Birds Art Life Death: The Art of Noticing the Small and Significant

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I knew at that moment I would not pursue private art lessons with this woman who, to be truthful, unnerved me with her quiet concentration and pin-straight posture.

I went home and pulled out my ancient brushes and pen nibs and old bottles of ink. I spent a little time sharpening my drawing pencils and cleaning my stubby grey erasers. I found a block of drawing paper. I looked at the sharpened pencils and for a moment they were arrows. They were arrows pointing to all the things that could not be captured with words, arrows pointing to other possible lives, potentialities, directions, even backtracks. I was waiting to be led by a line, in this case a pencil line.

In that moment of stillness, I realized I might also have been grieving the longer spans of time that allowed me to get a lift out of daily life.

As I sat with those arrows, as illness and caregiving further compressed my days into tiny snippets of moments, I had a growing feeling that my life, with its new shape and needs, required a different, less militant arrangement of time. What if I stopped fighting for the trance of long-form days, where I would be uninterrupted and ambitiously absorbed in a big project? What if I gave myself over to time’s dispersion? Could I value the fractured moments as something more than “sub-time” or lost time or broken time? Could I find a graceful way to work and be in the world that might still pull me up and forward?

I wish I could say that in the weeks and months to come I no longer felt at war with the world, but that was not the case. I am a self-employed writer. It is not easy to stop being unstoppable. (Just ask the pronghorn who continues to outrun the ghost of predators past.) I still tried to protect and fortify myself against invasion from time-looting bandits, still moved through the world as if I were perpetually on-task, trying to focus on nothing but what was in my own head and what I might make.

But I did begin to make peace with my fragments.

December (#ulink_184fd4d7-bb63-539f-a48f-8e03a2b8e57d)

LOVE (#ulink_184fd4d7-bb63-539f-a48f-8e03a2b8e57d)

On falling in love with birds and discovering other lessons in insignificance.