hello, hello, and are we not of one family

in our delight of life?

I used to teach a media literacy class wherein students learned about how they’d been buffaloed by this formula: bullshit TV + capitalism = advertising. For this course I borrowed a lot of good lessons from someone else’s curriculum, including one that asked students to identify a product associated with each letter of the alphabet. I found this very alphabet on the interwebs, so here you go. How many products can you identify?

It’s kind of fun to do this. E from Eggo, P from Pez, R from Reese’s…you know. Some of them are pretty old. You might have to be at least 40 for this.

Next, students are given 25 common trees to identify, trees like pine, aspen, maybe cottonwood. They usually can’t identify more than a couple. And neither could I, at the time. The point of this lesson should be obvious: we know plenty of shitty, sugary products¹ via advertising and have begged our mothers to buy them, but we don’t know the natural world around us much at all.

My mid-forties forced the issue on me. When I looked out to the woodlands or a meadow, I saw trees and grass, and some flowers. When birds sang, I just heard…you know, trills and stuff. I didn’t so much make a decision to change this as it was made for me, by the fact of getting older which naturally leads one to bird-watching² and also because of some trips I took and friendships which bring me closer to the natural world.

Bitterroot, June 2023

It’s become essential to me to see my world the way I can see that alphabet. I want to know what this tree with the dark-red leaves is, why those purple flowers grow just there, and what birds are chirruping overhead. There is something to be said for just appreciating too and I try to do that sometimes and let go the analysis, but the truth is I enjoy analyzing things. For me it is a partner to being curious and learning.

Below are some birds I recorded near a water body recently. There’s a robin in the background of it all (isn’t there always?), but other notable singers include the red-winged blackbird you can hear at :02 and :06, a song sparrow at :08, and a yellow-headed blackbird which meows at :14 and then barks twice at about :18. They make another really loud noise too which a friend called a caterwaul but I didn’t get that one here. Can you hear others? Hints below.³

This summer, I want to improve my tree identification skills — this for some reason is very hard for me⁴ — and wildflowers, especially the roadside kind. I use my phone to help, but it’s not always the best way, and I usually run my findings by my friend Deb for confirmation.

I want to know and do so many things in this life left before me. Least of them is spending time in front of a screen. Greatest of them is strengthening a bond with the natural world and the people who are closest to it.

Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him in Return

Meadowlark, when you sing it's as if
you lay your yellow breast upon mine and say
hello, hello, and are we not
of one family, in our delight of life?
You sing, I listen.
Both are necessary
if the world is to continue going around
night-heavy then light-laden, though not
everyone knows this or at least
not yet,

or, perhaps, has forgotten it
in the torn fields,

in the terrible debris of progress.

-Mary Oliver, of course

1. Exceptions being Oreos and York Peppermint Patties. Obvs.

2. I’m sure you’ve seen the tweet that goes, “As you age, it’s ridiculous how fast bird-watching creeps up on you. You spend your whole life being 100% indifferent to birds, and then one day you’re like ‘damn, is that a yellow-rumped warbler’”

3. Western wood pewee at :02, maybe a yellow warbler at :20 and more RWBB and another song sparrow.

4. although I’ve finally mastered the ponderosa pine and Doug fir as well as a cedar, juniper, and mi-nah-i-kwa-tik, Cree for lodgepole, in the evergreen group.