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“The terrifying groundlessness, the eradication of all violences. To be embraced by that which doesn’t know us and in that unknowing caresses us and truly loves us. We might become anything at all, something wildly other than what we are encountered by. A world that truly loves us by not presuming what we want or what shape we will take before we show up… We will be held when we are not known from the start.” — Dr. Marquis Bey

06 Monday Jul 2026

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Last year, there were vireos, grosbeaks, and warblers raining down on me with their song, from their canopy above a steep climb through the pine and aspen canyon, Ouray of the San Juan Mountains. This year a fire erased it all and was still burning as we flew out above the plumes, our pilot making a rubbernecking route as we departed. As we peered out down onto the devastated mountains, my sons held my hand as we ascended, a tradition they still abide by. And I saw the woman behind me from the corner of my eye, crossing herself.

Prairie Warbler, 2025, by Summer Mei Ling Lee

Joseph drove me from that place I freed myself from, where he was a day laborer. He had to change his shirt before he got into the van, where I waited in my impatience to break away. I was reborn like when I collected my kids and my things and my self worth and flew away from her smoldering apartment.

Joseph apologized for keeping me waiting and asked where I was going. Though he meant which hotel, I said I wanted to see his Zambia. Minutes later we were deep in conversation in the local open market. The open aluminum and wood stalls were humming at mid day with babies sleeping in the piles of vegetables and housewares, and women walking in groups with their bags and baskets. I bought vegetables from his aunt, peanuts from a man and his son, and I can’t remember what else, but in a short time his van was full of food. I told Joseph to bring it all home to his wife, what would I do in a hotel with any of that anyway. I was down to my last $20 USD in kwacha, a week’s wages for the better off there, when Joseph said he had understood me now. The last spot he took me was under a tree where women sat on the ground with some vegetables. He told me these women had to take a bus for two hours to arrive to that patch of dirt at the end of the market, to try and sell what little they had. I said for him to pick someone and give her my last bit of money. In a few minutes, he returned to the van with a fistful of onions he threw onto the pile of food. He said the woman was very grateful, told him to tell me thank you, but she had to give me something in return.

I would understand soon that many Zambians were orphaned young, and that famine lingered. They didn’t come out and tell you this directly but a few sentences in and they were missing their mother who was a good church singer, who even while dying asked her son if he had eaten something.

During our drives around the area, Joseph became less a guide and more a confidant. Joseph had some disappointment with his wife, the unfairness at his workplace, the different ways Zambians did things. How his young parents got sick, one after the other, and died. One evening, a story came up that he said he hadn’t told anyone. He had been taken in by an aunt who was mean, making him choose between school and food. He told me more than a few times that he knew what hunger was. He said one night when he was a boy he was dreaming and a voice told him to get up and walk the road. It was 2 am but he did it anyway, along a red dirt road just like the one we were driving along. Pitch darkness except his headlights and our imaginations. He said that he walked about a hundred yards and found coins lying in the dirt. It was enough to let him eat the next day. The next morning no one believed him and he didn’t try to convince them. I said it was an angel, thinking silently to myself about his parents somewhere in a different mode of existence. He said from then on he started to believe in a god, that there was something bigger than all of us that we couldn’t make sense of. His god was loving.

Ten years ago when I had to move thousands of miles away from my native land, I found a nest that fell to the ground in the yard of the home I was about to leave, I separated the fibers and fluff of the nest and sewed them into fifty cards and sent them to everyone across the country and the world who had given me a sense of home. When I told her about the project, she told me, you had to become displaced to find your family.

Soon after my time with Joseph, I found myself on four continents within a few months, and home became that tiny piece of driftwood I once photographed, where a Common Tern perched forty miles out at sea with no hint of land anywhere on the horizon.

Adrienne said this is where the utter vastness of patterning arrives to us in 3D rendering. I said Virginia Woolf called it the hidden pattern behind the cotton wool of daily life. I droned on about miracles, and she said: yes, they occur in the crossing, when the pattern breaks through and reminds us of what we are normally cut off from. And then she sent me a poem where multiple realities are happening all at the same time, the most superficial one being a young girl declining a stranger’s invitation.

Are there unlived lives?

Joseph tells me in the same sentence that he is ready to leave the earth, and that he adopted and is raising two orphans of his own.

And yesterday, emerging from the smoke of the western Colorado fires, the Black Grosbeak and the Yellow Warbler alight upon branches within feet of each other and despite everything, sing each other into being.

Common Tern, 40 miles west into the Pacific Ocean by Summer Mei Ling Lee, 2026

Images dream within us, a reverie is a world of expansion.

06 Saturday Dec 2025

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unwantedadvice.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/words-are-little-houses-bachelard/

(Looking for a blank page, I wandered into a moment of my 13-year old musing below, asking for new birds and another flight.)

“Words… are little houses” — Bachelard

The 12th century Japanese poet, Saigyo, lived in horrific times of war, chaos, and scandal. He descended from a lineage of warriors, and after violent service to the Emperor, he took up the robes of a monk and the pen of a poet to both understand and release the straits of human-ness, his metaphorical and literal bloodstained past, the limits that all humans are born into.

Bird in my Journal, by Summer Mei Ling Lee, 2025

In both life and writing, he became a homeless wanderer. And it was during these unceasing peregrinations between mountainous temple sites and towns that he used the ability of nature’s images to capture all that matters through deceivingly simple words.

An ancient field

and in the sole tree starkly

rising to its side

sits a dove, calling to its mate:

the awesome nightfall.

In his poems, words as single ideographs balloon with layers of meaning, and no one meaning stabilizes over another. What we think is important becomes indistinguishable as night falls. What remains there is the gift of the dove’s birdsong lilting in the dissolution of light — into awesome darkness.  As Sam Hamill writes, thoroughly intimate with Saigyo and profoundly aware that song might be the last thing heard, that words are the springboard into nothingness:  Those that I love are more beautiful because one of us will die.

I recall the moment driving home from the hospital after giving birth to our son, a process that even in good circumstances is seismic to the foundation. And in my case, I exhausted myself to the point of an acuity of my mortality. So there I was, dispossessed, with one foot still in the non-world, while my family packed up the days-old baby asleep into his carseat, also with one foot in the non-world. We were heading home.

Oddly, our destination in my mind’s eye was my childhood home. Driving down the familiar coastal route, I only saw my childhood living room with the wretched, green upholstered chair that I spent so many hours in, there under the expansive pane of glass through which was our neglected garden, littered with robins pecking at unwanted cherries. Even when it became clear that this was not indeed where we were heading, that the last time I stepped foot in this house was decades ago, I could not understand how to get to my current home, the one “known” for the last third of my life. I experienced a moment of homelessness.

Of course my literary hero, George Steiner, drawing on writers ranging from pre-classical Chinese poets to Holocaust survivors, professes this homelessness, that we are always guestworkers, “frontaliers in the boardinghouse of life,” regardless any distraction from this eventuality. It is the same for Dante, in his love for Beatrice, who travels through the three realms of the dead. And that the epic narration of Odysseus is in his journey, the textual death occurs when he reaches home.  Chuang tzu’s free and easy wandering, which is incredibly not free, nor easy.

Because we are human. We need a home. If we are to have a home, according to Bachelard, it would be like the fragile nest. Every precariously woven-together twig and dried straw comprise our human desire to hope for the future, and the precious eggs it cradles — but also the acceptance of its propensity to decay, fall apart, to be destroyed — to be ephemeral. The nest acknowledges the potential for me to be without the soul-killing need to push against Being, distracted from where the beauty of it lies. I have exhausted myself in my will to make things certain — because, as I am reminded in my changeling son, the infinite little losses in my body, my relationships, my art-making, and how in this moment right here is the possibility of perishing — words are anything but certain.

Schalow’s Turaco, Zambia. By Summer Mei Ling Lee, 2025

“When you are philosophizing, you have to descend into primeval chaos, and feel at home there.” Wittgenstein.

“We meet in the freedoms of each other.” – Takeyoshi Nishiuchi

02 Sunday Mar 2025

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Joy, she said way before any of this happened, is the enemy of fascism, as totalitarianism capitalizes on anger and despair.

The poisoning of our country has not yet seeped into the living and dining rooms of most people here yet. So it is in that collective cloud of comfort and yet palpable menace, I am standing in the miraculous California February sun, on the periphery between a Silicon Valley oligarch’s “campus” (George Steiner would connect their bastardization of words to our current godlessness) and the tidal estuary that remains at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. The serpentine line between the dystopic tech “architecture” and the diminishing marshland wilderness is this narrow crushed granite trail, the perverted indexical residue of environmental activists’ defeat — “put a nature trail on it.”

It is today, here on that consolation trail for birdwatchers, where my friend Chris heard what was thought to be extinct in our county: a Black Rail, a bird no bigger than a mouse, last heard nonetheless seen 15 years ago. So when my friend notified a few others, Ron went out immediately, the top county birder many generations over. Yes, these birders are temples of knowledge.

In his reverie, Ron cursed the tech company, but cried in joy. The persistence of a little marsh bird, a bird that only vocalizes for a couple of weeks a year in preparation for mating, in its hope of continuing its lineage since the dinosaur era, in a territory that in my lifetime with rising sea waters will be gone.

Photo by Summer Lee, where we heard the Black Rail. 2025.

But the computer world, no matter how much they built into our Bay, will always be mere simulacrum of what is sensate and experiential. It will always be the lesser substitute for life. My friend Leah’s psychoanalytic school shares two talks in the same week: “Submission as a response to trauma” and “Psychoanalytic perspectives on the unfolding global environmental catastrophe.” Children (we are all of us still children) accept abuse if it means we will survive, and we are unable to accept the slow violence of environmental degradation — the disavowal of our connection to each other and the natural world. She describes these talks as a series for an emotionally devastating curriculum.

So: Joy, joy and enthusiasm.

To find joy in the presence of other living things, Despret tells us. Our ethical obligation as living beings is to give existence to other living beings. That vestigial impulse is what sets me out here with these little words and paintings. Let me give exuberant breath to that friend who died, to those feathers she sent me, to that bird I only could hear but whose plaintive chirps filled my imagination with a wondrous swirl of hope and persistence — and with it, the fragile dignity of humanity. Right there in that crushed granite borderland between marsh and man, that periphery. Under the embrace of the California sun, next to the San Francisco Bay were once an ancient civilization thrived, today on the precipice of another unknown season, whether migratory or breeding.

Ink Painting by Qi Bashi (1864-1957)

“What if a man cannot be made to say anything?
How do you learn his hidden nature?

I sit in front of him in silence,
and set up a ladder made of patience,
and if in his presence a language from beyond joy
and beyond grief begins to pour from my chest,
I know that his soul is as deep and bright
as the star Canopus rising over Yemen.

And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm
of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say,
and how I say it, because there’s a window open
between us, mixing the night air of our beings.”

— Rumi

“Those with wings, those without, / the ghosts of the heart / — whose hunger is a dress for my song.” — Brigit Pegan Kelly

02 Thursday Jan 2025

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681.

To measure a life from the periphery.

The periphery is where birds live now, eking out existence in our built environment. Vinciane Despret also explains the periphery as where two conflicting demands can be held together in a vitalization resulting from those clashes and stimulation. It is where birds sing their territory. It is where nature and human modernity meet. It is the veil through which we mortals greet our disappearance. In its intensification of the things that aren’t yet perceived, the periphery is the place of artistic creation.

Annunciation VIII, by Summer Mei Ling Lee, 2024. Paint and gold leaf on wood.

Once I was at the periphery where on one side I would be ok, the other I would not. The place one arrives to after the loss of beloved things, which mostly reveals the limitations of my scaffolding and confabulations. I ended up in her office. She was a midwesterner, a plain and small, older woman who had come out of the managed healthcare system. I plainly admitted that my terror was that I couldn’t be helped.

The best healers do not make interpretations behind the backs of their patients. They resist the “simulacrum of intelligence on the back of the stupidity of others.” There on that clinical couch of her spartan and chilly office, just when I trembled in the anxiety of being a lost cause, she rolled her chair towards me and she reached her hand to firmly hold mine. She said sternly and confidently that she could help me. By grabbing me, she broke through that boundary of professional etiquette. But even more I registered that she didn’t know she was going to do that. She had the strength to answer to the moment. And that spontaneous responsiveness was real strength that no one can train for or read about or theorize.

After 10 years of seeing her, and after the last three years of nudges to fledge me, her cancer returned. She retired and flung me out into the wilderness. There is nothing more I could say or ask for — there is nothing left to explain. I drew a bird and sent it to her.

I might have been satisfied by the 35 or so anytime in my yard, but this past year I saw 277 different species of birds, right here in my own county, where I was born and raised. I saw 481 different species everywhere I wandered off to. In perspective, this year there were 4 other birders in my county who saw more birds than I did, and hundreds who saw more than I did throughout the world. Still, I abandoned myself to an attention that brought me into an intimacy with my native land outside my immediate yard.

This native land consists of precise sachets of memories as much as ecological specialization. One particular species of gull prefers one beach over the others, because the fresh water they need to survive pours into the ocean where the sands are flatter and can host more crustaceans they are specialized in eating. It is one beach out of dozens where we sifted through hundreds of gulls to try to find one rare gull, the first Siberian visitor to the continental US. It was the same beach where I was many times a near-hypothermic child who couldn’t resist the Pacific water tumbling over my feet, watching the sand bubble up where those crustaceans bury themselves before the next wave.

For 7 years in a row, Tufted Duck, off-course from Europe, wintered on a pond near an athletic club, where for our last day of high school our entire class spent the night, one last time together, signing yearbooks and playing ping pong. And then the next morning we dispersed into the rest of our lives. This year, Tufted Duck did not return.

While I was in the void 30 miles west on the Pacific Ocean, far from any landforms on the horizon, looking for migrating Arctic Terns and Sabine’s Gulls, thousands of dolphins suddenly broke the surface of the water as far as one could see. Just as quickly as they had rendered us ecstatic, they disappeared back into the void.

And along the ridge on which at 16 years old I first kissed a woman, there is a migratory path for Varied Thrushes, and when we were greeting them, a species of Crossbill touched down into a small pine in front of us — Cassia Crossbill, for the first time ever recorded, had immigrated into my county, crossing over the Sierras from its decimated forests of Idaho. The only way to know is by recording their calls and sending it in for confirmation from those who obscurely dedicate themselves to such distinctions.

I won’t bore you much longer, but maybe it is more imaginable now why Pietro and I sharing only broken English could spend two straight days together, seeing 102 species in a delta half-way between Africa and Siberia, and never stop talking about them. A Little Owl in the early dawn light, perched on the eave of an abandoned building, then the warming updrafts conjured a Red Kite over the hills. Until sitting in the dark in a field behind his hometown, as shadows of Eurasian Woodcocks sailed over us from the stand of pines into their nightly roost in the plowed field. And even later than that, owls circled around us, barely perceptible like swirling apparitions of the imagination. Whether they were one species or another, and all the stories in between, was more than enough to fill a conversation on the rural roads back to my farmstead.

A man a continent away who knows what arrives on different directions of winds, who prefers the slopes of certain beaches, and what happens on foreign trees and in pockets of warm air of his region — as I am coming to know mine. We also witness too closely, bird by bird, the horrors of modernity — the loss of habitat to human profit, the flippant carelessness away from Being — threatening to ruin it all.

Pietro on the third day, and the hills of Bologna, 2024.

As things slip away, like Tufted Duck, as they do when one realizes life in years is more over than it is beginning, time on the periphery becomes more precious and any aliveness, wretched or wonderful, can be understood as bittersweet. Abundance. And god help me, there is also the sting of every time I fell short of love.

680. (Malia Defelice’s 400th county bird). Watercolor by Summer Mei Ling Lee, 2024.

“It gleamed.” Tenebrae, by Paul Celan

“ O Opal / your ear / in my heart / both hear / the glorious void, / preferring the birds.” Jim Harrison

04 Saturday May 2024

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Life-preserving but not life-giving, he says. Maybe the best critique of art I’ve ever heard. “Nothing is harmed but nothing is thriving either.” The people around here trained their eyes away from the gods, ancestral dead, magic — and sometimes even beauty. Everything is a utility or transaction for something else, and that’s not how the most important things come to exist. And, “The true entrance into us will not occur by an act of will.”

Into the Nearness of Distance, 2024. By Summer Mei Ling Lee. 28 x 15 inches. Cyanotype on three layers of Gauze, wood.

Myself, I want to dance with all that is wild and alive, but am just sometimes scared to. I realize now back on this sky-murdering plane home, full of doubts and in mistake-review mode, I was still greeted that day by gleaming Prairie Warbler, in all his breeding plumage glory. He popped up in front of me when there could have been nothing at all in that sickly, urban forest. Odds are more likely that he would have been a thousand miles further along into Canada, but he was right here. Exactly where I have met so many who I have loved and who have loved me. As he explains, those things we need most in this world are more tangible in the messy, uncertain wild.

Prairie Warbler, the other day.

Just two weeks ago, blue-eyed Pietro drove me to a nature preserve that is now tragically a farm, where persists a pole at the side of the field with a platform on top. And up there in a roughly-woven basket structure she stares down at us, telling me something I don’t know how to write, something about fear but also just continuing on despite the hunters. She could live for forty years and knows how to squeeze water from moss into her thirsty chicks’ beaks. For what.

And then he takes me way out where the road barely can be made out anymore, to the last remaining colony of Lesser Kestrels in the eaves of a long-ago collapsed home. He jumps out of his tiny car when he spots them and shrieks like a boy. He delights in telling me when they fly back into view, for a period of time even longer than I still care. He can see them everyday and I will never see them again in my lifetime. And soon no one will. I know why he shrieks, but it’s impossible to write it, even though I feel it in my bones and try every time. I am deeply aware and sorry for that failure.

But after each word, it is impossible not to mention those that understand and keep me company — it’s why she has sent me a bird along her walk. And why he sends that line of poetry. Otherwise it can feel like the people here are dying mostly because they don’t even notice, nonetheless jump out of their car and shriek in delight. I think that’s why Celan threw himself into the Seine river, it becomes overwhelming that the rest of the world swings through the crowd like an ignorantly sharp elbow into a tender bruise.

Little Ringed Plover for Fiorenza, by Summer Mei Ling Lee, 2024

She cried openly this time when I left the farm, weeks before the Bee Eaters arrive. This year, I gave her a Little Ringed Plover instead. I am trying to fashion band-aids out of the birds, those little gods and ancestors and bits of magic in the trees. Band-aids for those whose tendernesses in the crowd, including my own, I absurdly want to preserve.

“If we must be careful of any anthropomorphism when studying animals, it is not bad to sometimes do a little zoomorphism when studying man, whose lucidity and power of reasoning are often exaggerated.” (Étienne Souriau, The artistic sense of animals, 1963. My translation).

“Not tears of fear but of grief. She wept as we weep once or twice in our life. Tears that carry amniotic fluid and sea salt and the dreams of sirens in them, that hurl truth, sorrow and defiance into this world, all at once. As she wept, she wiped the tears over her bruised and muddied body. As the tears made tracks, her skin started to gleam. Clean and bright again.” Martin Shaw

31 Sunday Mar 2024

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Because the vagrant snow bunting had appeared in my yard before waking, I knew when she called that he was dead. And upon hearing her voice, I began sounding like a strange bird, just uttering no, no, no. As if songs can magically push out reality and hold back time for just a moment.

What’s hard about this one is that he was inside that cathedral with me for many years, and I can still see him running back for me when the most rarest or most gorgeous bird was ahead and I hadn’t caught up yet. And of course, how he told my sons the exact trees where the chickadees were waiting so they could feed them from their hands. How I would wake up and say let’s drive out hours into the prairie to see this lifer and he would always beat me there. And now without warning except for the apparition of a snow bunting we had seen one windy day together two years ago, the cathedral is more empty. With that disappearance, my ancient rituals — timed with spring and fall migrations to welcome the beings from thousands of miles away as they pass through — have fallen into obsolescence.

And here is the ritual of writing, which lately (I apologize) tends to be predictably filling out absences with words. Because he told me, nothing can better bring back a presence than by just the uttering of it.

Nathan sent me some words about the stories we need in our lives and are less and less being told. And in those time-tested tales there is always a moment when we are thrown into the belly of the whale or into the dark woods or what have you. The writer says we are most cautious now of that wilderness, even having chopped off our hands to stop touching what is alive, and asks us to go sit willingly in the wild places and listen to what speaks to us.

I am using words here to listen, deep in another wilderness, sent here by the loss of a soul that scaffolded me, who saw hundreds of birds by my side as I looked at them too. Who sent me birds in every form, and delighted in my birds. And tried as he could to birdwatch in these stupid writings here. I have nothing to offer here because I am still in the wilderness listening, covered in mud, bruised in the middle of me, and seeing ghostly figures in the distance, those who I miss. They somehow feel nearer and nearer to me as I approach my own disappearance.

And yet, by some grace, so much gratitude, there is thanks for those who are waiting in the nearby village, full of love and mercy and words and bird feathers for me. Coming back to tell me they also can hear a beautiful bird just ahead, and they will help me find it.

(Annunciation, 2024 by Summer Mei Ling Lee. 23.5 k gold, watercolor and oil paint on wood panels.)

“To be wedded to the wild means some part of you — maybe a large part — guards your solitude like we guard an endangered owl, tells stories as much for the benefit of the lively dead as the moribund living, makes wayward choices many view eccentric, is capable of sustained generosity, has flashed your teeth and counted costs, has dragged meat back to the cave under the moonlight, has stalked all of Russia with only a line of Anna Akhmatova for company. To be wedded to the wild means you have curated a doorway beyond societal expectation of the perpetual, grinding tic of acting nice. That you have recognized discipline as the essential companion of the wildness, that sobriety and ecstasy have made a pact.

That is how good art gets made.” Martin Shaw, Smokehole

“But these blinds birds made of paper could not recognize my father. In vain did he call them with the old formulas, in the forgotten language of the birds — they did not hear him nor see him. All of a sudden, stones began to whistle through the air. The merrymakers, the stupid, thoughtless people had begun to throw them into the fantastic bird-filled sky.” The Night of the Great Season, Bruno Schulz.

27 Friday Oct 2023

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She asked me earnestly, in the context of a conversation about the war in the Middle East, does a bird I see also bring about the despair that birds are vanishing.

Counting birds is perhaps a futile defense against their disappearance. Even according to the software that I use to collect bird sightings, the bird closest to me doesn’t count. Neither do the birds in the wild who are escapees — and aren’t we all an escaped being of some sort? Nor do the birds who are introduced here and are considered invasive. Colonial human projections run everywhere, even into the bird world.

The bird in closest proximity, my son’s pet bird.

I listen to a lot of Vinciane Despret these days who speaks about the creative drive in relation to birds and the dead. She describes when a bird dies on the surface of the ocean it feeds life down into the depths of the ocean floor, and that for the natural world the ethical responsibility is that being alive gives existence to others.

Writing, a story, then puts words in a certain order to bring something into existence that was formerly a blank space on this screen. And some of us know that an animal can leave a similar trace, Despret describes, as in the way birds manage time with song, or a wolf paw print in the mud leaves pheromones. She adds, these traces are just the beginning of a story. And these are ephemeral stories (my favorite artists play with ephemerality), just like an oral history but no less important than the ones written down. She asks us, what capacities did the bird or the wolf have to acquire in order to live with each other. And as my great aunt Marguerite reminds us, what did the 5 generations of people before me enact upon each other, and is in turn enacted upon me?

Forgive me as I use more of these words to sweep up the mess of words I am creating.

Sometimes, the words people send me, the feathers they find, the scribbles, underlined passages, my memories of their presences and absences: they swirl into words and form a clearing where I glimpse the hidden pattern of things. And before it slips away I have to give testimony: these words, the paint, the connections we have, they all play upon me, just as pianists describe how a piano at some point plays them. Just like Alice, now gone, is still in my words reverberating here. Just how the birds in the field this morning made me late to the studio, where I hear the upstairs woman raging from her cage. And how my son chirps like his pet bird when he makes a bid for my connection.

A painting in progress, 2023. Summer Mei Ling Lee.

What is wondrous is that there are luxuries and gifts that you and the birds have shown me. That a feather is for warmth, but it doesn’t need to glint in the sun as metallic blue only for survival. And when Caroline sends me the image of one fallen along her walk, there is a ballooning of connection to her and all things. As is when Nathan says the birds outside his home were reflected inside and every line of writing he has lovingly sent me. The image of a list of every creature that Eva painted onto a hidden board of a home she was leaving forever: There is pleasure in singing — and no, not every part of a song can be minimized down to utility or survival. If you have ever heard a bird sing outside of mating season, after a cold night when the low sun casts warmth, even before the bugs start rising, you know. What is extra, luxurious, is beauty. And now, through these words that will up and disappear, I can see some inkling of the productivity of my life, never measured by wage or even number of paintings, or for sure approval. I count “birds” because it reveals a network here available to me and those I love, but really available to all, some discovered beauty in living and singing it. And we never know for sure how it sinks to the bottom of an ocean and feeds another soul. (And if you have followed me this far you know this is not a beauty of artifice). I want to measure my life in terms of this beauty. “Life, she loves living.”

Picture of a bird I sent Alice on her bookshelf, 2017.

“The subject is only the transient addressee of a verb which seizes them.” — Donna Haraway

“In heaven they’ll tell long stories of the horror of life on earth ending each session by chanting beautiful poems we did not deserve.” – Jim Harrison

29 Friday Sep 2023

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His hands were trembling so excitedly that he couldn’t text the group chat about what he had seen.

601.

Some lost birds set off mysteries that make even the most analytical of nerdy birder brains just pause.

The bird he had found belongs to a species that is the most ancient of gulls, whose home is just across the equator, but was now plopped down on our beach a couple miles from my son’s school — even more unusual for a bird that hunts at night and sleeps during the day at sea. This Swallow-Tailed Gull’s home is the Galápagos Islands where now weather patterns have made food scarce. He landed here, 3350 miles away as the crow flies.

At mid-life, there is an accumulation of absences and I imagine it intensifies until the final absence. I wouldn’t dare count them like birds, but they are related, each one becoming more precious, more miraculous, more stinging, and adds evidence to some sort of hidden pattern that will stubbornly remain just out of sight. One took flight almost a year ago, and I didn’t know it until this week.

Just like other birds, when I look back there was a mundane attempt to connect with me and say hello, which now I know was a goodbye. And in my list of birds, for some I have had the presence of mind to answer, and sometimes the presence of mind to not. For her, I didn’t answer the voice in my head that knew something had happened and I texted sheepishly and waited. In our last call, she had some repetitions and some irrational thoughts, and as I watched orioles eat mulberries in the neighbor’s tree, I listened to her lecture on the political nightmares from her Facebook and CNN lens of the world.

25 years before I had been one of a few in a snobby university enrolled in her courses, where we instantly understood we could be ourselves. I took several courses from her including two in Biblical Studies even while deep into feminist activism. I asked her to be my advisor, the year she was told she was removed from tenure track.

A few years ago, I made a sort of pilgrimage to see her in the Midwest town of her final professorship. We talked non-stop, the kind where my throat hurt and my head ached, but there was so much to learn and so much to explore with her. She told me about her life before she decided to get a PhD, which she didn’t do until her late 40’s. Years of Jungian analysis, what Anne Sexton was like in person, her childhood boarding school run by nuns who all seemed to have “lost husbands in the war.” She asked so many questions in the way I felt she cared about the depths of me. I reminded her that she once taught us that the bible in Hebrew contains idioms and euphemisms not available in English translations. For example, feet is a euphemism for male genitalia, and then she let our young minds run through the list of people who wash Jesus’ feet, and whose feet he washes, and on and on. Now, 25 years later she had totally forgotten saying that, but she laughed and said, I guess the point is, who is the authority?

She was a devout Catholic, and felt the church could be changed from within. She and her fellow Catholics did vigils in front of buildings where executions were occurring, lined up near nuclear plants, and fed the poor. She told me you couldn’t donate more than $500 to the Catholic Worker she belonged to, otherwise you had money that was likely made from exploiting others and they wouldn’t want it.

I reminded her that she took me to the University Faculty Club for dinner. That she put down the Diet Coke can that was always in her hand just to order another one the moment we arrived, and there in my Doc Martens and piercings, I listened to her whisper gossips of other department faculty. She told me she never ate there and thought it perfect to invite me so we could delight ourselves as two outsiders irreverently feasting ourselves in the ivory tower.

In the Midwest, I slept in her home of books, books lining every possible wall, from floor to ceiling. The guest bed was directly below rows upon rows of early editions Virginia Woolf novels and essays. Along other shelves were books she had written for young people, she said her favorite was about a talking bear and another about a teenage girl discovering life is not going to work out the way she thought. And it still breaks my heart to remember every little scribble of a bird drawing or postcard I sent her over the 25 years, framed and perched on her shelves. One sparrow sketch sat next to a humbly embroidered fabric that read: An immaculate home is a sign of a mis-spent life.

There is a trick that birders sometimes use to coax a bird out into the open, one that should be used prudently because of the stress it can cause. Afterall, the rare ones are usually lost. A birder uses their phone to play a digital recording of the bird species’ song which can trigger a territorial response, or the species’ call which can trigger a search for a flock. On my phone I have a handful of voicemails of people who are no longer here, their voices as fresh as today, sometimes wishing me a happy birthday, one was reaching out to console me after a loss, one is from Alice asking me to call her back a little later when she returns home.

Performing Mourning, Summer Lee and JiaJing Liu. Photo by Eddie Wong. Hungry Ghost Festival, SF, 2023

There was no need to play a sound for the Swallow-Tailed Gull, as it slept out in the open for a row of 30 birders lined up admiring it. I had to go home after a few hours, my youngest son can only stare at a gull and listen to bird-talk for so long. Later a birder friend wrote me, describing with uncharacteristic melancholy the moment when the sun sunk right above the ocean and the gull gathered itself up into flight, disappearing out over the horizon. When I left Alice in the Midwest, she watched from the sidewalk as my car left her driveway. She yelled out, see you around, kid.

602.

O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried
me along on this bloody voyage,
carry me now into that cloud
into the marvel of this final night.

James Harrison (1990) – The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems

To See is to Be at a Distance. – Takeyoshi Nishiuchi

26 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by in Aesthetic philosophy, Art, Birds, Nature, philosophy, Uncategorized

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399 birds.

It is a silly and random number, especially when applied to the chaos of life.

I have counted 399 species of birds over the years, my life staggering and flowing with the number. With them, there are little drab stories and big colorful ones too. Births and deaths and hopes and losses, and fears and little reliefs and bits of joy. Like how, when she addresses me as “my love,” a bird flies through me. And gratitude for those who counted with me. With poems and stories and letters and sometimes just a line that says, I saw this bird. A bird, like a thought migrating over arbitrary borders, that reaches me and perches on my heart.

(Pompeii fresco)

So many gifts.

Like the story about the man who paints. We met long after we lost Takeyoshi, meeting only because we both lost precious Takeyoshi. So how could it be that we both have spent our lives making artwork from birds.

And some of those who have taken it to the other side with me. We easily slip into the private language of obsessive details about where that bird was seen and when. Daily reports of who arrived and who left. Remember that time? And all the while, I ask myself, why does this young man, and that old man, and this lost soul, and that serious cynic, why do we devote ourselves to birds. Track them. Count them. Photograph them. Why not butterflies? Or pieces of rotting fruit? What of them drives us to beyond which we can go no further, knowing the bird might be long gone.

He once whispered, It is not like I need to see all of the birds. I replied, I need to. He added, Well maybe it isn’t necessary to do so in one year.

I climbed several thousand feet up a fog-covered mountain twice in three days to see a small group of Bell’s Sparrows, a species not even listed in most books. The second day the wind opened the curtain of fog just long enough to see the tiny apparitions.

Or the other times, like Prairie Warbler who visited from far away. I waited patiently for weeks at the pond where it drinks. My friends saw it. I never did.

How futile to argue with a Prairie Warbler.

(Merlo from Sara’s yard, July 2021)

And then the ones that flew over like signs from dreams. Sometimes it was when the heart was heavy from an absence. Or there was an unexpected blessing. Like when, in my grandmother’s land, the golden pheasant was digging through trash at the hastily-restored ancient wall, or the little wren that sang outside the window of the home that stands guard over displaced immigrant bones.

Or the magpie that comes to her door, reminding her to stay in the garden rather than retreat inside. How magpies risk themselves for shiny objects, reminding us all about the unfolding, if not wayward, path. Along which there are no repositories, because shiny objects have no use in the next season, the next life. Because there is always a next season.

And scooping up the dying and dead ones, sometimes trying to save them, as if I could. In the hand, they weigh at most one or two nickels, and are soft and fearful, and heavy with mourning. How they persist so dutifully against so many odds, storms, predators, just to succumb to human ignorance and interference and land in the bottom of a muddy hole I have dug for them. The point at which finally I have learned: it is witnessing, not intervening, that heals.

In some cultures, they remove themselves from their kindred to shift their senses towards the animal world, and away from the human ones. They perform rituals to cleanse and purify themselves. Then after a few days, the animals appear to them, what we have survived upon since the beginning. And we follow.

In life, I never have had the emotional strength to keep up with where the birds take me, especially Fox Sparrow. But somehow the discomfort eases just enough to comprehend the next rare bird who I must change my life for. And less and less do I know where that will take me. But the 401st bird is already just in view over the horizon, trailing off towards this choice-less path, and I have already devoted my life to it.

The 400th Bird.

O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried/me along this bloody voyage,/ carry me now into that cloud/into the marvel of this final night. — Jim Harrison

04 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by in Aesthetic philosophy, Art, Birds, Nature, philosophy, poetry, Uncategorized

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I own a caged bird made up of thousands of serious marks by several colored pencils on paper, framed. None of it is particularly bird-like except the woman I know who applied each one. I met her in a room in an institution in my grandmother’s country. She was one of a group who spent their days in an art room. When one of them began hitting his head and shrieking, I asked my colleagues to leave and I sat down and started drawing birds, too. The silent making in that space brought us all back home. Eventually their caregiver tapped me on the shoulder and said, we knew you were coming from far away. We have a song for you. They handed out instruments to each other and stood in a circle around their art desks and starting singing, loud enough to carry into the clinically sterile halls outside. I clapped my wings and let their foreign calls delight me, until an older man who could sing but not speak wrote on his dry erase board: Ask our visitor to sing a song for us.

If I sing these words about you, you stay alive with me. If I craft these scenes from our past here you still are in them. Humans, by dint of language, are the only beings capable of a future conditional tense. It enables the birds to sing in the daybreak after the night of our death, and we hear them. And the more sensitive, by the size of the eyes of the bird, the earlier the song begins. And the more comfortable and active they are in the dark, from where you also emerge.

Little ink bird, by Summer Lee, 2020

At some point in their circle of death the birds turned towards me and they told me matter-of-factly you had been taken. Gone. Right from the middle of me. The swaths of memory that made you part of me flew out of an absence and circled themselves over and over as clear as today. Some sort of compensation for the violence that I will never see or talk to you again. I would also learn that someone took something from you when we were young that wasn’t theirs to take. It stole parts of your life increasingly, until you were gone. We were born right across the street from each other. Now I am living and you are not. This song is my deepest apology.

Some of the most beautiful birds in the circle know me through intimate, timely words over incredible distances. At the moment when I thought you were most gone, it was as if you were sitting across from me. In her knowing, the beautiful poet bird just then wrote: somehow when they leave the body, they become closer to our hearts.

And yes, these songs fall out like feathers, like when at the end of one morning, the birder opened her car door to leave and told me the lump was cancer. That same day I held Magnolia Warbler who had been found struggling on the ground, and in my hand he shrieked a distress which was the call that there is unfathomable suffering without the consolation of reason.

One morning of those 43 mornings in a row, before the other birders arrived, there at the edge of the puddle was a bird I knew well and would make me famous to other birders for the week. How funny since he was a common bird to me, Varied Thrush, from a dark path along the reservoir near my west coast home. But here, he was a long way out of range. The place I often find myself. Who knows how these specialists drift thousands of miles from their homes, how this tiny bird managed to cross over the Rocky Mountains. Surely alone. We are birds along a life-long commute of thousands of miles. These words are the apology when one goes off course.

Thank you to our parents who let us little kids out to play together hours on end, often into the darkness. Thank you to my mom who visited him a few weeks before in the hospital, to remind him he was not his diagnosis. Though the tattoos of darkness were adding up on his body, there is always the light of possibility for all our self-inked narratives to be not true.

After the 4 hours a day every morning I spent with these birders, the migration season was over. It reminds me of the moment I left that institution where the caged birds sang and made art for their entire lives. A part of me stayed behind to keep drawing birds. But along a corridor on the way out, a mother was visiting her son. He sat alone from the group flatly staring out a window, and she was petting his head, preening him with all her loving attention.

The birders leave because the birds move on. The last bird spotted was an emerald blur of a tiny hummingbird that was late for the cold air. It hovered over our heads just long enough for even the slowest of us to register and then it zipped away into the invisible. 

“Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.” Jim Harrison

Detail of Deposition by Pontormo, 1528