December 20, 2007 – Never was much into birds before, and I am still not sure what kind of birds I’m even looking at most of the time, but Annie is conscious of keeping the feeders full, as she is of taking care of all of the animals. And the feeders are right outside my study window. I’m realizing as time passes that the people who warned us some time ago that we were harming ourselves by becoming disconnected from the natural world, from myths, from animals and from the animal parts of ourselves, were prescient. I surely was disconnected, what some shrinks called existentially lonely.
  Bit by bit, year by year, beginning with the dogs, and moving ahead to sheep, donkeys, chickens, goats, cows, steers, and even birds, and walking two, three, four times a day in the deep woods, I am beginning to reconnect, perhaps even to heal, after years of alienation. I have a long ways to go. I am still tethered to a lot of old anxieties, responses, ways of thinking.
  Joseph Campbell writes that when one can feel oneself in relation to the universe in the same complete and natural way as that of the child with the mother, one is complete harmony and tune with the universe. Getting into harmony and tune with the universe and staying there is the principal function of mythology, like natural life, lost to most of us in our harried worlds. People who need as much customer service and technical support as we do are not in harmony with the universe, nor is our spiritual well being likely to grow.
  I am not, surely, in harmony with the world, not even close, not even living on this farm in the country with all of these animals. Still, I get a whiff of it sometimes. I’ve gotten interested in taking pictures of birds, which is difficult, for all sorts of technical, lighting and lens reasons. They are by definition flight, easily startled and always moving. This requires thought and patience and presence. A good lens too.
  I stood out in the cold and snow for nearly an hour before these birds would approach the feeder so close to me, and every time I lifted the camera, they took off. I talked to them, waited, watched and soon they got used to me and began to crowd around. A small process, which forced me to pay attention to creatures I usually don’t even notice. As I turned around, having gotten this picture, Mother the barn cat sprung out of the snow and snatched one of these birds right out of the air, and then ran off with it struggling in her mouth. Not for the first time, she had used me as bait.
  Harmony is definitely relative, and means different things to different creatures. And the farm is a teacher who never stops giving me lessons.