(no subject)
I was just out walking on one of the most beautiful ranches I've ever seen.
I felt like I was walking in the landscape of my own heart. You see, the landscape of my heart is an oak woodland. One with long sweeping hills just green with early grass under a sky heavy with autumn. In the heights, the hills grow craggy with rock, high wild places where the winds dance and storms might kiss the earth with lightning. Down in the folds between the hills, there are secret places where shadows stay, doorways glimmer into the land, the hidden folk and the strange lights. Down in the shade running creeks stray between the rocks. In the day this landscape is all sky, a vault of sky warm with great birds, wing and sky and space. In the night the moon transforms it to a sea of shadows and silver, and the weird grace of the twisted oaks looms over you, and spirits walk. It is a whispering land. It could be anywhere, but it happens to be California.
On my way down there I watched a couple of red-tailed hawks winging from one tree to another. There are a lot of hawks about right now; it's migration season and they come through from everywhere north ahead of the winter. They were hawks like all the other hawks I see every day, but they showed me that the arch of wings, the red glow of tailfeathers, the quick sweep of flight still catches my heart like that. When I was a teenager I started to experience a sensation something like the phantom limb phenomenon: phantom wing syndrome. The feeling still spears me through from time to time when a raptor sweeps or soars just so, or the light illuminates their feathers just so. Suddenly I feel like lightning has pierced my heart and I feel like I'm remembering something: that's what's been always wrong; what happened to my wings? It feels the way the longing for homeland is described by expatriates - a piercing longing for the sky, being trapped down here much too far away, and the missing parts of me reaching for it, trying helplessly to fly.
I was reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. In it one of the characters dreams about thunderbirds, huge oversized dark birds with lightning in their wings. It reminded me of the stories I used to read when I was a kid. Fairy tales and folktales, with the usual mythical creatures. The ones that always caught my imagination were the giant birds. In the Arabian Nights there are stories about these giant eagles they call "rocs", and I would read those stories over and over again, picturing the awesome birds. They were one of my favorite races in The Hobbit, too. When we went to see the film version of The Return of the King, and the great eagles come at the end, I was swept away, I lost my breath, I had tears coming. I can't explain it really. It's like the way bagpipe music makes some people inexplicably emotional. Things with great wings make my heart leap and burn.
What am I writing this for? I don't really know. Just because today I was out in the oak woods and open meadows in autumn, and the hawks were winging in the wind, and I felt my heart growing huge within me. This is my land, and these are my people, the bird people. I am one of them.
I felt like I was walking in the landscape of my own heart. You see, the landscape of my heart is an oak woodland. One with long sweeping hills just green with early grass under a sky heavy with autumn. In the heights, the hills grow craggy with rock, high wild places where the winds dance and storms might kiss the earth with lightning. Down in the folds between the hills, there are secret places where shadows stay, doorways glimmer into the land, the hidden folk and the strange lights. Down in the shade running creeks stray between the rocks. In the day this landscape is all sky, a vault of sky warm with great birds, wing and sky and space. In the night the moon transforms it to a sea of shadows and silver, and the weird grace of the twisted oaks looms over you, and spirits walk. It is a whispering land. It could be anywhere, but it happens to be California.
On my way down there I watched a couple of red-tailed hawks winging from one tree to another. There are a lot of hawks about right now; it's migration season and they come through from everywhere north ahead of the winter. They were hawks like all the other hawks I see every day, but they showed me that the arch of wings, the red glow of tailfeathers, the quick sweep of flight still catches my heart like that. When I was a teenager I started to experience a sensation something like the phantom limb phenomenon: phantom wing syndrome. The feeling still spears me through from time to time when a raptor sweeps or soars just so, or the light illuminates their feathers just so. Suddenly I feel like lightning has pierced my heart and I feel like I'm remembering something: that's what's been always wrong; what happened to my wings? It feels the way the longing for homeland is described by expatriates - a piercing longing for the sky, being trapped down here much too far away, and the missing parts of me reaching for it, trying helplessly to fly.
I was reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. In it one of the characters dreams about thunderbirds, huge oversized dark birds with lightning in their wings. It reminded me of the stories I used to read when I was a kid. Fairy tales and folktales, with the usual mythical creatures. The ones that always caught my imagination were the giant birds. In the Arabian Nights there are stories about these giant eagles they call "rocs", and I would read those stories over and over again, picturing the awesome birds. They were one of my favorite races in The Hobbit, too. When we went to see the film version of The Return of the King, and the great eagles come at the end, I was swept away, I lost my breath, I had tears coming. I can't explain it really. It's like the way bagpipe music makes some people inexplicably emotional. Things with great wings make my heart leap and burn.
What am I writing this for? I don't really know. Just because today I was out in the oak woods and open meadows in autumn, and the hawks were winging in the wind, and I felt my heart growing huge within me. This is my land, and these are my people, the bird people. I am one of them.