Morning…

Yellow flower-dandelion-clovers-weeds, speargrass
That rooster crowing by the shed
Small tree-purple flowers
Cars on the highway

Yellow stars on green grass space
Tiny moth flying below the tops of grass-unseen & secret
Lines of trees-leafless, still asleep
Birds chirp and sing, unseen
Dandelions gone to seed
Vulture, distant, glides horizon wind
Pink flowers beyond the ditch, beyond reach
Stands of bluebonnet
Chilly breeze, gray skies, colors fading in the haze
Mockingbird silently flies between two trees

Afternoon…

Wasp buzzing under canopy,
Killdeer flying over ditch
Smoke from behind the trees, campfires in the air
Purple blossom tree

Ant mound pressed against cracked concrete
Ants stream from invisible holes
Airplane cuts gray sky

Buildings through the trees
Donkey brays, rooster crows
Tiny blue flowers in the grass-invisible from six feet up

Crisp on the grass, old leaves-autumn leftovers-punctuate the ground
Burnt leaf smoke carries on the wind
Drills call cadence while a tiny spider climbs a blade of grass

Chipped bark on live oak
Soft moss on the lower trunk, bird’s nest in the branches
Light green, spring leaves sway
Grass, tired and old, hasn’t started growing yet

In the distance a pile of rocks explode with purple flowers, yellow centers
Alone in the field, a daisy, lost in prairie sea

Soaring overhead,
scissor-tails returning
a long journey ends

I love the scissor-tailed flycatcher. So beautiful and elegant with tails forked wide or streaming long and thin behind like signs towed by toy airplanes. What would the sign say? Bugs beware, spring is here.

They’re the state bird of Oklahoma, and can be found on the Oklahoma statehood quarter, released earlier this year.

Fortunately, they can also be found all over central Texas this time of year, soaring over open fields, twisting and diving to come up with a delicious dragonfly. Watching their forked tailed displays is cause to stop the car and stare.

They migrate up from southern Mexico and central America, and then fan out across Texas and Oklahoma. Those journeys are especially amazing to me. What have those little black eyes seen? Seeing the first members of a returning migration is a sight to make one’s day. For a moment, at least, we can know that some things still work, still happen as they should. With their return, Nature’s clock chimes April.

They showed up on April 1st this year.

The return of the
scissor-tailed flycatcher
April has begun

Not much time for blogging and book writing. Guess what comes first?

So, here, another picture of a bird.

In a free moment at work today, I flipped open Beat Poets and found Kerouac’s advice for writers: “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.”

Half lunatic love ravings of the self-professed angelic mind (see me vent my inner Jack?) half good advice, half (yeah, 3/2’s) scattered pearls, I found a few ideas I like, especially these:

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

29. You’re a Genius all the time

And, now, off to the labors of my genius…

Being a squirrel sometimes looks like good work if you can get it.

Today was a perfect first day of spring with deep blue skies and a nice cool breeze. I saw a barn swallow while out today, so the swallows are back as are the hummingbirds who are starting to show up at the feeder again.

Spring at last.

There’s nothing like an old stone wall, crumbling and forgotten, to make a gray day seem even grayer. I’m sure its builder would be as surprised to find it still here as I was to find it at all only a few steps away, though all but hidden from the trail.

These thick leathery plants are suddenly everywhere. A good reminder to sometimes look down.

Like a gate, these sticks block the way to a small clearing, owned by cardinals.

I saw this downy woodpecker banging away on a branch about ten feet above the trail yesterday. Everyone I passed on the trail was talking about the woodpecker. Did you see the woodpecker? Did you see him?

Loud as he was, he wasn’t hard to miss.

I took my survey walk along the trail near the house on Saturday morning. The first thing that hit me when I walked outside was the sheer number of birds that were singing. It’s been a while since it was that loud. It was a beautiful spring day, and the birds knew it.

The pond held a few northern shovelers and a bunch of gadwalls (lousy over-enlarged picture above), a duck I hadn’t previously met in the neighborhood. I counted six of them in the pond with the two shovelers, but all the ducks flew away as one when a family walked up to the edge of the pond to skip rocks.

I got this shot of one of the gadwalls on the way out.

Along the way, I saw the usual suspects: mourning dove, carolina chickadee, northern mockingbird, American crow, killdeer, and lots of noisy blue jays.

The blue jays were a nice surprise. They’ve been lying low these past months, but with such a perfect spring day, they were out in substantial numbers. I heard far more than I saw, but I saw quite a few. They are also back in the yard for the first time since August.

The white-winged doves are back as well. Most of them left in November, leaving only a few stragglers behind. Saturday morning, I saw one of those clean-out-the-feeder-in-ten-minutes flocks that hasn’t been around in months.

So it’s spring, although a front came through today to give us one last bite of cold, and I’m curious to see when the ducks will leave for good and when the scissor-tails and swallows will return. I bet the swallows are here by next weekend.

One other thing I noticed on Saturday afternoon. I took the dogs out and the trees were erupting with chatters, screeches, cooing, twirls, and any other sound a backyard bird can make. The jays especially were having a fit. Then, silence as a hawk flew over. As soon as the raptor was gone, the singing resumed, but in a much less agitated manner. Nice of them to warn us.

There’s that moment just before a dog barks when you can see it in his eyes.

It’s going to happen.

You know he’s going to bark.

He knows you know he’s about to bark.

It’s like he’s saying, “It’s dinner time. We can do this easy way… or the loud way.”

‘Round here, we seem to opt for the loud way.

***

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A few years ago we went camping up near Colorado Bend. All through the night we kept hearing what sounded like a cell phone ringing up in a tree above our camp site. We initially suspected it to be the mysterious birdus ringus loudus (commonly known as the central Texas greater telephone bird), but it was, of course, none other than mimus polyglottos, the northern mockingbird and our state’s rep among the avifauna.

I have mixed feelings about the fact that there are so many cell phones out on camping trips that birds are mimicing the sound, but still, that’s probably what made me start really paying attention to these ubiquitous little singers. Maybe he was just showing off anyway, thinking to himself, “I can play that… what else you got?” like a jazz musician at a jam session.

Lately, the ones around the neighborhood have begun the spring concert season, making mornings just that much more pleasant.

They can be ferocius little birds, too. I’ve seen them chasing hawks off their territory and people out of their parking lots. It’s hard to not admire such a fearless little animal who also manages to so eloquently grace the trees with his song.

Atticus was right: It is a sin to kill a mockingbird. And that from a finch, no less.

“Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.”
-Philip K Dick, VALIS

Sound like certain members of the Oceanic 6?

I can’t even begin to say how thrilled I was to see the book that Locke pulled off Ben’s shelf to serve with his breakfast in last week’s episode of Lost, “Eggtown.” That book, VALIS by Philip K Dick, is one of my favorite novels.

Truth be told, I’ve been wondering when Dick would make an appearance on Lost. I even speculated in my post on the Season 3 finale that come Season 4, we’d see Jack reading Dick. He had, after all, turned into a bearded drug-addled nut, a description often attached to Dick, the brilliant writer responsible for the books and stories that gave us Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, and Minority Report. A man who apparently had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy. A man who was convinced that They (with a capital T) were watching him.

VALIS tells the tale of Horselover Fat and his attempts to understand a possibly spiritual experience he has had. Dick shifts between first and third person narration “to gain much needed objectivity” while Fat remains mostly unaware that he is, in fact, the narrator. They argue their way through Gnostic Christianity, paranoid conspiracy theories, philosophy and everything else Dick can think of in this novel that attempts to make sense of the notion of God. It is at once sad, troubling and hysterically funny. Dick’s answer is found in the title: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. A paranoid science fiction writer’s vision of God as revealed to him by a pink laser.

At the end of the book, there is an appendix containing Fat’s journal entries and his conlusions. I’ve included a few of the shorter ones that pertain to themes on Lost and make me think especially about Jacob:

1.  One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.

3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.

9. He lived long ago, but he is still alive.

Okay, enough about VALIS. It’s great. Brilliant. Read it. Not just because I say so either. The Lost writers have suggested we bone up on Dick’s VALIS trilogy (h/t Brian), which also includes The Divine Invasion (okay) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (beautiful) as well as what is sort-of a first working out of the ideas in VALIS, a posthumous little book called Radio Free Albemuth, less heady, but somehow warmer than VALIS.

So why is VALIS on Lost?

Season 4 has delved deeper into themes of madness and the fluid nature of time and VALIS is certainly a book about these things. More importantly, though, VALIS is a “theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime” (according to the cover copy). Considering the seeming omniscience of the island and its ability to reach out to the characters even after they’ve left the island, I can’t help but think that VALIS - Vast Active Living Intelligence System - is the perfect way to understand the island. I think it’s that simple. The writers are telling us what the island is.

And, as with Horselover Fat, perhaps madness is the price of knowing it. Madness is another of Dick’s great themes and when I think of madness and Lost, I always come back to Hurley and his tenuous grip on reality. Perhaps someone should point out to him that, as Dick wrote in “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” and (I think) reformulated in VALIS:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

In the Season 3 finale Jack talked about seeing his father. That led me onto the alternate futures theory track, but after the first few episodes of Season 4, I realize that’s not the case. As to Christian Shepard… Jack has been seeing his dead father just as Hurley has been seeing dead Charley. It’s driving him crazy, and I suspect when he realizes that it’s real, he’ll get his act together and find his way back to the island. Believing in the reality of the island is the key to salvation. Jack, Hurley, Kate, and Sayid never really believed. Never showed any faith in the island. Is that why they are 2/3s of the Oceanic 6? Is that why they are back in the “real world,” a place Dick describes in VALIS as “the black iron prison?”

Go here for a list of the rest of my Lost book posts.

I now realize I even posted a quick blurb about VALIS back in October 2005 in this blog’s first month. 

And, finally, some other bloggers’ thoughts on “Eggtown”:

• Kulturblog where you’ll find lots of interesting observations
• BB’s Fantabulous Life where BB throughly explores “Eggtown”
• For the Record where I am reminded that there was a second book in “Eggtown” - The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares