It's All Good

The thing about walking every day, sometimes at the same spot over a period of days, is that I watch a folding of one event into other without interruption, the way life happens as opposed to an invented narrative. To wit:

Day One
I note several sizable piles of scat at various spots near the small Day Lake Road pond. Not dog poop, not cow patties, not horse droppings, not deer or rabbit pellets, not dog doo-doo, not dark like coyote feces. Plenty of seeds, undigested, size large and splattered in shape. Raccoon maybe? Raccoons? Whoever has left the splatter left it generously.

Day Two
Several Silver-spotted Skippers and one Red Admiral alight on the droppings, teeming with flies, though one skipper in particular seems especially greedy and lingers, spreading himself over as much of the pile as he can, exerting an authority that speaks this is mine! (On the other side of the pond, a Green Heron kaks in distress, bleeding where a leg should be, and I wonder who will eat the bird?)

Day Three
A horde -- five and then six -- of newly minted Eastern Tiger Swallowtails clump themselves on the dung, a hallelujah chorus of hungry Lepidoptera, shaking a St Vitus dance one moment, stilling in meditative prayer the next (stunned like newborns, milk drunk).

Here's the thing: nothing's wasted. The animal or animals who left the scat ate something that lived, digested what or they could,  left the rest, to use it for nourishment, leave their eggs on plants, those emerge in new forms, they feed on plants, . . . .

Anyway, the Lion King was right about that circle of life, and I like watching it.

In the Here and Now

In today's New York Times, Perry Garfinkel describes opening a writing workshop with this direction:

At the top of a page, write the words ‘Here and now I am’ followed by an ellipsis. In the next five minutes write as many sentences as you can, each sentence beginning with ‘Here and now I am.’ The rules: no questions, no stopping, no thinking, no worries about logic or syntax and no cheating off your neighbor.

If you go blank, draw from your senses — what you see, smell, taste, hear, feel.

Here goes:

Here and now I am writing my 2,120th post for My Daily Snap, a ritual that lifts me like a swing, higher and higher, head back, laughing. 

Here and now I remember swinging as a child, and I love blogging like that, an infectious addiction, even though my feet hurt. 

Here and now, my feet hurt as they have since morning when, over my head a green heron ack-ack-acking across the pond, I slid part-way into the black loam, water soaking my socks, my camera aimed at another new species -- the Southern Spreadwing. 

Here and now, I smile, knowing that a famous person, Dennis Paulson, author of a major field guide to Odonates in America, verified my photo on Facebook. 

Here and now, I heard the heron's acking as applause, but it's the rush of wings, the gust of air brushing my cheek as a Slaty Skimmer races by, that makes my skin pucker. 

Here and now I feel dehydrated, not literally, but metaphorically: spent, I suppose. 

Here and now, still tired from looking for bugs, in wet shoes and socks, two cameras slung across my chest and back, I know I'll do it again tomorrow. 

Here and now, when I write have nothing to say of consequence other than noting the way the Southern Spreadwing turned a moment toward me as I reached in for a photograph or the way the second lizard, the one on the Lake Dimmick sign, waited and waited and waited as I approached, as if it knew I am no predator. 

Here and now, I have nothing to write, I think, but then when I sit at the computer and place my fingers on the keyboard, something happens and text appears. 

In the here and now of photowalking and writing I am part of the elements, and I feel whole.