The Largest Aloneness

John Steinbeck on his mornings in Somerset, England...

"At about six in the morning a bird calls me awake. I don't even know what kind of bird but his voice rises and falls with the insistence of a bugle in the morning so that I want to answer, "I hear and I obey!" Then I get up, shake down the coal in the stove, make coffee and for an hour look out at the meadows and the trees. I hear and smell and see and feel the earth and I think - nothing. This is the most wonderful time. Elaine sleeps later and I am alone - the largest aloneness I have ever known, mystic and wonderful."

Spoonbills in the rain

A family of white Spoonbills waded in the shallows of Skeleton creek as I walked the dog yesterday. The sleeting rain and low skies that cast the wind and salt swept landscape in a dusky grey palette, set their white plumage in a shock of  brilliant contrast that delighted the eye and shook the mind from its wrestless winter musings. Silently, they glided their precisely evolved, strange bills through the current coming in from the ocean  along the  salt encrusted bank.

As my eyes blinked and my body hunched against the stinging rain, and the dog strained against his leash and shook the the water from his coat, one dipped in the air above the creek, appearing suddenly, as an angel or a metaphor, then ascended again over the footbridge, and silently glided down to join the others.

The Grey Heron

There's a grey heron that stalks the vacant block across the road from the shopping centre. Black crows gather in large, prophetic covens on the street lights,  the edges of car parks and around bins to collect scraps of  discarded fast food meals. Their presence in mythic law foretells of a coming death. And I wonder if  their presence around the dumpsters and bins foretells the future of this time and place.A flat, windswept suburb close to the sea that can drive you mad with its carefully planned, funnel like streets and housing.

The grey Heron takes careful steps through the brown grass of the vacant lot. Head angled like an indigenous dancer. Eyes blinking. The pie and chip wrappers that blow  like tumble weed across now asphalted and landscaped  shell middens, collecting along the fences and in the low growing salt bush, don't interest him or anyone else for that matter. The blurred faces passing in the constant stream of traffic that flows up and down Merton St, morning and night and all afternoon, intent on their pressurized existence don't notice the adaptation of bird life to their decaying culture.