Art Strikes

The week's Week-end Assigment (Number 50!) asks us to talk about a work of art that's had a significant impact on us.  So here it is - Ansel Adams, Moonrise Over Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.

I took a photograph like this once -- a photograph of the moon rising over the distant mountains as we drove from Jackson back to Grand Teton National Park one night.  My photograph is a brilliant work of art -- solid black, nary a moon nor mountain in sight.  Okay, so I have a ways to go before I even reach technology kindergarten.  I'm fine with that.

Seriously, this is a photograph at which I think  I could gaze for hours.  This is the photograph that tells me that spending hours trying to produce a print that says exactly what you want is worth the effort. 

It's also a photograph that brings to mind the dozens of times I have celebrated full moons with my children:  at home, over the desert in the Southwest, over the Atlantic Ocean, over the lakes of Algonquin in Canada, over the summer Piazza Vecchio in Florence, over the winter Seine in Paris.

It's also a photograph that was taken before the atomic bomb was tested in the desert of the southwest, and yet the astonishing rendition of light in the sky seems almost to foreshadow that awful morning in New Mexico when physicist Robert Oppenheimer watched his destructive creation come to life for the first time and said, quotingthe Baghavad-Gita,  "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."   The New Mexican desert was one place in 1941; it was another after the summer of 1945.

A work of art -- a slice of beauty and technical mastery in itself; a reminder of precious personal moments, both humorous and poignant; a connection to geography and history on a grand scale.

L'Chaim

My father called very late last night, which he never does, to tell me that the doctors have finally advised that my stepmother move from their care to hospice care.  After four months of grueling chemo and radiation, four months in which she has barely left her couch (and amost never without assistance), they have concluded that they have no more tricks up their sleeves.

The third eagle chick has hatched at Blackwater.

My stepmother was canoeing in the Algonquin backcountry with my father and sons in September.  After her diagnosis, she insisted on following the doctors' treatment schedule to the letter, even though her chances were almost nonexistent and the hour-long trips (one way) to the hospital and the drugs administered there left her exhausted, often physically sick, and sometimes mentally disoriented.

The third chick is a few days later than its siblings and therefore comes into the world with the distinct disadvantage of being much smaller than its competitors for food.

I've already explored my feelings about the path my father and stepmother have taken, here and here and here and here and here and here.   I don't think I would have made the same choices.  I know I would have asked more questions.  But I have to honor my stepmother for being a woman of incredible grit and determination, and my father for his exquisite care of her.

The eagles don't ask questions.  There is the next day, and the next, and the next.  They sat on a nest for weeks, even when they were buried in snow.  For the next months, the mother will be a dedicated nurturer and a ferocious defender, and the father will be an exhausted provider.  In the summer, given hours and days and weeks and months of unremitting attentiveness, with some luck tossed in, five eagles will soar over the nest and the Blackwater refuge.

Despite the fact that I would have liked to have seen the hospice folks called long before today and despite my personal view that death is best anticpated with openness, in community, I feel a terrible weight of sadness this morning as those things are all about to fall into place.  My stepmother is a woman of vitality and vivacity and my father is a man of great gentleness and love for the created world.  It was surprising that they even encountered each other, but it's not surprising that in the aftermath of painful endings to prior marriages, each would conclude that the other offered hope for a new life and risk falling in love again.  They have that, that surprising and life-affirming love, to celebrate now. 

I won't see them in person, but I feel a great joy when I wake up in the mornings these days and remember that I can come downstairs and, with a couple of clicks, see what the Blackwater eagles are up to.  The adults are nurturing beginnings, entirely devoted to the prospect of filling our skies with magnificence.

L'Chaim -- To Life.

Credibility - Something to Think About

I spent Saturday at a church leadership retreat.  It was a long day, made longer by the fact that we Presbyterians are a verbal lot -- give us a chance to reflect on a  question and we go at it with gusto! 

One of the topics we addressed was credibility.  Here are two questions for you all:  (1) Identify one world and one  ministerial leader whom you believe has exhibited credibility with their people and (2)  What primary characteristics do you believe are responsible for that credibility?

My leaders were President Jimmy Carter and Sister Xavier, a nun whom I knew as a teacher, mother superior and, in my adult years, as a good friend.

The characteristics I came up with were:

Authenticity

Expertise

Committment

Gentle Guidance

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In the meantime, I "borrowed" a photo of the Blackwater eagles on  Saturday.  It seems that the third egg isn't going to make it, but the two surviving chicks look robust and hungry!

 

Eagles, Big and Small

Many years ago, more than 25!, I became a regular volunteer at our Museum of Natural History, which was involved in an eagle hatching project.  At that time, eagles had almost vanished from our state, and the state DNR was trying to mate captive eagles, hatch the eggs in captivity, and then move the little ones to the nests of wild pairs.

It was an involved project!  Most of the details have faded from memory, but I do recall the first year that the Museum had an eagle who produced a chick who then moved, with the assistance of state officials, to a wildlife refuge-area nest.  The parents would be quite willing to accept the eaglet; the trick was making sure that the chick never saw the humans who were feeding it, so that it would not bond to the wrong species.  It bonded to a giant eagle-head glove and successfully made the transition to the wild.

Somewhere around here is a picture of me in the office of the museum guy in charge of the project, holding a tiny eaglet in my hands. 

In fact, I just remembered precisely what that picture looks like and where it is:  I was pregnant with my twins, so it was taken almost exactly 21 years ago!

No wonder I feel an affinity with eagle mothers.

Over the years, we have seen eagles here and there.  There are a few more nesting pairs around now, and you can find them if you know where to look.  I used to watch some in a distant but no doubt huge nest across the Matanzas River south of St. Augustine.  Every once in awhile in Florida an eagle will speed overhead when you're on the highway.

My birding has been considerably constrained in the past few years.  I did go out with a friend to see some eagles about a year ago, and maybe we need to do that again soon.  In the meantime, I am thoroughly enjoying the arrivals of the Blackwater eaglets, who are reminding me several times a day that there is a vast world beyond mine in the city.

I've quoted Henry Beston before but, as eaglets and great horned owls begin to hatch, as hawks soar in their mating dances, and as passerines and shorebirds in South America begin to feel the internal restlessness that will soon propel them northward, it's time again:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves.   And therein do we err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
The Outermost House

Sunshine II

Exhibit A:  Christian Science Church Tower about 7:30 this morning.  That is BLUE in the sky, and it's there because to the east there was a bright shiny golden sphere beaming just above the horizon. 

Not a great photo, because le chien was wriggling all over the place and I couldn't hold the camera still. But I couldn't resist recording this unusual weather phenomenon.

I have had a really busy day but I have taken a lot of mini-breaks to check out the new eaglet (see previous entry).  It seems that in our enthusiasm, we viewers broke the isp for the eagle cam -- but there's a link there to another viewing site.  The eaglet looked pretty perky this morning, and papa brought mom a duck for breakfast -- which seems to have been entirely consumed.  I wouldn't have been so thrilled if my husband had shown up with an unplucked duck the morning after the arrival of our children, but I have to figure the eagle knew what he was doing.

An Eaglet Has Landed!

http://www.friendsofblackwater.org/camhtm.html

Snow and Cold and Ice, Oh My!

OK, so fine, whatever.  I was too optimistic about that whole spring idea.  No go.   I guess I was completely undone by the six hours or so of sun that materialized during the last week of February.

It is SO cold and blustery out there.  Every time you step outside you get smacked in the face with a shower of little icy bits of snow.

On the positive side, my daughter has been ecstatic since learning yesterday that she's in at one of the colleges she really likes.  There's nothing like an acceptance letter to turn things around for a high school senior.

It is NOT, I might add, snowing at said college.  The folks down there suffer through the occasional hurricane, but they skip the winter thing altogether.  If she decides not to go there, I'll be happy to take her place.