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apologia

September 27, 2022 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

Mourning Dove by Meera Subramanian

In homage to Barry Lopez and Amanda Stronza. And the flying creatures.

The familiar thud on the kitchen glass, but louder, heavier. When I look up, I still see small gray feathers suspended in the air. The stickers that help birds see the glass we like to look through, which I found through the American Bird Conservatory, have helped. The thuds have diminished this season, even as we’re in the thick of migration. I suspect that one of the raptors I’m so enamored of was in pursuit of this dove, frantic, flying fast, until the air became glass and she was downed. Other strikes this year were just stuns. Five minutes later, and the feathers lifted the life back into the sky, airborne again. Not this time.

In the summer of 2021, I had great plans to attend the The Art of Mending show at the Brick House Museum in Kennebunk, Maine. Covid thwarted the plans again and again. I watched the video of exhibition, glad for it, at least. The show was curated by Scott and Nancy Nash of the Illustration Institute / @illustration_institute. They’re friends. (Scott designed the gorgeous logo of RESP for us.) They’re the kind of friends you see once or twice a year and hours pass in an instant, so enlivened and wide-ranging is the conversation. They told us about the show when it was still in the planning stages. In these times when it can feel like too much is broken or breaking, they sought out those who were focused on repair.

woodcut of hands holding a dead bird

From Apologia by Barry Lopez, with woodcuts by Robin Eschner

One of the people they found was Dr. Amanda Stronza / @amandastronza, an anthropologist, conservationist and photographer in Austin, Texas whom they’d come across on Instagram when she started honoring the dead animals she discovered in her meanderings. She created memorials with the flowers, cones, seeds, leaves and whatever natural bits she found around the lifeless body. I took it today as inspiration. It seemed the right thing to do, when I lifted the dove from below the window and carried her to the edge of the yard.

Amanda, in turn, was inspired by Barry Lopez, who wrote about his tendency to stop when he sees roadkill and remove the body. “I carry each one away from the tarmac into a cover of grass or brush out of decency,” he writes in his short book Apologia. “Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?”

A journey fell apart here today. More than one. It’s likely there’s a mate nearby, a mourning dove in mourning, their broods fledged but their bond still strong. The hawks won’t come back for their quarry, but perhaps she’ll be sustenance for someone else, a scavenger furry or six-legged, the cycle continuing.

 

Filed Under: just another day Tagged With: Amanda Stronza, Barry Lopez, birds, death, Illustration Institute, mending, mourning

preserve what’s left

December 20, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Photos by Meera Subramanian

Lord God, it’s good to be home. The sky over Cape Cod is slack and grey, coughing up sleety rain that crunches and slides underfoot, but still there is a surge of delight, leaving the comfortable wood fire after wrapping too many gifts for too many Christmas revelers and heading out to meet Edie Vonnegut at the underpass (underpants! I think every single time I pass under it…and giggle). I was responding to her text:

I need a turpentine helper. Hold my ladder? 20 minutes max. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: just another day Tagged With: Art, cape cod, Edie Vonnegut, mural

oyster season opening day

November 4, 2018 By meerasub Leave a Comment

It’s an annual ritual, this first day of the oystering season. Some falls I’ve been off traveling, but I’m home this time, and get off a phone meeting just in time for the approach to dead low tide at 2:42pm. The downpour of earlier has lifted though gusts of wind are still wrenching colors from the trees. No, stay, just a little longer….! But to everything there is a season, and the leaves must go, but the oysters are now ours to take. I gathered my half bucket in about 3 minutes, barely moving my feet, they were so plentiful. And then I played around with video. Have a look…

 

 

Filed Under: just another day, video Tagged With: Barnstable Harbor, cape cod, food, gathering, oyster

to be a human body, in flint, mi

October 10, 2018 By meerasub Leave a Comment

We have a ten-minute break from talking about #climatechange at the #SEJ2018 conference in Flint, MI, and I walk outside seeking air. I find a heavy police presence, notice the Flint River is right there, wander over. See cops on the water’s edge, along with a scuba diver gearing up. I ask an older black man on my right what happened. He says a man drowned a few days ago and they’re looking for the body. A younger white man, tattoos on his neck, comes up on my left, and I ask him, too.

“It was my friend. Tripping on acid the other night and he thought he could walk on water.”

Oh.

He’d been walking on some object that was floating, and then he slipped in. Couldn’t get out. Vanished below the water.

“I’m sorry,” I say. He’s stoic.

“Just another one down in Flint,” he says.

“Why?” I ask him.

“I dunno, drugs,” he says, shrugs. I’m silent.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” I say again, putting my hand on his arm. I’m utterly lacking. He says thanks.

Back in I go to the old building that was once a Sheraton and now is a conference center just this side of shabby to talk about carbon and climate and journalism in a windowless room. A couple hours later I go back out. I take a photo of the river, lazy & brown, framed by trees whose leaves are blushing red. I leave out of the frame the medical examiner, bent over the body of the 32-year old man who, the tattooed man had told me, left behind a twin brother. Somewhere, the twin that remains is walking through the city, solo for the first time since the moment of conception. 

Filed Under: just another day, travels Tagged With: conference, death, drugs, Flint, Michigan, river, SEJ, walking on water

life large & small in Sewanee

July 9, 2017 By meerasub 2 Comments

This is my last Sunday in Sewanee. I fell asleep to the deafening sound of cicadas, a thrumming from the upper branches of the trees that surround the house. In spite of stories of escaped convicts, I can’t help but keep the sliding doors open so I can hear the sound. The land is alive with the cacophony. Bring it on. The more there is, the merrier I am. It was the brilliance behind Rachel Carson’s book title. Two words. No rambling subtitle telling all. Just two words, three syllables, that spoke volumes: Silent Spring. Give me noise from the natural world. Remind me, unceasingly, that there is life. Keep the silence at bay.

I’ve just finished reading [Read more…]

Filed Under: just another day, peregrinations, photography, travels Tagged With: Arli Hochschild, hawk, Helen Macdonald, James Agee, mushroom, Sewanee, silence Rachel Carson, South, Tennessee, USA, wildlife

perimeter perambulations

June 8, 2017 By meerasub 1 Comment

I always try to deny dawn. She slips under my eyelids and I reach for my eye mask, craving one more hour of unconsciousness. But I hear birds. Knew the light was illuminating the unexplored forest behind the house I now find myself living in. Discovered myself pulled up and into clothes warm enough for the cool morning, lacing up my hiking shoes before I quite realized it. My eyes don’t read so well in the morning anymore, but before I walk out the door, I squint at the map for the Perimeter Trail that loops around Sewanee, hugging the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and figure it should be due west of the house. Why walk along the lanes to find a proper entrance? I tuck my pants into my socks (the default fashion for us in Cape Cod’s tick-infested landscape. Are they here or am I liberated?) and cross the bit of backyard grass and enter the woods. Ten steps in, I flush a herd of white-tailed deer twenty strong, their cotton-burst butts bounding down the hill of the small valley, then up the other side. A hundred feet in and I find a brook I can step across with one stride. Twenty more paces and I’m on the trail. I take a right and go. It’s good to be back in church.

Just before I left Knight Science Journalism fellowship up in Cambridge, Maura O’Connor spoke to us about her new book on wayfinding. She explained the wonders of the hippocampus, how it grows when we challenge it by getting lost and then finding ourselves. I have not (blindly) used a GPS since then. I find a map, preferably on paper, and study it til I can put my finger on the spot where I am. I have loved to do this, always. It felt like a reward when the last page of a test in third grade was a map, the legend reliably there in the corner, a gift of a key that would unlock the mysteries some mapmaker made.Here on the edge of the plateau, there is the added orientation ease of heading towards the almost horizon that appears between the boles of upright trees, that indicates the drop-off of slope and the potential payoff of views. It’s why I went right. But I am distracted. A russula mushroom there in the duff. A widow-maker tree defying gravity until her uprooted roots decide to give out completely. Rounding a bend and finding myself below a sandstone overhang like a chiseled layer cake of rock, seeps staining spots dark, the smell of iron in the air. Did I gasp? I think I gasped. At a fork I go left, each rock outcropping greater than the last. I scramble up a rock to pass through a tunnel of stone and then the sound of water pulls me forward until I’m below the spray of Bridal Veil Falls, oxygenated, awake. [update: that wasn’t Bridal Veil, I discover later. Just some unnamed cascade. Just as lovely, if not as spectacular.]

How many landscapes can one love? How many humans? How many creatures, great and small? Imagine an infinite number and you are correct.

#Sewanee #hiking #waterfall #Tennessee @univofthesouth #schoolofletters #PerimeterTrail #getoutofbed

Filed Under: just another day, peregrinations, travels Tagged With: hiking, Nature, School of Letters, Sewanee, Tennessee, waterfall

practice resurrection

February 11, 2017 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

Home growing up and home now means inhabiting the edge dividing land and sea. We go there to eat sandwiches in the cab of the truck, sheltered from the icy wind that lifts the waters of Barnstable Harbor into whitecaps. Beyond the water, the dunes of Sandy Neck glisten white with snow, the Handy shack popping out in dark relief.  Before the first bite is taken, a flash of fur to the right. A fox, tiny, on the hunt, nose to snow, a few steps, another sniff, more steps, her footprints left behind in the layer of snow.

The markings join the other imprints of other creatures that have passed since the snow fell two nights ago, an extended exposure of all we never see.

She shifts to her right. She comes towards us, our truck gracing us a cloak of invisibility. She passes close by, and she’s gone.

It’s always a good time for Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” but seeing her reminds me of it. A good reminder. A necessary refresher. I reread the whole thing, and I’d say you should too, but here’s the last bit:

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

And I am humming “Ouroboros” by Casey Neill and focusing in on the word “practice,” an active word, ongoing, if there ever was one.

#CapeCod #fox #BarnstableHarbor #WendellBerry #poetry #winter #resist #persist

Filed Under: just another day Tagged With: Barnstable Harbor, cape cod, fox, poetry, Wendell Berry, winter

this is how it happens

April 10, 2014 By meerasub

2014.04.09-23

Lean back til you feel like you’ll tip. Take in the sky. Wasn’t it a steely grey just a minute ago, and now, now, blue like the eggs already in the nest, cluttered with clouds that have broken apart. Soon the marsh grass will erupt. An emerald carpet reaching up, breaking through the brackish phragmites, pounded flat in the last storm, but for now, a wash of pale shades.

2014.04.09-14

This is how it happens, falling in love with a place. [Read more…]

Filed Under: just another day Tagged With: cape cod, home, Nature

shutdown in southeast asia

February 13, 2014 By meerasub

2014.01.31-103

Last month I stepped out of India for a short bit, traveling to Bangkok and Siem Riep for a belated holiday break. On my last days in Thailand, the Bangkok Shutdown, with a power off icon as its symbol, took over parts of the city. I, meanwhile, had a more private shutdown, ignored politics, and sat on the banks of the Pravetburirom Canal, sketching and becoming entranced with the silent exchanges I had with the man/woman across the water. Every once in a while he/she would wave happily and I would wave happily back. And every day, as the sunset painted the sky, it was time for he/she to cuddle the cat. Next door, long bamboo poles held a wide fishing net that the family would drop into the lazy canal and periodically check for catch. A small fish, maybe two, were the slim harvest.

The protests continue, a month later, and no one much is paying attention, but journalist Richard Barrow is still madly tweeting about the happenings, and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Filed Under: just another day, travels Tagged With: Art, Bangkok, travels

a musical interlude

January 5, 2014 By meerasub

2014.01.03Chen-8

Some way or another, poet and friend  Vivek Narayanan and I figure we’re related. Some of his people hail from Besant Nagar in Chennai, as do mine, even sharing a street if not during the same decade in time. And his poetic alter-ego is a man named Mr. Subramanian. On a warm winter night we met up in Chennai with plans to see music. First we wandered on Eliots Beach, a place transformed with each return, more people, more glowing and squaking toys, more vendors selling roasted corn on the cob, rubbed with lime, chili and salt, which I have a serious weakness for. That kind is known as “normal,” though the new “American Sweet Corn” is also available. Oh, sorry, am I talking about food again? With my lips still numb from the chili and lime, Vivek led me into Spaces, a place I’ve walked by a hundred times yet never entered, though the granite posts that serve as a fence have always caught my eye. Inside, it is a space removed, the same peacefulness offered by the nearby Theosophical Society, where trees and the quiet space between them dominate, the sounds of the city set back, only the occasional roar of the Besant Nagar boys on their bikes speeding along the beach penetrated into our realm.

We were there to see other boys. More talented boys. Much more talented boys. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Fulbright, just another day, travels Tagged With: india, music

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