Stillness

comes in many forms: the kind of stillness I require to read and review student papers on the computer ; the kind that descends on me when I watch mindless television, half-asleep; the kind considered de rigeur at a funeral or classical music concert; the kind I hear occasionally when no car, or student, or bird breaks the silence. Yesterday, I enjoyed the magical kind that has visited me only once previously: preternatural stillness in the presence of another still species.
This adolescent male Eastern Pondhawk and I breathed the same air and felt the same scratch of sandy grass and wave of wind under hot sun for a good fifteen minutes before he decided to fly off for a snack or female.

First, I squatted and stilled myself, and then lay down and stilled myself, so much so that a Blue Corporal landed on my sleeve and cleaned his jaw. But it was the Pondhawk I studied with his fantastic lime face like a translucent jelly bean, honeycombed blue-green eyes, chartreuse and turquoise thorax, powdering into dusty blue.

From his tiny antennae to his ivory tooth-like claspers at the end of his abdomen, I studied each part I had just studied hours earlier in my new book, Dragonflies & Damselflies or Georgia and the Southeast.
I stared and he stared back.

I did not live in his brain as Annie Dillard did in the weasel's, but did learn "something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive."

For those minutes, my consciousness stilled into a state of pure joy.