emmaaadub's review against another edition
2.0
2,5*
This wasn't really what I expected. I needed more of a journey, this just felt like a lot of single observations put together. Some of the messages were inspiring though, so I'll be looking out for birdsongs in the future :)
This wasn't really what I expected. I needed more of a journey, this just felt like a lot of single observations put together. Some of the messages were inspiring though, so I'll be looking out for birdsongs in the future :)
bookbirder's review against another edition
2.0
I found this book on a list of books about birds. Don’t be fooled: this is a story about an artist going through some sort of mid-life crisis or revolution, who happens to use her entry into the birding world as a central axis from which to share her metaphors and philosophical thoughts.
Even once I’d accepted the book for what it was, I found it difficult to engage with the words, and there were several points at which I considered putting the book down for good. It was too slow-moving people for my tastes, but the writing itself wasn’t necessarily bad.
My final word of caution would be to find a physical version of the book. There were a fair number of drawings and photographs, none of which were well formatted for an ebook.
Even once I’d accepted the book for what it was, I found it difficult to engage with the words, and there were several points at which I considered putting the book down for good. It was too slow-moving people for my tastes, but the writing itself wasn’t necessarily bad.
My final word of caution would be to find a physical version of the book. There were a fair number of drawings and photographs, none of which were well formatted for an ebook.
sophieblunt's review against another edition
5.0
I have never cared much for birds. I don’t wish them harm but have never really given them much thought. I’m not sure, then, what led me to pick up a book about a woman who follows a birdwatcher for a year. But I actually loved it. I still don’t give much of a hoot for birds, but I got lost in this mediation on birdwatching and how we need to get outdoors, slow down and sometimes look up to help us find a subtle yet restorative meaning to our everyday lives.
littlefoot10's review against another edition
3.0
I really enjoyed this book. I wanted to originally read this because I'm not the biggest fan of birds.. but my fiancees father and wife enjoy "birding". I was hoping that this would enlighten a bit of this activity for me and also just to see how others process grief. This was a quick and very interesting read. There were parts I did not enjoy in this novel...like her relationship with her husband.. it just seemed strange to me. But i really enjoyed the drawings throughout the book!
ceeelizabethreads's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.25
nyssahhhh's review against another edition
5.0
Loved this so much. Had no idea what to expect, but it was everything I could have wanted. So many beautiful lines.
4: It was also the winter I found myself with a broken part. I didn't know what it was that was broken, only that whatever widget had previously kept me on plan, running fluidly along, no longer worked as it should.
7: Or maybe I discovered something more fundamental: worry is a constriction. A mind narrows when it has too much to bear. ... My relationship, my attitude toward it, grew fickle. I wanted an expanse of it. I wanted just a little. It moved too quickly. It crept too slowly. It was overly determined by forces outside myself. It overwhelmed if i was left to define its shape.
10: I knew in my heart that I didn't want to fall in love with another person. I wanted to fall in love with something bigger. Something that would hold me and my wandering mind. Something, like a love affair, that would allow me to say: I am here, I am alive. I am doing more than calmly bracing myself.
It was not enough to be a vigil flame, contained and burning around the clock.
As my days became increasingly plotted, I developed a bad case of wanderlust (Ger. wandern, to hike, and lust, to desire).
14: What if I gave myself over to time's dispersion? Could I value the fractured moments as something more than "sub-time" or lost time or broken time? Could I find a graceful way to work and be in the world that might still pull me up and forward?
17: The message in the photos wasn't the usual one about environmental sins or planetary end-times. The message, if it could be called that, was about love. it wasn't love for a pretty girl or a love that placed the beloved on a plinth or in a vitrine. It was not the kind of love that knocked you over, left you in a state of craven hunger, and gave you jittery bouts of insomnia. It neither idealized nor sought to possess. The love I felt in the photos was a love for the imperfect and struggling. It was a love for the dirty, plain, beautiful, funny places many of us call home.
22: Now I spend hours trying to spot tiny distant creatures that don't give a shit if I see them or not. I spend most of my time loving something that won't ever love me back. talk about a lesson in insignificance.
23: As we walked, I was thinking about something I had just read in a book by Amy Fusselman: "You would be surprised at how hard it is to be ope to new and different things Being open to new things that are bad--disasters, say--is pretty easy. ... But new, good things are a challenge."
24: Was it possible that my focus on making art, on creating tellable stories, was intercepting my ability to see broadly and tenderly and without gain? What would it be like to give my expansive attention to the world, to the present moment, without expectations or promise of an obvious payoff?
26: There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories.
29: I, in turn, would make things up in response, not because I am an admirable daughter but because I do not want anyone deciding for me what is big and what is little. I do not want fashion or fathers to decide.
31: Love can be so glaring and fierce, so full of paranoiac energy, it will obliterate you.
32: I stopped dreaming of what a person could do with limitless freedom, resources, and time and became more interested in what a person could do with relative scarcity, in what abundance cold be generated with modest resources, in what mind could create in cramped quarters.
37: To see a bird moving as if it's on fire and then realize you have ignited this anxiety challenges any illusion you may have had that you are a benign and low-impact presence int eh world. For me, it triggered an awareness I had never felt so acutely before. it gave me a different and more accurate view of my scale and proportions. I cant' say I liked it. Who wants to feel like Godzilla when in contact with other species? But perhaps this is the way it really is.
Most of the time, we don't harm birds on purpose. Some of us may kill birds with guns and oil spills, but most of us kill hem with our lumbering ignorant love--invading their habitats in bouts of nature appreciation or caging them as pets to adore--or we kill them at a distance through our technologies (communication towers, wind turbines), our windows, our medium-size carbon footprints, or by allowing our cats to roam wild and do the decimating for us.''
39: I understand. I understand getting stuck. I understand wanting to make a change while circling around the same neural cage. I understand that sometimes, when you are at a stage of life when you have given yourself over to mothering and daughtering and you get to keep very little of yourself, it can be hard to live with open doors. Yet in an effort to hoard solitude and keep people out, there is a risk that all you end up doing is fencing yourself in.
45: Still, I have held on to this photo of us at the falls as evidence. The photograph says: there will be times when an impulse to flee and a desire for freedom may tug at you and take you to the watery edge, the insoluble boundary between your needs and others' needs. Keep sight of the falls.
46: ...we ran as if we were being pursued, but if we had turned around, we would have discovered that no one was following us. We had internalized our discipline and our jailers. We were good girls who could not afford to believe that flight could be so easy, so unpunishable.
48: Smallness did not dismay me. Big nature travel--with its extreme odysseys and summit-fixated explorers--just seemed so, well, grandiose. The drive to go bigger and farther just one more instance of the overreaching at the heart of Western culture.
56: Small is a safe harbor. The smaller your goals, the less likely you are to be deflated or "cut down to size." In this sense, a bias toward the small could be a version of low expectations. Or a form of feminized compliance, as in "I don't want to be seen as loud, fat, assertive, or ambitious."
Good girls are taught to make ourselves small until there is very little of ourselves left in the world, even as our hunger expands. If we are also "minorities," embracing smallness is a less mutinous and more predictable route. Little, petite, modest, delicate, submissive, soft-spoken, docile, cute, feminine, tidy...
58: In response to Orwell, Deborah Levy writes: "Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, nevermind all the way to December."
72: It was his second bad fall in six months, his second round of stitches, and both times there had been no momentum behind the fall. He had just fallen.
78: ... it is sometimes painful to wait. But it is also painful to always be in a hurry on someone else's behalf, to cram as much into a day as a day allows.
79: Birds that have wasted needless energy lifting off and landing in a strange area are vulnerable to animal "wake hunters: who may seize on the opportunities caused by their fright and confusion to attack.
89: [Letter from international writers demanding nature-related words to be reinstated to the Junior Dictionary] We base this plea on two considerations. Firstly, the belief that nature and culture have been linked from the beginnings of our history. For the fist time ever, that link is in danger of becoming unraveled, to the detriment of society, culture, and the natural environment. Secondly, childhood is undergoing profound change; some of this is negative; and the rapid decline in children's connections to nature is a major problem. ... We recognize the need to introduce new words and to make room for them and do not intend to comment in detail on the choice of words added. However, it is worrying that in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today.
94: It made sense to me-the focus on nature growing in the cracks and crevices of urban life--not because we should romanticize human blight and fallout but because, at the end of the day, humanized nature is all that many of us have.
99:I began to wonder if one of the things we were missing was the opportunity to miss, to yearn for, to possess the sort of deep local knowledge that inspires you to fight for a place. Viewing nature as optional--as always elsewhere or in the past--denies us, or spares us, the work of caring.
The book I ended up writing, The Specific Ocean, is about the places that sustain us. It is about the joy and mournfulness deep emotional connection. Mournfulness because when you love a specific place you open yourself up to the singular sadness that arises when that place is harmed or lost to you.
101: I discovered my sons didn't need a guide or scout leader. All they needed was for me to lead them to beauty's general habitat, to wave my arm and say, "I think there might be something that way."
102: I learned that when it rains, the birds come down from the sky, and that when it rains and you realize you're alive, the rain goes from feeling bleak to feeling refreshing.
103: There is wilderness at the edge of all knowledge.
Die knowing something. Die knowing your knowing will be incomplete.
107: [From Julian Barnes's Levels of Life] We live on the flat, on the level, and yet--and so--we aspire. groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. ... Every love story is a potential grief story.
108: All striving may lead to suffering. What goes up must come down, what begins must end. My son's (and, arguably, my own) hesitancy in the world was a product of extensive foresight mixed with a pessimistic disposition, a perfectionist quality mixed with a sense of inadequacy. This is why we did not have freer souls.
111: Strong one moment, vulnerable the next, we falter because we are alive, and with any luck we recover.
112: I want to know how to be as undaunted as a migrating bird, how to sustain that perennial fortitude.
120: Some declines are natural and inevitable. Some are not. There was a distinction to be made between the regular frailties of birds (their everyday expiration, the losses that occur in the hurly-burly of migration) and the more catastrophic faltering brought on by a threatened ecosphere.
Deforestation, habitat loss, hunting, pesticide use, urbanization, predatory pets, and climate change... The decline of migratory birds is an indication that nature is out of balance. Rising temperatures, earlier springs, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, changing rainfall and drought patterns, worsening heat waves, extreme precipitation, acidifying oceans. In ordinary times, thebenefits of migration made it worthwhile for birds. But what about extraordinary times?
The term shifting baselines describes slow, almost imperceptible changes in an ecosystem. A fisheries biologist named Daniel Pauly first used the term in 1995 to explain how ecological standards could be lowered to such a degree that humans could tolerate things they once wouldn't have. In Pauly's opinion, the deterioration of wildlife has been enabled by collective forgetfulness. our faulty memories and relatively short life spans have made us unreliable witnesses. We are unable to truly grasp how much of the natural world has been altered an destroyed by our actions because the baseline shifts over time and generations have rendered us blind. Our standards have been lowered almost unnoticeably. What we might regard as pristine nature today is a shadow of what once existed. We can't seem to remember how things used to be.
121-3: How could a species that existed in such prodigious numbers just vanish? How could the robust become so vulnerable?
The story of any lost life-form is a tragedy, but the disappearance of the passenger pigeon occurred on a scale unmatched in human history. The cautionary tale serves as a crash course in impermanence, a reminder that nature is finite. ... The history of humans is a history of disregarding nature's wake-up calls. We deny and bargain. We adjust the baseline. We reset our memories. We practice genetic wizardry and mad science. We modify our bodies and tamper with the land. We deny death and decay. We override limits, compensate for our vulnerability with engineering and knowhow. We ignore the feedback and messages our bodies and the earth deliver. While there is a place in my heart for a resurrected passenger pigeon or an approximate facsimile, I am wary of a world with no limits, a world in which humans feel omnipotent, in which appeals to change course are drowned out by the euphoria and hubris of invention?
Can we remember our vulnerability when we feel strong again? Can we feel both the frailty and capacity of our bodies, the sorrow that continues inside joy? ... Sometimes it is worth acknowledging the places and moments where things break down, where life is at its limits. Sometimes we stay with the faltering because it is a fragile embodied world, made all the more so by our efforts to suppress this awareness int he name of technological growth and progress. There is no life without adversity, failure, and frailty.
124: Later I will tell him: our courage comes out in different ways. We are brave in our bold dream but also in our hesitations. We are brave in our willingness to carry on even as our pounding hearts say, "You will fail and land on your face." Brave in our terrific tolerance for making a hundred mistakes. Day after day. We are brave in our persistence.
133: Nothing to prove, nothing to lose, nothing to do. here, away from the scaffolding and schedules and the extreme depletion of stress, was the understory of life.
136: I have come to realize that a lull is not just an occupational problem. It is an emotional, intellectual, and existential one as well. If I ever find an answer, I figure I will feel less fatalistic about intervals, period of unemployment or dormancy, fallow times. I might be easier on myself and engage in less-anxious behavior. I might achieve the kind of Zen serenity that allows one to sit with unresolved and sometimes aching emptiness, to feel the silence and immensity of the universe without being too rattled by it. ... [from Eve Sedgwick] "... When I tell you how bad it is, how hard I've worked at something, how much I've been through, there is only one phrase I want to hear. Which is: 'That's enough. You can stop now.'"
139: [reasons a lull is a negative] 2. Capitalism We live in a culture of high performance and competitiveness. Even artists, perennial outlanders who appear to have more freedom from conventional market expectations than most, feel they must maximize productivity and extract the most out of every day. Even those who live outside the city, in the lulling countryside feel time pressure and the relentless demand to perform and stay connected. Even the notion of betterment, which seems benign, can be wielded as a baton of self-discipline.
142: What if we could imagine a lull as neither fatal nor glorious? What if a lull was just a lull?
152: He had been raised to believe everything would work out in the end and that it was possible to feel purely happy without a precautionary chaser of sadness. The skies would not fall and you were not tempting the gods of misfortune if you did not plan for contingencies and worst-case scenarios. You did not need to fortify yourself ... against the coming catastrophe.
He was not raised the way I was.
160: Look at what roaming brings, I thought. From one detour, this.
169: What do you regret? I regret the times I have acted with too much head or, conversely, with too much heart. I regret the ties it seemed better, somehow, to hang back and not step forward. I regret, along with writer George Saunders, the tepid and timid response, the moments when another "being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly." I regret the instances I have turned to others for guidance even when I already had a hunch of what to do. I regret the part of me that is deferential, that fears being sentimental. i regret I am not more propelled by impulse, never, instinct.
172: Still, apart of me wishes he had taken time to look around, that he had not conducted his life as a race to the finish. I regret he took many of life's circumstances, including the positive ones, and shot them through with skepticism and dread in an attempt to inoculate himself against disappointment.
174: Deep down I think I knew he remorse would not be large and crushing. It would be small and manageable, just a tiny bird, embarrassingly little. Not a crisis. And that's why I regret it. Because the attitude that somehow, without our acting, the little things will take care of themselves does not ring true anymore.
183: I also saw that many of our commonplace notions about beauty are simply wrongheaded-- that to say that a love of nature is a function of privilege and wealth, that a delight in small things is incompatible with a passion for justice, is untrue and patronizing to the struggling and the poor. Rosa's letters push back against this assumption by showing how much nature could hepl, how it had historically helped, to fulfill "the potential dignity and worth of human consciousness." She was not naive. What Rosa [Luxemburg] believes was that a commitment to social justice, far from being incompatible with aesthetic experience and sensual pleasure, demanded it--that politics has to be about harnessing the libidinal and the beautiful and not only bout abstract categories.
198: Rebecca Solnit once described as an awareness of "two streams" of loss: on the one hand, there was a revived bird on a restored lake, a sense of things that had been saved from slipping away (imperiled species coming back from the brink); on the other hand, there was the pull of things that were simply "vanishing without replacement."
...
I had met city birders and local conservationists who were using a different environmental voice, one that could (in Naomi Klein's words) "speak to the wounded, as opposed to just the perfect and pretty." It was a voice that looked around the city's most blemished and broken places and said: "There is something left to love."
200: I recognized the DNA of this effort in myself and others close to me. I recognized the valiant, creative, sometimes futile microstands we take against the myriad forces that upend us like bad pranks. Life is just this way, filled with embarrassing, run-of-the-mill, sometimes awful obstacles. If we're lucky we learn by watching others make it through, still standing and smiling. If we're lucky we learn to live in a flux of adaptation. In the twoness. Flickering between ease and difficulty.
203: [among the things the musician taught her] 2. Make leeway for chance. Sometimes you don't want to be driven to a point. Sometimes it is exactly when we lose our bearings or take a detour that life really gets going.
210: The birds tell me not to worry, that the worries that sometimes overwhelm me are little in the grand scheme of things. They tell me it's all right to be belittled by the bigness of the world. There are some belittlements and diminishments that make you stronger, kinder.
214: The birders I encountered in books an din the world shared little except this simple secret: if you listen to bird, every day will have a song in it.
4: It was also the winter I found myself with a broken part. I didn't know what it was that was broken, only that whatever widget had previously kept me on plan, running fluidly along, no longer worked as it should.
7: Or maybe I discovered something more fundamental: worry is a constriction. A mind narrows when it has too much to bear. ... My relationship, my attitude toward it, grew fickle. I wanted an expanse of it. I wanted just a little. It moved too quickly. It crept too slowly. It was overly determined by forces outside myself. It overwhelmed if i was left to define its shape.
10: I knew in my heart that I didn't want to fall in love with another person. I wanted to fall in love with something bigger. Something that would hold me and my wandering mind. Something, like a love affair, that would allow me to say: I am here, I am alive. I am doing more than calmly bracing myself.
It was not enough to be a vigil flame, contained and burning around the clock.
As my days became increasingly plotted, I developed a bad case of wanderlust (Ger. wandern, to hike, and lust, to desire).
14: What if I gave myself over to time's dispersion? Could I value the fractured moments as something more than "sub-time" or lost time or broken time? Could I find a graceful way to work and be in the world that might still pull me up and forward?
17: The message in the photos wasn't the usual one about environmental sins or planetary end-times. The message, if it could be called that, was about love. it wasn't love for a pretty girl or a love that placed the beloved on a plinth or in a vitrine. It was not the kind of love that knocked you over, left you in a state of craven hunger, and gave you jittery bouts of insomnia. It neither idealized nor sought to possess. The love I felt in the photos was a love for the imperfect and struggling. It was a love for the dirty, plain, beautiful, funny places many of us call home.
22: Now I spend hours trying to spot tiny distant creatures that don't give a shit if I see them or not. I spend most of my time loving something that won't ever love me back. talk about a lesson in insignificance.
23: As we walked, I was thinking about something I had just read in a book by Amy Fusselman: "You would be surprised at how hard it is to be ope to new and different things Being open to new things that are bad--disasters, say--is pretty easy. ... But new, good things are a challenge."
24: Was it possible that my focus on making art, on creating tellable stories, was intercepting my ability to see broadly and tenderly and without gain? What would it be like to give my expansive attention to the world, to the present moment, without expectations or promise of an obvious payoff?
26: There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories.
29: I, in turn, would make things up in response, not because I am an admirable daughter but because I do not want anyone deciding for me what is big and what is little. I do not want fashion or fathers to decide.
31: Love can be so glaring and fierce, so full of paranoiac energy, it will obliterate you.
32: I stopped dreaming of what a person could do with limitless freedom, resources, and time and became more interested in what a person could do with relative scarcity, in what abundance cold be generated with modest resources, in what mind could create in cramped quarters.
37: To see a bird moving as if it's on fire and then realize you have ignited this anxiety challenges any illusion you may have had that you are a benign and low-impact presence int eh world. For me, it triggered an awareness I had never felt so acutely before. it gave me a different and more accurate view of my scale and proportions. I cant' say I liked it. Who wants to feel like Godzilla when in contact with other species? But perhaps this is the way it really is.
Most of the time, we don't harm birds on purpose. Some of us may kill birds with guns and oil spills, but most of us kill hem with our lumbering ignorant love--invading their habitats in bouts of nature appreciation or caging them as pets to adore--or we kill them at a distance through our technologies (communication towers, wind turbines), our windows, our medium-size carbon footprints, or by allowing our cats to roam wild and do the decimating for us.''
39: I understand. I understand getting stuck. I understand wanting to make a change while circling around the same neural cage. I understand that sometimes, when you are at a stage of life when you have given yourself over to mothering and daughtering and you get to keep very little of yourself, it can be hard to live with open doors. Yet in an effort to hoard solitude and keep people out, there is a risk that all you end up doing is fencing yourself in.
45: Still, I have held on to this photo of us at the falls as evidence. The photograph says: there will be times when an impulse to flee and a desire for freedom may tug at you and take you to the watery edge, the insoluble boundary between your needs and others' needs. Keep sight of the falls.
46: ...we ran as if we were being pursued, but if we had turned around, we would have discovered that no one was following us. We had internalized our discipline and our jailers. We were good girls who could not afford to believe that flight could be so easy, so unpunishable.
48: Smallness did not dismay me. Big nature travel--with its extreme odysseys and summit-fixated explorers--just seemed so, well, grandiose. The drive to go bigger and farther just one more instance of the overreaching at the heart of Western culture.
56: Small is a safe harbor. The smaller your goals, the less likely you are to be deflated or "cut down to size." In this sense, a bias toward the small could be a version of low expectations. Or a form of feminized compliance, as in "I don't want to be seen as loud, fat, assertive, or ambitious."
Good girls are taught to make ourselves small until there is very little of ourselves left in the world, even as our hunger expands. If we are also "minorities," embracing smallness is a less mutinous and more predictable route. Little, petite, modest, delicate, submissive, soft-spoken, docile, cute, feminine, tidy...
58: In response to Orwell, Deborah Levy writes: "Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, nevermind all the way to December."
72: It was his second bad fall in six months, his second round of stitches, and both times there had been no momentum behind the fall. He had just fallen.
78: ... it is sometimes painful to wait. But it is also painful to always be in a hurry on someone else's behalf, to cram as much into a day as a day allows.
79: Birds that have wasted needless energy lifting off and landing in a strange area are vulnerable to animal "wake hunters: who may seize on the opportunities caused by their fright and confusion to attack.
89: [Letter from international writers demanding nature-related words to be reinstated to the Junior Dictionary] We base this plea on two considerations. Firstly, the belief that nature and culture have been linked from the beginnings of our history. For the fist time ever, that link is in danger of becoming unraveled, to the detriment of society, culture, and the natural environment. Secondly, childhood is undergoing profound change; some of this is negative; and the rapid decline in children's connections to nature is a major problem. ... We recognize the need to introduce new words and to make room for them and do not intend to comment in detail on the choice of words added. However, it is worrying that in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today.
94: It made sense to me-the focus on nature growing in the cracks and crevices of urban life--not because we should romanticize human blight and fallout but because, at the end of the day, humanized nature is all that many of us have.
99:I began to wonder if one of the things we were missing was the opportunity to miss, to yearn for, to possess the sort of deep local knowledge that inspires you to fight for a place. Viewing nature as optional--as always elsewhere or in the past--denies us, or spares us, the work of caring.
The book I ended up writing, The Specific Ocean, is about the places that sustain us. It is about the joy and mournfulness deep emotional connection. Mournfulness because when you love a specific place you open yourself up to the singular sadness that arises when that place is harmed or lost to you.
101: I discovered my sons didn't need a guide or scout leader. All they needed was for me to lead them to beauty's general habitat, to wave my arm and say, "I think there might be something that way."
102: I learned that when it rains, the birds come down from the sky, and that when it rains and you realize you're alive, the rain goes from feeling bleak to feeling refreshing.
103: There is wilderness at the edge of all knowledge.
Die knowing something. Die knowing your knowing will be incomplete.
107: [From Julian Barnes's Levels of Life] We live on the flat, on the level, and yet--and so--we aspire. groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. ... Every love story is a potential grief story.
108: All striving may lead to suffering. What goes up must come down, what begins must end. My son's (and, arguably, my own) hesitancy in the world was a product of extensive foresight mixed with a pessimistic disposition, a perfectionist quality mixed with a sense of inadequacy. This is why we did not have freer souls.
111: Strong one moment, vulnerable the next, we falter because we are alive, and with any luck we recover.
112: I want to know how to be as undaunted as a migrating bird, how to sustain that perennial fortitude.
120: Some declines are natural and inevitable. Some are not. There was a distinction to be made between the regular frailties of birds (their everyday expiration, the losses that occur in the hurly-burly of migration) and the more catastrophic faltering brought on by a threatened ecosphere.
Deforestation, habitat loss, hunting, pesticide use, urbanization, predatory pets, and climate change... The decline of migratory birds is an indication that nature is out of balance. Rising temperatures, earlier springs, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, changing rainfall and drought patterns, worsening heat waves, extreme precipitation, acidifying oceans. In ordinary times, thebenefits of migration made it worthwhile for birds. But what about extraordinary times?
The term shifting baselines describes slow, almost imperceptible changes in an ecosystem. A fisheries biologist named Daniel Pauly first used the term in 1995 to explain how ecological standards could be lowered to such a degree that humans could tolerate things they once wouldn't have. In Pauly's opinion, the deterioration of wildlife has been enabled by collective forgetfulness. our faulty memories and relatively short life spans have made us unreliable witnesses. We are unable to truly grasp how much of the natural world has been altered an destroyed by our actions because the baseline shifts over time and generations have rendered us blind. Our standards have been lowered almost unnoticeably. What we might regard as pristine nature today is a shadow of what once existed. We can't seem to remember how things used to be.
121-3: How could a species that existed in such prodigious numbers just vanish? How could the robust become so vulnerable?
The story of any lost life-form is a tragedy, but the disappearance of the passenger pigeon occurred on a scale unmatched in human history. The cautionary tale serves as a crash course in impermanence, a reminder that nature is finite. ... The history of humans is a history of disregarding nature's wake-up calls. We deny and bargain. We adjust the baseline. We reset our memories. We practice genetic wizardry and mad science. We modify our bodies and tamper with the land. We deny death and decay. We override limits, compensate for our vulnerability with engineering and knowhow. We ignore the feedback and messages our bodies and the earth deliver. While there is a place in my heart for a resurrected passenger pigeon or an approximate facsimile, I am wary of a world with no limits, a world in which humans feel omnipotent, in which appeals to change course are drowned out by the euphoria and hubris of invention?
Can we remember our vulnerability when we feel strong again? Can we feel both the frailty and capacity of our bodies, the sorrow that continues inside joy? ... Sometimes it is worth acknowledging the places and moments where things break down, where life is at its limits. Sometimes we stay with the faltering because it is a fragile embodied world, made all the more so by our efforts to suppress this awareness int he name of technological growth and progress. There is no life without adversity, failure, and frailty.
124: Later I will tell him: our courage comes out in different ways. We are brave in our bold dream but also in our hesitations. We are brave in our willingness to carry on even as our pounding hearts say, "You will fail and land on your face." Brave in our terrific tolerance for making a hundred mistakes. Day after day. We are brave in our persistence.
133: Nothing to prove, nothing to lose, nothing to do. here, away from the scaffolding and schedules and the extreme depletion of stress, was the understory of life.
136: I have come to realize that a lull is not just an occupational problem. It is an emotional, intellectual, and existential one as well. If I ever find an answer, I figure I will feel less fatalistic about intervals, period of unemployment or dormancy, fallow times. I might be easier on myself and engage in less-anxious behavior. I might achieve the kind of Zen serenity that allows one to sit with unresolved and sometimes aching emptiness, to feel the silence and immensity of the universe without being too rattled by it. ... [from Eve Sedgwick] "... When I tell you how bad it is, how hard I've worked at something, how much I've been through, there is only one phrase I want to hear. Which is: 'That's enough. You can stop now.'"
139: [reasons a lull is a negative] 2. Capitalism We live in a culture of high performance and competitiveness. Even artists, perennial outlanders who appear to have more freedom from conventional market expectations than most, feel they must maximize productivity and extract the most out of every day. Even those who live outside the city, in the lulling countryside feel time pressure and the relentless demand to perform and stay connected. Even the notion of betterment, which seems benign, can be wielded as a baton of self-discipline.
142: What if we could imagine a lull as neither fatal nor glorious? What if a lull was just a lull?
152: He had been raised to believe everything would work out in the end and that it was possible to feel purely happy without a precautionary chaser of sadness. The skies would not fall and you were not tempting the gods of misfortune if you did not plan for contingencies and worst-case scenarios. You did not need to fortify yourself ... against the coming catastrophe.
He was not raised the way I was.
160: Look at what roaming brings, I thought. From one detour, this.
169: What do you regret? I regret the times I have acted with too much head or, conversely, with too much heart. I regret the ties it seemed better, somehow, to hang back and not step forward. I regret, along with writer George Saunders, the tepid and timid response, the moments when another "being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly." I regret the instances I have turned to others for guidance even when I already had a hunch of what to do. I regret the part of me that is deferential, that fears being sentimental. i regret I am not more propelled by impulse, never, instinct.
172: Still, apart of me wishes he had taken time to look around, that he had not conducted his life as a race to the finish. I regret he took many of life's circumstances, including the positive ones, and shot them through with skepticism and dread in an attempt to inoculate himself against disappointment.
174: Deep down I think I knew he remorse would not be large and crushing. It would be small and manageable, just a tiny bird, embarrassingly little. Not a crisis. And that's why I regret it. Because the attitude that somehow, without our acting, the little things will take care of themselves does not ring true anymore.
183: I also saw that many of our commonplace notions about beauty are simply wrongheaded-- that to say that a love of nature is a function of privilege and wealth, that a delight in small things is incompatible with a passion for justice, is untrue and patronizing to the struggling and the poor. Rosa's letters push back against this assumption by showing how much nature could hepl, how it had historically helped, to fulfill "the potential dignity and worth of human consciousness." She was not naive. What Rosa [Luxemburg] believes was that a commitment to social justice, far from being incompatible with aesthetic experience and sensual pleasure, demanded it--that politics has to be about harnessing the libidinal and the beautiful and not only bout abstract categories.
198: Rebecca Solnit once described as an awareness of "two streams" of loss: on the one hand, there was a revived bird on a restored lake, a sense of things that had been saved from slipping away (imperiled species coming back from the brink); on the other hand, there was the pull of things that were simply "vanishing without replacement."
...
I had met city birders and local conservationists who were using a different environmental voice, one that could (in Naomi Klein's words) "speak to the wounded, as opposed to just the perfect and pretty." It was a voice that looked around the city's most blemished and broken places and said: "There is something left to love."
200: I recognized the DNA of this effort in myself and others close to me. I recognized the valiant, creative, sometimes futile microstands we take against the myriad forces that upend us like bad pranks. Life is just this way, filled with embarrassing, run-of-the-mill, sometimes awful obstacles. If we're lucky we learn by watching others make it through, still standing and smiling. If we're lucky we learn to live in a flux of adaptation. In the twoness. Flickering between ease and difficulty.
203: [among the things the musician taught her] 2. Make leeway for chance. Sometimes you don't want to be driven to a point. Sometimes it is exactly when we lose our bearings or take a detour that life really gets going.
210: The birds tell me not to worry, that the worries that sometimes overwhelm me are little in the grand scheme of things. They tell me it's all right to be belittled by the bigness of the world. There are some belittlements and diminishments that make you stronger, kinder.
214: The birders I encountered in books an din the world shared little except this simple secret: if you listen to bird, every day will have a song in it.
torapaint's review against another edition
4.0
This is the first book i've finish in the past 2 months. I've started it 2 months ago and in the meanwhile i haven't read anything else. Because of this there was a kind of disconect, reading wasn't on my mind and i was sometimes forgetting i was reading this book.
However so, everytime i was reading the book i felt a bit more grounded and a sense of calmness.
I really love books and stories that encourage you to find beauty and solace in the 'small' things, however cliché that might sound I don't have a better way of puting it.
I wish to rearead it in the next year, one chapter in the month it is dedicated to.
I also must say that I really love the design of the book. From the cover to the way the text is organised and the drawings and the photographs inside. The whole book is very beautiful that way and a pleasure to read.
However so, everytime i was reading the book i felt a bit more grounded and a sense of calmness.
I really love books and stories that encourage you to find beauty and solace in the 'small' things, however cliché that might sound I don't have a better way of puting it.
I wish to rearead it in the next year, one chapter in the month it is dedicated to.
I also must say that I really love the design of the book. From the cover to the way the text is organised and the drawings and the photographs inside. The whole book is very beautiful that way and a pleasure to read.