 In reading The Spell of the Sensuous,
I am re-learning wonder. Our back yard has become a wonderland, a
menagerie. I sit cross-legged on the floor of our Great Room with its
larger-than-life picture windows, drinking tea, a foot from a window I
have opened just enough to hear the sounds from the bird feeders just
three feet on the other side. It is pouring rain, and thunder is
rumbling across the sky. I am watching a grey squirrel and three black
squirrels, a chipmunk, a rabbit, a noisy group of six grackles, puffing
themselves up to twice normal size as they announce themselves at the
top of the feeder stand, two lovely epauletted redwing blackbirds, two
house finches, two mourning doves, a crow, a tiny nuthatch, a
slate-coloured junco, a cardinal, and a multitude of chickadees and
sparrows. They each respect and respond to the pecking order of their
own species, but seem to ignore the other species, getting within
inches of each other as they jockey for open perches on the feeders and
the prime space below the feeders where seed is scattered by those
above.
I am learning to hear not only the sounds of each species, but the
distinctive sounds of each creature. The cardinal is pecking for seeds
half-heartedly in the grass, well picked over by the earlier visitors
that morning. A few feet away, the junco digs vigourously in the grass,
unearthing seeds packed down over the winter. The cardinal watches,
head cocked, at this strange behaviour, but a few minutes later I see
it, too, scratching in the grass, comically, clumsily, successfully,
the morning's new lesson learned.
The grey squirrel and the black squirrels took only a few weeks to
master the squirrel baffle, but did so differently. The grey squirrel
leaps up on the baffle, wraps his paws around the feeder pole, and
steadies himself before pulling himself up onto the wooden feeeder. By
contrast, the black squirrels take a long running leap, clear the
baffle and scramble paw-over-paw to the top of the feeder pole, then
climb head first down the polycarbonate feeder, suspend themselves at
an angle from the top perch using their hind paws and scoop the
sunflower seeds from the lower openings into their mouths with their
front paws. Between them, they made short work of the earlier, plastic
feeders, the chewed pieces of which I still find all over the yard. But
now I watch one black squirrel spin his paw deliberately and repeatedly
clockwise on the lower perch, deftly unscrewing
the metal feeder insert from its polycarbonate cylindrical backing,
taking no more than a minute to wind the metal nut along the full two
inches of thread, and then prying out the metal insert and exposing the
now much-more-accessible seeds to himself, many of them tumbling out
onto the heads of his family waiting below. Yesterday I found three of
the four metal inserts on the ground, and the metal nuts scattered
nearby. I thought I had tightened the nuts well when I reassembled the
feeder last night, but obviously tonight I will need to use a wrench. I
still have it relatively easy -- my neighbour has had his feeder pole,
which he had triple-braced and pounded two feet into the ground,
systematically toppled by a pair of industrious raccoons in less than
fifteen minutes. And another neighbour's beautiful handmade wood feeder
was destroyed by a pair of clumsy, amorous, fifty-pound wild turkeys
which decided to perform their mating dance on top of it.
The thunder is loud, almost continuous, and somewhat alarming to me in
its volume, especially since under the low thick grey clouds no
lightning penetrates to warn of the next crash. But while the squirrels
don't seem to be crazy about the heavy rain, and scatter for cover in
the nearby spruce trees, the birds are oblivious to the bluster, and
one of the finches splashes joyously in a puddle. For crows, communal
bathing is a favoured social activity, accompanied by a variety of
ritual behaviours including end-over-end aerial manouevers, claws
locked together in a wondrous sky-dance.
When you can't imagine, you can do anything. You can end the world.
If we could imagine, really
imagine, what it was like to be a crow, soaring above the world,
care-free, astonishingly aware, senses alive in a way that we bored,
distracted, abstracted, sensually dulled humans can no longer conceive,
if we could put ourselves in the claws of a corvid, surrender to the
spell of the sensuous, we could never return to, never again tolerate,
the imaginative poverty, the prison that our culture has captured us
in. If we could free ourselves from that, if we could imagine such an
utterly different way to live, to really live, what could we do? What
would we do?
I wonder...
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
