Field Notes #2

April 13, 2009

Why do I still do this?   Why, at my age, do I follow as if I were nine years old unmarked, unpaved trails away from what I know into the wilds of what I don’t know?     That’s how this striving creation—part light, part water, part air, part earth, and all aspiring flesh—shows itself to me, in the mutual bodying forth between us. It seems an involvement composed of equal slices revelation and formation, since in discovery, everything changes, the New erupts into being, not just in me, the older wide-eyed child, but in this juvenile Creation.

Today, I begin at the Crossfire Canyon’s cliffs, taking inventory of the birds.   A few days earlier I saw cliff swallows flash between the rims, returning or passing through.   Had they stayed or gone?   To find out, I take to the air myself, or at least to the boundary between earth and air, the rimrocks.  

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The fly

Late summer of 2008, I was sitting in Crossfire Canyon (here are parts two and three) at one of my favorite sandstone perches when I became conscious of a persistent buzzing noise. Looking down, I spotted  an insect hovering just above the ground about a meter below me.  The insect  looked something like a yellow jacket, black and bright yellow in coloration, but in morphology it more closely resembled a fly than a  wasp. A yellow jacket’s buzz changes pitch constantly as it moves, and it’s always in motion  because it has no real talent for hovering. This look-alike hovered  like a champ, so it  droned at a fairly constant pitch  rather  higher than a wasp’s.