nature

Absorbing Silence.

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I had some dalliances with the outside world, some with interesting people, but mostly not. The community I live in is remarkably ignorant and petty. Someone dropped an egg on the stairs and the janitors had not gotten to it, so that was a point of discussion. A security guard had laid on a couch was another, which became a matter of pettiness as well – the guard was unwell, it ended up. The ‘rain flies’ of Trinidad became a topic or so I thought – it ended up that the recent deluge of rain flies (termites) was accompanied by actual flying ants – alates – that befuddled the denizens of this strange community.

Recently, in a group chat, someone posted a video of an extraction fan in a bathroom and said they thought they had animals in their ceiling. Upon listening, it was clear that there birds involved, and being a curious person I had long found that the extraction fans connected to open air rooms where the split AC units vented their heat to the world. Like most chats, I was late to it and a day’s worth of speculation had already gone into it with only one person out of maybe 10 involved actually getting it right: birds. I don’t know how people couldn’t identify it, and the original poster retorted to me that she didn’t have time to watch the discovery channel.

I live on a planet where being able to identify the sound of birds was being shamed. Discovery Channel? Most of this can be found by simply walking outside and observing. Listening. Watching. Noticing. Finding the right questions, and thanks to the advent of a communications network filled with information, finding the right answers to questions. It used to be much more laborious with encyclopedias and the Dewey Decimal System alone. How can you not know the sounds of a bird in Trinidad and Tobago? What sort of life has one lead for not knowing the sound of birds to be defensible?

I sat drinking beer with a friend a few evenings ago, and said as much. He, too, has a curious mind, and like me, his advice is often ignored by people not as far away from brandishing pitchforks and torches over small and petty things while larger issues loom. We commiserated, laughed, and went about our lives after a few beers, but it bothers us both not that people don’t know as much as people don’t seem to want to know. What if I told you the person with animals in the ceiling was a musician? How does a musician not know the sound of birds?

Are we so removed from our world, staring at the flat screens in our caves that we shout complaints at these same screens about things we should know? How is not knowing the sounds of birds defensible? What sort of life does one have where one doesn’t hear the birds around on a daily basis? What sort of silence is in that cave?

Is it a cave, or a tomb with wifi?

Is it that the red dots of life have replaced the sounds of the outside world?

Like every morning, I sat with my first cup of coffee listening to the birds – the orange winged parrots and their revelry of cacophony, while every now and then the sounds of various tanagers and the croaking of the orependola rings through. The ever present Great Kiskedee chimes in now and then to a natural symphony of sunrise every morning. Not all would know the different instruments involved or name them, but certainly we should be able to hear them and know that they are birds. Rodents are not known for their voices. Birds are. One doesn’t need to be a naturalist to appreciate the songs of the morning.

It seems we absorb more and more silence around these flat screens that we expect that as nature when it is not, but I know it is not silence. I hear the fans of my computers, the whine of electrical devices all too well, and in time I tune it out but it also takes a toll on me where I need to hear the other lack of silence. That there are people who are different does not surprise me, and still I wonder after over half a century why people don’t know more about their world when the information is so readily available.

My knowledge of birds came from observation and answering questions that came to mind. My knowledge of insects was the same way, with trying to understand which insects were beneficial or not to households and plants pushed me on minor quests to get more knowledge, and I do not claim great knowledge of these things, yet the ignorance of others about these things has become as palpable as the shroud of silence they seemingly snuggle in. What sort of life is there without curiosity and only complaint?

We are the noisy ones on the planet, mostly, and we are deaf to our own noise. We are deaf to the sounds around us, it seems, and we are blind to the world around us as well if it is something inconvenient.

It seems despite my best efforts, I am surrounded by the deaf and blind, who lash out at the smallest inconveniences, and who will complain as if it’s their problem while acting as if it isn’t.

We do not live in silence. We live increasingly in ignorance, it seems. The troubles half a world away, where people die because other people choose to kill them, are likely filled with people who appreciate the songs of birds as a welcome interruption to the sounds of the weapons of their enemies.

What luxury we live in to not know the sound of birds. What depravity.

AI should replace some of these people, for that is all they have become – large language models with no questions and hallucinated answers.

The Spider.

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It wasn’t a very big spider. In fact, as spiders go, it seemed like a fairly small one. We took a moment to consider each other carefully.

I had opened my door leading to the corridor, leading to the elevator – something I had not done in some time. I cannot tell you how long. I had been holed up in my cave, writing away, looking out the window on occasion. Had it been a day? Two days? 3? I don’t know. Generally I look at my watch to know what day of the week it is, and I only note the days where I put on jeans to go out into the world. Going without pants is not recommended.

On opening the door, a web, and a spider. On inspection, it was harmless to me. It was likely some sort of trans spider, for it was androgynous to me – that seems important to note these days. We couldn’t communicate, so it couldn’t give me pronouns, so I will simply call it Spider and hope I don’t get cancelled for the wrong pronoun. That’s a real risk these days, and I don’t want to be insensitive.

The spider, in the center of it’s web, was close enough to eye level. I tilted my head and drew closer, wondering how the opening of the door had not broken the web. This was a surprisingly strong web. I nodded at the spider. It did not nod back.

There was a dilemma. I needed to go out. I didn’t want to destroy the spider’s home, but the web didn’t give me any options. I am not afraid of spiders, and for the most part, they do not seem afraid of me. We have a mutual respect. An understanding. They eat bugs, I leave them alone, yet now, I was forced to make a decision.

It wasn’t a particularly good spot for a web. Even insects fear crossing my door, for there is a madness inside that only escapes through the keyboard. It is where I stay away from the asylum of humanity, like Wonko The Sane, and every now and then gasp at the profound lack of understanding of those in the asylum.

I went to the kitchen, procuring a sharpened piece of bamboo from the glass where I kept such things. Sharpened pieces of bamboo are handy for all sorts of things, but the pointy end was not necessary for this. It would be a part of the Spider Relocation Program.

It took some convincing, but soon I had the spider on the skewer, unharmed though I imagine some of the dignity was as lost as the web. I carried spider to an air room nearby, with good air circulation and a better chance of catching flying creatures. It’s near the garbage room, too. A much better spot, I would think, but ultimately I don’t know. I was simply trying to be thoughtful. We need spiders.

And so I left the spider there.

Today, I opened my door again, because on inspection in the mirror, my hair had voted for a haircut.

The spider was there again.

I had clearly misunderstood the spider.

It had bigger plans.

I repeated the process, and hopefully the spider takes the point, or I may have to take stronger measures. I don’t want to, but I am prepared, and I told the spider so.

There are other people on my floor that might make better meals. There are even a few that I won’t miss. This I also told the spider.

We shall see tomorrow. If you do not hear from me again, please – don’t feed the spider.

The Nest.

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The insistent tick of a man cutting bamboo with a cutlass outside makes it’s way through the dusty window, while an orange winged parrot surveys the scene with interest in a nearby hollowed palm.

A nest.

All that parrot is concerned with is the protection of it’s nest, and while the bamboo cutting is happening some meters away, it monitors the situation. This is what many creatures do when their offspring are not ready to leave the nest yet. They keep an eye on things and, if threatened, will either make a lot of noise or will attack creatures disproportionately larger who might be a threat – like the nearby osprey, who are held at bay by the noise of the cutlass cutting that bamboo.

Sometimes, a parent isn’t available to do these things. Sometimes a predator gets a foraging parrot. Sometimes a human shows up to capture it and put it in a cage. Sometimes life is ended otherwise, and the young parrots within have to either learn to fend for themselves or die.

I sit outside with my coffee and observe. I do not know much of these nests and families. I was a young one who learned to fend for myself at a young age, even with a parent around. The idea that a parent is constantly around for that sort of thing seems… alien to me, and so I always watch how animals and people act in families – and then by extension, tribes, and then by extension… well, it gets messier and messier.

It all revolves around The Nest.

Humanity is different, The Nest has largely become a derived function of society, and I am a product of that, and I am also the dividend of The Nest I came from, whatever good that is. In the grander scheme of things, I am of No Nest, of the caves, left tapping away at a keyboard as insistently as the man with the cutlass cuts at the bamboo patch.

I type faster than he cuts, but he gets a tangible result where I do not. He is cleaning his nest, I am sure, and I am building mine one word at a time, weaving words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages and chapters of a life lived with open eyes and a burning question.

AI will not be trained on his work, as important as it is. Generative AI will not be cutting bamboo anytime soon.

Yet in time, that bamboo may grow back, the words will have fallen away, and all will be forgotten.

Nature and Play.

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A friend of mine recently went to a informal conference regarding orcas and their attacks on ships, and I wish I could have gone myself. He was kind enough to post some bullets on it which were interesting and reinforced some of my own thoughts.

One thing leapt out at me – that the scientist that was there stressed that these weren’t attacks.

“…We talk to animals quite a bit – maybe more than we should, anthropomorphizing where maybe we shouldn’t. Communication, though, can be different from their end. Maybe they think the boat is an upside down creature that is playing?

It’s impossible to say, but I’m pretty sure it’s not an attack.

I’m also pretty sure it feels like an attack if you’re on the boat.

People do the above to each other every day, accidentally causing harm when trying to be playful. Maybe the answer is to let the orcas know that it hurts when they do that.”

‘The Unattack‘, RealityFragments.com, November 20th, 2023.

What I was getting at here was that I have seen and experienced way too many times destructive behaviors that, when someone is held to account, they respond with, “I was just playing”. “I didn’t mean anything by it…” Normally these seem to be responses that you don’t hear about beyond lower maturity levels that we associate with teenagers and below, so it’s part of the learning process, but I’ve heard people well down their temporal paths say the same or similar.

Well, if you didn’t mean anything, why did you do it? What was the reasoning behind it?

That’s pretty simple when we look at our own species, but across species, it’s much more complicated.

Another friend complained to me about her cats digging up her plants, which to the cats are play. It’s a behavior she doesn’t like, so of course she got upset about it (and that her housemates walked through the dirt rather than clean it up before she awoke), but it’s in the instincts of the cats to hunt. Cats are hunters. They may be domesticated, they may defecate in boxes and eat from dishes, but they are still cats. The damage done from that play should be expected from a cat, and I gave her some tips on how to avoid it that she didn’t use. The cats dug up her plants again, she got upset, cycle continues.

Dogs, as domesticated as they are, sometimes like digging holes, sometimes like going past fences, and all manner of other things – not because they are ‘bad’, but because they see no value in not doing it and find entertainment in doing it. It’s play.

Play has a practical use in our world. That’s why parents buy children educational toys, or at least things accused of being educational. It’s to prepare them for the world that we live in, which we as homo sapiens have a lot of control over. That’s why cats and dogs, despite hundreds if not thousands of years of ‘domestication’ retain some habits. Is it genetics? Some of it probably is. Have you ever seen a husky that doesn’t vocalize? A cat that doesn’t chase things around at some point in it’s life?

Taking this back to the largest carnivore on the planet, the orca, these are creatures that have worn salmon as hats during one of their fads, that love slapping stingrays into the air, and many other things. I love the research we see on them, and to date we have no reports of orcas attacking humans outside of captivity. No one knows the exact reason that these particular orcas are having fun with ship’s rudders, and scientists apparently agree that it’s play.

Play can be destructive. Whether spiteful or not, the damage from play can be real. More knowledgeable people than myself don’t know why the orcas are hitting the rudders. When we pull what they consider food out of the water, how do they view that? When we make noise in their environment, our cacophony of engines and rudders causing sounds around them to change, are we irritating them, as it did the baiji (Chinese freshwater dolphin) and which quite possibly is extinct?

Is this play, or are these orcas taking control of their environment? Can it be both? Or do they have TikTok challenges?

I think being able to disable a ship might be useful for a predator. It might be useful for disabling competition for food, or it could be the same as banging on the floor or ceiling when the neighbors are playing the song of their people too loud.

Knowing What Something Is.

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Thraupis Episcopus, Blue-gray tanager, also called the Blue Jean in Trinidad and Tobago.

Recovering yesterday from the silicon insult, there was a quote that I kept coming back to as I awoke now and then.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard P. Feynman, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character

We use labels to communicate things to other people, and it’s all based on some common perception. The bird pictured is blue-grey, so some very smart person called it a blue-grey tanager, where tanager is a type of bird that has common characteristics to other birds we call tanagers. Then someone who was taught too much Latin in school decided it looked a lot like the ‘Bishop of Thraupi’ (the literal translation). I have no idea why it’s called a blue-jean in Trinidad and Tobago, but it is what it is.

As most creatures, they’re interesting in their own way. I spent a lot of time watching birds in Trinidad and Tobago, taking pictures of them as a challenge, most of which ended up on Flickr and most of which weren’t that great. In doing that, I learned about how the birds interacted with others, what they ate, and when I talk about a blue-grey tanager all of that is behind the label. I know what the bird is based on what it does, how it behaves, etc.

It’s not just a label.

In the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’, a similar point was made in one of the more epic tirades done by the late, great Robin Williams:

…You’re an orphan right? You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?

“Good Will Hunting” (1997), Sean speaking to Will.

The obvious way to go with this would be about identity politics and some of the silliness that ensues with it because clearly labels don’t mean as much as who the people we’re talking about actually are, but that’s not where I’m going with it – though in a way, I am.

When we look at generative AI, and how it can be trained on the way we have communicated in the past, be it art, writing, etc, all it’s really doing is using the labels as puppets. It doesn’t understand what it has spit out in response to a prompt.

I’ve met people like that. In fact, in my younger days, I was more like that than even now I care to admit – reading about things I didn’t understand, and having my world view defined by the views of others. Actual experience varies, and that’s the point of all of it. That diversity of experience is what enriches our society, or should. It’s additive.

It’s impossible for us to be able to share all of our experiences with others, but we can share more if we go beyond the labels. That one picture above of the blue-grey tanager did not just happen. It required me to understand the bird to get close enough with only 3x magnification on one of the original digital cameras to get the detail I did, it took trimming the plumb tree just right to allow the branches to be close enough from the top of the stairs, and it required a lot of patience in developing trust with the birds – that I wasn’t going to eat them.

The very experiences that make us human are the things we need to fall back on to be human these days, not the rote memorization and regurgitation of labels that generative artificial intelligences are much better at than we are.

We need to understand these things.

Seed.

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I was tending my bonsai projects yesterday when I noticed a seed sitting in one of the bonsai pots.

It seemed to be a bougainvillea seed. It had gotten wet when it landed, expanding as they do. I puzzled over it.

There are no bougainvillea within sight of my little window to the outside world, several floors above the ground floor. Clearly it had come from a bougainvillea somewhere. I let it be as I ran some errands, did some other things, but the seed stayed on my mind.

Other people have similar views. Yet that one seed found my place, found that particular pot, and it landed. The odds of that seem extraordinary. It’s not as if there was one nearby. The winds had brought it to there, up into my little external window to the world that is open about 15 feet by 7 feet. Somehow, of all the places to land, it had settled there.

Life. Opportunity.

Some people would talk about it being meant to be there, as if there were some intentionality involved. The only thing that happened is that a bougainvillea somewhere out of my sight had dropped a seed to the wind, probably one of many, and one landed in my little area to try to find purchase in this world, within the lines that demarcate my little viewing area. Was it an opportunity for me?

Not really. I don’t like bougainvillea. They are pretty from a distance, their colors vibrant, but they have no scent. They have thorns that make managing them cumbersome at best, painful at worst. No, I do not like them at all.

A few hours had passed and I went back to decide what to do with it. Should I stick it in a pot? Should I throw it away? Should I…

I looked, and it was gone.

The same winds that had dropped it there had likely taken it somewhere else, the burden of decision taken away as easily as it was given. Had I acted decisively, it would be planted out there, something I would tend and care for, or thrown in the trash, but I didn’t care for this opportunity.

It moved on, as have I.

You don’t need to jump at every ‘opportunity’. It gets tiresome, you end up investing time into so much and you may not find value in it at all. Or it could be very rewarding, fulfilling you in ways you wouldn’t expect. You don’t really know which is which. You hope that you get it right, but sometimes you don’t.

Things happen. We want some things to happen, we need other things to happen, and there are things that just happen.

Regardless, things just happen, just as sometimes you happen to other things. The difference is that we get to respond to things, that we can want things to happen and even sometimes conjure them into being on a whim.

Sometimes you can’t.

Things happen. If it’s a thing you want, you need to be prepared, and if it’s something you don’t want, you have to be prepared.

The seed escaped my judgement because I was prepared. I was prepared to allow what came into my life to leave in the same way.

It took a long time to learn that.

Less Than Netflix.

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I sat outside a while this evening, my back to my apartment, facing the darkened hill face, the landslide leaving a lighter area on the face.

Over my left shoulder, I can see a stab at humanity. The electric lights, cycling at different hertz you can see over the distance, visually humming in different tones.

To my right, and below, some of my ongoing bonsai related projects lost in the dark.

I can’t tell you how long I sat there. I’ve thought about that hill in so many ways that now when I look at it, my mind relaxes – as if working it into a tizzy is the only way I can get it to get rest. I bat that around in my head a bit, bouncing it around, still looking at that hillside, darkened further.

Last night the moon hit it just so, where it reflected it’s topography back to me with reflections and shadows.

It was darker tonight. Thoughtful, I might say, if I pushed my perspective onto it.

Then a flash on the rock face.
A small smile crooks the left side of my lips, I feel it and am surprised by it. Why did I do that?

I like nature’s light shows and it looks like it might be a good night.

All in all, the subscription costs less money than Netflix.

The Bananaquit And The Hummingbird.

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Bananaquit from above
The Bananaquit

I sat one afternoon after lunch and sat, listening to the surf. A bold bananaquit had grown used to me and would come within arms reach, whistling and studying me – unafraid even when I moved. He whistled loudly, either happily or voicing a complaint. After much song and the little hopping two-step dance of the bananaquit, he would go for the hummingbird feeder.

The ever-present hummingbird watched from it’s regular roost in a shrub in front of me, and would dart at the bananaquit – the bananaquit that was unafraid of me would fly off quickly to avoid the humming bird, looking for it, but unable to see it.

I watched the hummingbird hover in the shade of a nearby tree, watching the feeder it had claimed. As the bananaquit would sing and dance toward it again, the hummingbird would dart at it again,so fast and precise.

The bananaquit would again fly off.

Photo
The Hummingbird

This process repeated itself in so many different ways – different directions, different starting points and ending points for both of them. The bananaquit could simply not get to the feeder, afraid of a bird even smaller than itself as I quietly chuckled at it’s many failures when trying to sneak into the hummingbird’s territory.

I watched – they had been at it for an hour, and in heartbeats that must be the equivalent of days of their lives, perhaps even weeks.

A thought occurred to me.

It might be nice to have a hummingbird to deal with all the noisy bananaquits in my life.

Vacation Thoughts

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Bananaquit from aboveThe time away was a wonderful thing; I hadn’t realized how much I needed a vacation.

There was time for some necessary culling of what I have been doing over the years by not doing any of it. I wrote for days in a notebook, a means I have for clearing my mind. I started doing that as a teenager, a way to get everything out – every sting, every joy, every itching wound. That writing is never to be published – simply an exercise in free writing that cleanses and, which at the end, is destroyed.

An open letter to the Universe as some might see it, an open letter to the Self as others might see it. The physical act of making everything inside external, the mechanical process, is something that works for me because then you can look at it from the outside looking in. The shift in perspective is then more easily done, going through one’s own life as the reader rather than the author.

You find petty things, you find important things glossed over, you find a character whose world-view is affected by things no longer present, whose actions are affected by that world-view in both good and bad ways.

And then I burn them – a symbolic thing I have always done, watching the black ink contrast less and less on the pages that go from white to ash.

Then you’re left with a start, and in that start, in a space where you can be yourself, you find what’s really there now. What I found was not what I had thought was there – faux rationality is easily scattered from the urn and you can see yourself for what you are, the world for what it is…

And then the vacation starts where you can do the things you want to do.

One morning I idyllically tossing a tethered waterproof camera into an area of deep current, just because I had one and some 550 cord.

Another morning I traipsed around on the abandoned paths of Blue Waters Inn – full of life, absent people who wanted to spend money to go see things and were out and about. I saw new things.

I sat with a hummingbird for hours, watching it feed and chase others from it’s source.

Most of all, I figured out what the next me was going to do with his life, if only for a while.

Context

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Crystal sparksWe miss things.

We look away. Sometimes it’s a matter of time, which is a matter of prejudice in the full meaning – not the popular usage.

Take for example The Wall, by Pink Floyd. I introduced the album to my father circa 2001, and he liked it. In 2004, I got a copy of the video for The Wall. The video is something that Tarantino probably looks up to, really, but it tells the story as they wished to represent it.

My father hated it, and would not listen to Pink Floyd after it. In his words, “They’re fucking sick!”.

Now, we could get into the metaphors, etc, but the video – is biographical to an extent, as is the music. It’s about tearing down metaphorical walls, something of a theme in every sentient human I know and have known. To me, it’s soul food.

That’s not what my father saw at all – in it’s own way a tribute of our differences. To him it was sick and disturbing. To me, in a way, that was sort of the point – because inside of ourselves, when we’re honest with ourselves, I think – there always lurks something sick and disturbing. Some might say that there is a darkness in all of us. My father was taught, oddly enough, to maintain The Wall, whereas I embraced that darkness early on.

Was he wrong? No, he was not, he was absolutely right in what he saw – in his context, in the context of his own life and what he thought the world should look like. Was I wrong? No, I saw in my context that it all fell into place. That he was a cornerstone of some of my Walls was a bit poetic in his reaction. Pink Floyd was also a tool for me to help work my way around things, and he believed in brute force – which is not to say that he wasn’t intelligent, but that he was forged of the same materials in a different furnace.

That’s one example of context. Others abound. We all prejudge things to at least a small degree, and some of us – a few, it would seem – take the time to get to understand the contexts better. To see things from different perspectives, to appreciate these perspectives for what we are. It’s important for creating lasting solutions in a world that doesn’t really care about context – it doesn’t care about our prejudices, it doesn’t care about any of what we care about.

The Laws of Nature, which we’ve started figuring out, don’t care about what you think of the next person.

Society, on the other hand, does. We live in both, and we live where contexts are always in conflict – and the big ugly ones remain unresolved because they fester, they are not allowed to heal, and they remains bricks of the wall in our society.