Hummingbird skeleton

Several years ago a hummingbird flew into our front window and died. My son and I found the body on our front stoop. We had recently seen, I think, the living decay exhibit at the Exploratorium, so I told my son let's just put the body in the garden and see what happens. In a day or so, ants had created a small dirt mound beneath the hummingbird as they excavated a tunnel that ended just beneath the bird. There they scavenged bits of the bird and carried the bits away bit by bit. The eyes were already gone when we first checked. Within 3 days only a clean white skeleton remained and the ants were gone.

What's happening

What I love about blogs is the chronicle quality. That it is a dated path. So I find myself in moments pre-writing answers to questions I had when I began this blog. Lofty ones like: how must language change for us to belong again to nature? And the little practical ones like: how can I inspire my students to care about their impact on the distant future without being preachy and dogmatic? And now I can say joyfully, the answers don't seem as elusive as they did seven years ago. I think language is changing. I guess I say this today because I found a compatriot in David Mitchell's character Zachry in Cloud Atlas. In my own deep word ecology it's not that I want to appropriate images from nature so much as make the images the star of the show, the teachers, the collaborators, the wonderous. Not as objects but as subjects, the ones with the know-how that I didn't figure out or know that perhaps I belonged to. Instead I suffered for a long time because I let my ego be the dictator. And we in nature surely are dictators, predators; nature's not a democracy, but it's also not all as greedy and selfish a base reality as we imagine it to be.  At a talk on leadership at the Center for Eco-literacy, Zenobia Barlow warned of the little words that are getting in the way: I, me, she, it, them, you. The subject pronouns that make objects out of others.  At least that's how I remember her talk.

 So I wonder if the next influential phase in language will be emergent, merging, not so easily the voice of one as the voice of the inter-relational and ever more diverse. Ex. if I am only the consequence of every little action around me, and I am fluidly in relationship with these ever merging and emerging elements, then I am everything and at once anew and also not really "I." It's an abandonment, a dissolution of self, a take to the wind, and yet also an acceptance that we belong and become. It's odd, because our language gave humans a feeling of superiority and entitlement. So it's an endless humble path to imagine the languages of beings without our speech. We can't forget, what has been done in our names. In our tongue. Sometimes I imagine every word must be an apology.

The day the spider flies (remix)

A day, a cloudy day, a breeze-loft day
the waspy jangles in my gut ignite
 the supple thread, my ticket spun today.
O where? and why? I do not ask the light,
the wind, my hair, the shiftless clouds,
Alone one migrant flies aloft a-flight
 sidelong, I drop and dare to wear no shroud
Instead a tail of silk to fly aright,
 but if the clouds keep traveling to where
the sea between the land expands and then,
will it be that height is worth the fare?
or landfall marries me to all new there?
The travel, the nights aloft the sails ballooned
take me, I go, and with you, wind, am maroon'd.

The day the spiders fly

The Day the Spiders Fly What day? A spontaneous day when the clouds' right and their's is a bit of wind and perhaps predators on their tail their organs jangled they spin a ticket just gossamer trails in the breeze invisible travelers, if you please one lone migrant per flight but not alone the timing is all that we know if we, still, heed the body, the wind, the clouds launch sideways aloft daring why not why not belong to the breeze

This winter I'm building rainwater gardens at my school with my middle school students. It's a project I barely know how to build except that with a lot of help and ingenuity we'll pull it off. In fact simply the humble admission to our head of school that I'm inept with building launched a crew of helpers including the landscape architects helping to design our new lower school campus. This week 18 students in the gardening elective met with the landscape architects and the facilities manager to begin our design for a new roof to collect rain water and house a green house.

Blossom Jack Wordle

Tracking my brother in Powerless Manhattan

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Rob Campbell wrote: The powerless are primarily most everything below 34th St. in Manhattan and most of Staten Island. The black out zone is much darker than one would expect. It's very dark. You don't see people 1/4 of the way down a block. When you walk down a cross street you feel like you're going to a place of permanent darkness. You can't really tell the difference between a distant flashlight and a distant headlight. Only big intersections have traffic cops. They have flares on some intersections to remind drivers to look for pedestrians crossing but it feels like its pretty much a crap shoot. Only a small handful of restaurants have generators and they only run them for a few hours. Other places that are open have only candles which is nice but you only see them when you get close. Some bodegas are open but you only realize it when you're right on top of them - they don't bother with any lights at all they just stand behind the register in total darkness. It is scary. It is the entire downtown of Manhattan. Everything below midtown. When you're down there you keep thinking you're in a part of a neighborhood you've never been in but it's just the darkness. That you'll turn a corner and it will be like it was but then it's not. It's amazing how much we identify light with life. It feels abandoned but it's not. It seems to dead or very dormant but it's not. Its darker than the woods or the country in that sense. Darkness where it's not supposed to be.

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Sue Campbell wrote: The fascinating element of this storm is that nature took over again. So it is forest or coast again without the lights of electricity... the exuberant use of electricity that helped cause the storm in the first place. From the ecologists' perspective, this is one of the storms that will finally push people out of their apathy and denial. It's inevitable in that way. And fascinating that NYC is the epicenter, the city and the people who have the power to radicalize and shape culture globally to see nature and urban life in a new way. They are already do. It's just now the game is changing faster.

On Fri., Nov 2, 2012 at 7:16 PM, Rob Campbell,robcnyc@yahoo.com> wrote: Back in the dark. It's all out Hemingway now. They're putting lights back on so now it's a hunt a safari to track down the darkness. Cars and trucks are like huge dumb animals here.

Photo credit: Rob Campbell, Nov. 2, 2012 "Charging Station at E 7th St. and 1st Ave. Manhattan"