Murmuration

Late to the game, I have discovered the many wonderful videos of Starlings en masse. It is easy to get lost in the sensation it produces, whether it's awe or curiosity or anxiety or joy. When I came across the video, the pulsing cloud of birds brought to mind my community of friends. For a few years we have hoped to "share life abundantly" - the only words I recall from our mission statement as we sought to buy land together and form a legal entity. And we have come to share life together in meaningful ways. A meal here. A shared moment there. But with a goal in mind, a very clear picture of our ultimate destination, every step along the way has seemed to fall short. 

And so I watch the collective herd, tight one moment, and loose the next; flying to the left and then to the right; and then in every which direction. I get a familiar feeling in the open spaces within me; that feeling of bated breath I connect to community discussions. Close, but not quite. Almost, and then it's gone. Panic and retreat. A desperate grasp, relief, and then that helpless sensation of it slipping through our fingers. I imagine the individual birds chasing after the tail feathers of the bird in front of them. Confusion. Concern. Chaos. 

There is a quote attributed to the Buddha that says when the cloud transforms to rain it does not panic like us. Maybe this is true of all non-domesticated beings. I find assurance in natural patterns. I gain a new vision of the individual starling, caught in a motion so grand; so fragile; un scripted. The starling has no manner of seeing the full murmuration. I catch a momentary vision of my own life, my movements, my community, my world past to future, from the viewpoint of something bigger. I imagine these things spread across the sky like starlings. Not a destination. A dance. 

Some have called a murmuration a selfish herd. The theory is that each starling desperately competes for the center to avoid predators, resulting in a moving center. But some research has shown that this sort of collective behavior results in less predation for the entire herd. Maybe our community will never settle. But perhaps in our attempts to group we can evade the predators that would consume an individual. And maybe it will be beautiful to behold. 

Starlings in Winter

by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers,

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;

they float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;

and you watch

and you try

but you simply can't imagine

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

"Starlings in Winter" by Mary Oliver, from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press, 2003.

(note: definitions are quoted directly from the dictionary)

Social. 

Worker. 

Social. Of or relating to society or its organization. 

Social. Of or relating to rank and status in society. 

Worker. An employee. 

Worker. A person who works in a specified way. 

As a social worker, I am very familiar with theories of human development, among them the theories of ego development. I have known, or rather, I have learned, that humans in infancy are incapable of differentiating themselves from the people and events in their lives. For the first time in my life, I heard this described as an inability to compartmentalize. It is funny that the word ‘compartmentalize’ has been brought to my attention recently by a close friend. He may argue that we suffer by compartmentalizing our lives. Here is our work, and there is our family, and here you can play, and there you must be quiet, and here is me and there is a worm.  

Ego development. Human development. We come to this world, thinking beings, believing that we are somehow connected with every event and every person. But after a few days or months or years have passed, the idea of associating ourselves with this world, without distinction, becomes absurd.  Now I recognize, as a social worker should, that this disassociation is a protective factor. But then, I have never (in theory) been a proponent of disconnecting from what is emotionally difficult. Because we are alive. We are filled with life. We are foolish, us humans, but we are here, and we should fully experience that emotionally. At our best, we give word to the feelings of others, allow for a second of connectedness, wherein there is no disassociation from human to human or world to world or life to life. At our worst, the idea of associating ourselves from this world is something to grow out of. But we are food for worms. Where's the sense of ego in that? 

Social. Needing companionship. 

Social. Living together in organized communities, typically with different casts, as ants, bees, wasps, and termites do. 

Worker. A person who works hard. 

Worker. In social insects such as bees, wasps, ants, and termites, a neuter or undeveloped female that is a member of what is usually the most numerous caste and does the basic work of the colony. 

Life lines and extinction

A discomforting thought poked me in the head the other day; an unwelcome awareness that I have an ancestral line that dates back as far as can be imagined. I have had ancestors alive at any point in time. The simple testament of my existence declares that by blood has been here through the ages. People I can credit my existence to were breathing in the1960's, the 1930's. They crossed an ocean and settled in the US. Even fought a few wars here. And before that, I am sure they fought battles in Europe. They were on one side or the other of a revolution. Changed religions. Built things that have long since disappeared. And quite probably a few things that have not. They were carving out a life somewhere while Jesus walked the Earth. They were part of the movement away from hunting and gathering to agriculture. They were a part of evolution as we know it. They had to have been. Because I am. And to survive it all is both astounding and horrifying. 

I watched a match burn down. The fire slowly moving towards my fingers. It was beautiful and gave me pause. But just like human innovation, it soon consumed all that sustained it.  

I drifted off in a meeting today, undoubtedly with that vacant look on my face, the hallmark of boredom, or so I've thought. I came back to reality feeling a little sheepish, trying to decide whether my mouth was hanging open, and immediately began to criticize myself for not being able to engage the material. Each time I drift off now I try and trace my distraction to its root. And each time, I find that I veered off shortly after hearing something interesting. Thought provoking, in fact.

I recently heard that our brain sleeps a lot during the day. I knew that while we slept our brain went through cycles, but I did not know that those cycles continue through the waking hours. I notice these slips in and out of consciousness when I am reading and go a few pages before realizing I have no idea what I've read, or pulling into the driveway and having no recollection of the journey, or sitting in a meeting and realizing I am thinking about rabbits instead of progress reports. While our bodies continue to function unconsciously, we lose conscious thought.

As we are able to look at the functioning brain in new and exciting ways, neuroscience is teaching us that sleep plays a function in processing information. We cannot remember what we have learned the day before without sufficient sleep the proceeding night. I read a study before that suggested that dreams are survival tactics - dogs run in dreams because they are learning how to survive the challenges of their day. Humans dream they are naked so they know how to get out of church when that happens. I don't know. The ideas connect in my mind - daydreams are opportunities throughout the day to process what we are learning.

So there I am, sitting in a four hour meeting, paying attention with the best of them, learning good things, when suddenly I have drifted off into some fantasy. I am ok with that. Children use play as a way of making sense of their world. It stimulates their brain and creates the necessary synopsis to grow and develop. I think play time is just as crucial for adults. We need play to make sense of our experiences. We drift into fantasies of saying something brilliant or chewing someone out or running away to Thailand, or bunnies, and something about the process and the white noise and turning off conscious thought and control helps us incorporate what we have been learning.

What I really want is to not take myself so seriously. Learning takes humility. It takes letting go. Maybe it takes a jaw ajar during a meeting. I want to have grace with myself. At my best, I am an untamable mystery.

Retreat

There is a beautiful gazebo across from our yard. Everyone who visits comments on the beauty of this gazebo. They ask who owns it and how often they use it. No one ever uses the gazebo. It was intended as a spiritual retreat. It is a retreat for the groundhogs I chase from my garden. Today, though, I saw a brilliant orange passing through the trees and into the gazebo. Our neighbor’s relatives are in from Laos for a wedding. One, a monk, found his way to the gazebo. It made me realize that quiet rest and contemplation are practices. They take practice.

What the duck?

Ducks gather by the crick running through my back yard like travelers gather by the pool at a resort. Only the ducks are not vacationing. They are being ducks. I wish I were a duck. 

I saw the remains of a duck by the side of the road, torn to pieces by something. I guess that is the price you pay for sitting by the water all day instead of building walls around yourself.

The other day I sat looking at the gathered ducks. There were three distinct groups. Since most of the female ducks are sitting on nests, the largest group consisted of lone males, glistening green at the top like bottles of champagne. One male sat off from the group with a female duck. I have heard that ducks mate for life, and this site filled me with romantic thoughts of my partner with his own fancifully feathered head. The third ‘grouping’ was a single duck – female. She sat alone between the others. Separate. I look at her and imagine the blanket of feathers and duck parts by the side of the road. I wonder if she lost her mate.

I wondered about the ducks. I like to think the single-mate notion has merit in nature outside of human invention. But does their social life mirror our own in any other way? Does the male duck sitting with his partner feel disappointed to be separated from the other males? Does the female partner feel guilt for the nature of partnership? Is she infertile? Does she feel guilty about that? Does the lone female feel lonely? Does she look at the partnered female with envy? Does she hate the other female? Does she hate herself without a mate to give her some reason not to? Do the males sitting in a group ever get tempted? Do they look longingly at the smooth brown feathers of both the partnered and widowed female duck while their own mates sit on nests, hatching their progeny? Or are they just ducks? 

Why can't we just say "easel"?

The words we unconsciously use reflect the society we have constructed. The words we chose can dismantle that society by making thought conscious again.