Returning to the Birds

I lost touch with the birder in me but today I returned to the birds and a part of myself. I went for a walk, with the camera! To my surprise I have captured three birds who I have not shared on the blog before: a palm warbler, an eastern wood-pewee and a white-throated sparrow. I only realized after coming home and searching to identify the birds because my bird-attunement is currently very low due to lack of use.

I’m really happy.

I am planning to begin something new after a long period of quiet introspection but I have been hesitant for a long time. While sitting under a tree looking out for the birds, I asked for a sign. I asked the universe to send me a sign: a hawk, a ladybug or something magical like a rainbow. Is that strange? That’s how my mind works and I saw both a hawk and a ladybug on my short walk.

It is way beyond the orderly house of reasons and proofs now:

“I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
Is wider than that. And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.”

-Mary Oliver

Now, once again, my orderly house is a messy garden.

Palm Warbler

Eastern Wood-Pewee

White-throated Sparrow

See ya!

Too much brightness

It is very bright outside, with the snow throwing back sunlight into the world. The contrast between light and dark, and the sharp shadows made by the sun cannot possibly describe my feelings right now.

I went ahead and added some of my current feelings to these images I took on a walk last week, by messing with the colors a bit;

Winter Fruit

Shadow self of tree of life

Water moves beneath the frozen creak

 

I have the strange feeling of not being suited for this world.

I feel misaligned and out of place. 

Perhaps just a case of winter blues. 

 

Bare Life

 

 

Bare Life:

“The term originates in Agamben’s observation that the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what in contemporary European languages is simply referred to as ‘life’: bios (the form or manner in which life is lived) and zoē (the biological fact of life). His argument is that the loss of this distinction obscures the fact that in a political context, the word ‘life’ refers more or less exclusively to the biological dimension or zoē and implies no guarantees about the quality of the life lived. Bare life refers then to a conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived, by which Agamben means its possibilities and potentialities. “- Ian Buchanan, A dictionary of Critical Theory

What has photography to do with critical theory?

Perhaps nothing.

When I decided to go back to academia two years ago, I felt that a part of who I am had been defeated. I remember the exact moment I accepted it. I was in the library looking over a collection of photos by Ansel Adams. I could not control a tear in my eye over a life I could not afford to live, right then.

I have read critical theory among other things since then. There is a part of me that searches for more than bare life. More than the maintenance of life. More than paying off the student loan and other bills. Academia offered me something – a chance to think, a chance to think better, a scholarship, a way to delay a completely bare life. What’s the point of thinking?

Today I walked into the woods and hugged all the trees in the third and fourth photo.

I still have a sense of failure. For not securing my bare life. For not applying for the best job. For not going for the most lucrative field. For being lost, wandering. For refusing what should be done.

For not being able to refuse my refusal of the world as it is.

Yesterday, I started reading Mary Oliver’s Upstream once again.

“But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

I believe, one day, I’ll be able to weave all the threads of my life together in complete harmony; nature, psychology, photography, philosophy, theory. I might as well start from here.