I hadn’t stopped at before.

This weekend I did not go camping because there was big boy stuff to take care of at home. But there’s a lot of nature to observe in the city: the buds are popping out. A red-winged blackbird was calling atop a sign above a freeway (I have never seen this before). The crayfish are crawling about in the river.

Observing nature whether afield or in the city I discern major destructive events as well as dramatic growth.

This attunes me to my own transformation. It encourages me to take the long view and to love and revere this whole process as if I was watching the grand project of life itself.

Not watching, but captaining, determining the thing. And sitting there by the river in spring is the perfect time to reassert the exact direction I want to go in, and decide who is to be my crew.