Birds (and more about writing)

I see a lot of different kinds of birds every day. The area where I live, Northwest New Jersey, seems to be ideal to support them with food, shelter and suitable climate. Since moving here from the city, my interest in birds has sharply increased because of their omnipresence.
There's all kinds of Hawks, Woodpeckers, Orioles, Owls-you name it (that’s if it’s not a tropical, western or extreme cold weather species), we got it. I spot one of my favorites, the (shy) Great Blue Heron, on a regular basis. When I was a kid, birds just seemed boring- or maybe it was it that I was just too preoccupied with growing up?
To me, they manifest personalities. Spend some time watching a sparrow or wren-you’ll see what I mean. At best, they are strange creatures-made more of air than of substance-bones thinner than splinters, flitting around like motorized (but jerky) bundles of lint. They are so jumpy, so nervous- is it that their movements are in perfect proportion and rhythm to their size? With every second there is a different twitch, a new titter. How many sounds do they make that just aren’t audible?
They are responsible for eating a lot of the tiny insects (imagine the insect population without them) unless you’re talking about buzzards, hawks or crows. Bigger bird, bigger food. I once saw a big woodpecker (he was hard to miss-a standout in bold red, black and white) rip apart a tree hunting for grubs. A regular Avian chain saw. The Turkey Buzzard - so huge and so ungainly on the ground-but what an efficient eater. Since we lose lots of deer (and other critters) to automobiles up here, I see lots of them. Many times, I’ve seen them almost join the road kill-too absorbed in eating to notice the shiny, speeding SUV overtaking them at their dinners.
Recently, our yard has been commandeered by a family of turkeys for use as a byway. They take the same path across our lawn to the adjacent farm field almost daily. Amazing animals-the adults have an odd shape and subtle yet brilliant coloration. The chicks all follow each other in a line marshalled by the hen. I saw a family of wild turkeys cross Route 280 last week, about three miles out of Newark-since they were big enough to spot from far away, drivers slowed down for them and they crossed without event- a strange and funny sight.

…and on to writing.

The need to write has overtaken me recently (part of the reason for this blog). I can’t help but wonder what’s driving me as, although the idea of writing has always appealed to me, I’ve come nowhere close to really doing it on a steady basis at any other time in my life. When I was a kid, I wrote a “novel”, filling a whole spiral pad (said pad was 4 X 6, maybe 80 pages)-just to prove I could- based on some WWII cliché of a movie…you know, the squad has to travel through enemy lines, gets decimated, only a few guys make it back alive. I had some sort of admiration for the written word back then, however nascent. My Dad read a lot-I always went with him to the public library on his quests for more reading material. He’d bring home a stack of books (Spy novels, as I remember…) and I would always grab something from the shelves of the fiction section. No kiddy books for me. I’d search those shelves for anything that looked interesting. Occasionally, I’d be rewarded ( I found The Hobbit by JR Tolkien that way), but I brought home a lot of dogs (pardon my French) as well, which went back, when due, unread.

I’ve always practiced writing down random thoughts (as was suggested to me time and again), but never with any kind of order. I’ve always kept a sketchbook (a necessity for the visual artist), but this was always a bit skimpy when it came to the written word-my scrawls might translate well into three dimensions, but they were never literary material.
The computer has helped to mold my random thoughts into form. The PC makes it all too easy to combine snippets that can not only be edited freely, but cut and pasted around to (my) heart’s content. The other great thing is, if you are not sure whether to delete something or include it, cut and paste it into a “storage” document.

A side note: Remember all those beautiful handmade journals? I stopped buying them after realizing that I was petrified of making the first mark in them. Even if you got the first drawing or paragraph right, the second thing you wrote was sure to be a horror, not even fit for yer all-forgiving Mom to see! Christmas carried the dread of getting one of these beauties as a gift…Can I see what you’ve done with your journal?...Cripes!

But here’s the point in my writing about my writing.

Why question what you want to do when you have the drive and the ability? Like our sportswear friends say, Just Do It. I’m writing because I can... and because I always want to.

I have to add that reading folks like Annie Proulx (The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes and –oh lordy–Brokeback Mountain), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), the poetry of Anne Sexton, coupled with Anne LaMotts’ Bird By Bird (subtitled Some Instructions on Writing and Life) and Stephen King’s On Writing have made for an inspirational trip into the eye of the proverbial literary storm. It has been said that the more you read, the better you write. In my case, it has been the more I read, the more critical I have become. Nothing seems to pass by me without edits these days. Now onto the next dilemma: what about plot and/or a point to what I choose to write about.
There’s always something….

The above collage/mixed media piece measures 26 X 16.5 X 4. It is titled “The History of Birds”. I completed it earlier in the week.