A Grouse, a Fawn & a Question about Existence

I looked out my office window and caught sight of a male ruffed grouse in full display mode. His banded tail stood erect, a flat fan of autumn-hued feathers, perfectly crafted both to conceal and to attract, not unlike the fan of a geisha.

Glossy black feathers formed an areola around his speckled face, a mane of masculine glory that brought to mind tribal masks, Bob Marley’s braids, and mythological griffins. The grouse was a creature implausibly present, strutting one haughty step at a time across the leaf-strewn meadow, three or four females bobbing and weaving some twenty feet behind, courtiers at pains not to disturb the king. He had an unmistakably royal air, theatrical and contrived, every movement designed to convince the observer of his prowess, seduce her with his beauty.


I don’t know how the act was working on the hens who skittered and pecked in his wake—they seemed a bit distracted actually, multi-taskers obsessed with things-to-do—but I must say he had me at hello.

When he turned his head to one side with a dramatic jerk and puffed out his yellow-feathered chest, I couldn’t help but giggle at the come-hither bravado. Patrick Swayze dressed in fabulous, feather-boaed drag.

Workin’ that hat girlfriend, workin’ it hard.

It was the first time I’d seen such a display in real life with my own eyes, absent the photographic editing and sonorous voiceover of a nature show. It was the first time I’d had the opportunity to interpret the grouse on my terms, to make my own associations and draw my own conclusions. There was just the grouse, high-stepping across the meadow below the house, and me, watching. My vision un-blinkered, my mind blissfully un-led by any externally imposed breadcrumb trail of an expert notion of What’s Important to Notice About the Male Grouse.

Faced with new, unfiltered experience, my mind was free to decide for itself. My mind was free to think.

****

One afternoon this past mid-summer, our garden activities were interrupted by a horrible bleating scream, the truly scalp-tingling sound of infant terror. Cosmo had startled a very young fawn from the hiding place where it had been left by its mother, and the babe had run pell-mell into a remnant of rusty barbed wire fence at the forest edge. We, all of us, immediately dropped our tools and moved toward the screams, drawn by the alarm just as urgently as if the fawn had been a human child.
We quickly realized that we knew the fawn and her mother as “residents,” frequent visitors to the Grandmother apple tree, the Spring Road, and the copse of locust just beyond the garden enclosure. As we used my pruners to free the tiny struggling deer, I said aloud: What if the mother doesn’t return? I was near tears, heart-struck by the passionate wailing of the child for its mother. We watched the fawn, so spindly-legged and tiny, yet so fiercely strong, bound away, screaming “Mommy!” just as clearly as if it spoke English or we understood Cervidae, the family to which white-tailed deer belong.

The hollering and wailing of that fawn, so entirely “human” to my anthropocentric ears, forged a bond of commonality: our shared experience of the pain and suffering, the wacky, unpredictable terrors, the sudden, unanticipated mercies of life on earth.

“You are like me,” I thought, as the fawn disappeared into the forest and I knew without doubt that from a nearby yet expertly hidden location, the doe watched all that had occurred.

None of my reading about deer had previously elicited such a progression of thoughts. And nothing about my decade-long experience suffering under the persistence of their appetite for cultivated plants could dissuade me from such insight. The resident deer were no longer The Other. No longer The Enemy of All Things Agricultural. They were neighbors. They were…well, suffice it to say, I couldn’t wait to see if the doe and her fawn came back.

They did. They came back. Along with another doe and her twins. And a mixed-family group that includes a button buck. For four good months now, seldom is the morning that I look out the bedroom window and don’t see one or all of these groups moving up the spring road and across the slope of the ridge. In the early hours, they venture within just a very few feet of the house. The conifers planted along the crest of the ridge are a favorite spot for hanging out, bedding down, and uhm, fertilizing the rocky, hungry dirt. I look forward to the sight of them no less than to the sun itself, illuminating the winter-brown grasses with amber light.

It’s not that I’ve stopped believing in venison as one of the healthiest meats for the human body—and the environment. I haven’t. But I have begun to think about deer unfiltered by what I’d read or seen or even experienced myself in the past. The new experience with the trapped fawn tripped a re-set button of sorts.

Do the deer themselves feel it? Do they sense the change in my intention toward them? Who knows?
I do know this: They're comfortable here, increasingly so, and the sound of my voice does not frighten.

****

In this most consumerist of all seasons, a time during which I myself am very much engaged in peddling my wares, a question simply won't leave me alone: If we are but consumers of the things others tell us to want, but reflectors and repeaters of the information given to us, but conduits for others' preprocessed ideas do we, any of us, really exist?

To live is be a consumer of air, water, food, shelter. I consume, but not because I’m told I deserve a new handbag, or new shoes designed to make me appear prosperous to others. There’s little room for artifice in my world. I consume to live.

To think is be a processor of experience into thought, not a pipe for the transference of other people’s unmeasured ideas. I think because, frankly, I have to think in order to live.

I experience most of my life right here and now, unscripted, unfiltered. No sonorous voiceover, no photographer’s edit to guide me to what’s important. No utility company. I, uhm, pretty much have to figure out what's important for myself. Right now.

Rene Descartes said: I think, therefore I am.

It’s a philosophical assertion much interpreted and debated, to be sure. I prefer to take it at face value.
How does one know who she is until she thinks for herself?

Certainly, she may well prosper in the purely physical realm through the abject adherence to others' ideas regarding what she may or may not think and what she may or may not adorn herself with to reveal her value. Surely, she may prosper as a physical body with no original thought at all. But what of her mind?

Where does the Self that importunes the mind for existence on its own merits, entirely separate from its ability to purchase the newest technology or rubber-stamp the latest social-theology—where does that Self reside?

Mental freedom is perhaps the most significant blessing of life in the wilderness.

But such a blessing is bestowed, much like God’s upon Abraham (or Gene Roddenberry’s upon Captain Kirk) with a corollary curse: to boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before, regardless how manifestly difficult, absurd or lonely the journey.

To live in the wilderness, in 2011, is to plant, pick and snowplow in the face of a culture that says: Oh, for pity’s sake, what are you doing? What's the point? Follow me.

It’s all online. All downloadable. Google-YouTube-able. Easily answerable. Poll-able. Wikipedia-ready. You don’t need to experience in the flesh what you can experience, virtually. It’s more efficient this way, life as the highlights reel of a really intriguing movie. Who cares if the thoughts aren’t your original thoughts, the conclusions aren’t those you were present to make? They’re well-vetted, they’re probably the majority, they’re the ones you would have made yourself, surely, most certainly.
Follow me.

Really? I dunno. Somehow, I remain unconvinced.

I never saw a nature show that came anywhere close to nature reality.

I never valued for long any thought I didn’t earn through living.

I'm the kind of fool who falls in love with a flannel shirt and wears the sucker 'til it comes apart at the seams.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com

Self Reliance

When I was 16, I fell in love with Ralph Waldo Emerson.


You think I’m kidding? Oh no. I would never speak lightly of such passion. Yes, it was 1982. And yes, Ralph died in 1882, but no matter. He had that je ne se quoi that makes a long-dead philosopher irresistible to a teenage girl. Or, at least this teenage girl. I appreciated Henry David Thoreau, but Emerson’s bombast I found, in retrospect, frankly sexier.

In Humanities class, junior year, when I learned that Socrates had said “The unexamined life is not worth living” my god did I love it. I wasn’t crazy after all! These were the days of Deep Earnestness, when I carried a journal with me everywhere. When I believed there was nothing that occurred that wasn’t worth recording and analyzing. Evenso, it was Emerson, my Ralph Waldo, who kicked it up a notch.

Emerson said the things I barely dared think.

Emerson said: “Know thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

Emerson said: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

Emerson said: “Whoso would be a man would be a nonconformist.”

I was certain he intended “man” to be inclusive of “woman.” After all, he hung out with Emily Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott. Wherever Ralph wrote “man” I assumed him to be speaking, unequivocally, to me.

And my favorite essay, the essay that spoke most clearly to the girl who was trying to rationalize the impossibly conflicted external realities of her life with a blooming sense of iconoclasm, was Self Reliance.

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

Twenty-nine years later, I can’t help but wonder what ol’ RWE would say if he could see me now.
If we met over tea (a nice aromatic blend of nettle, yarrow, and mullein perhaps) would he give me a “yes, but” when I quoted his 170-year-old words back to him? Perhaps he’d argue that he was, indeed, promulgating an interesting philosophical argument, an intellectual entertainment of the type highly valued in 1841, but that he certainly never intended anyone to attempt to live it. Let alone a woman on an Allegheny mountaintop in 2011. A woman struggling with all the practical survival issues well-known to the 19th century, coupled with something nearly as insidious and unstoppable as a plague of small pox: The expectation of electrons-on-demand, of pumps that move water at the flip of a distant switch, of worldwide communication at the click of a piece of plastic called a mouse.
I imagine his bemusement at the peculiarities of my plight. But even more compelling, I feel his nodding recognition of my struggle with Expectation and its corrosive impact on my sense of Self, even as he lambasts me for it.

I imagine him saying something along the lines of: “The man who stakes claim to a mountaintop and endeavors to carve his life upon that rocky earth would do better to build an Ark and wait for the Flood than expect the solace of regular society to carry him away from the Self he seeks. The valley and the ridge are joined by the land between them, each rod of which, once advanced, cannot be foresworn save by the liar or the fool.”

With all due apologies to RWE, I do imagine him “getting” me.

I imagine him prefiguring the best of the existential authors of the 20th century, when he’d say to me: “Once your Self has claimed its authentic home, celebrate, grieve not. Resist the siren call of conventionality and the safer drudgery it promises. Your trust in conformance is what restrains you, it is the barometer of your Self-defined failure. Leave it behind, as the hair your mother cut from your brow so you might see.”

Unless there really is some chamber of the afterworld where Meeting of Minds (the 1970’s-era PBS series hosted by Steve Allen) actually occurs, I’ll likely never know what words RWE would say to me personally.

I do know that I’d likely not be here today, at Brightside, if I’d never heard the words he wrote way back then. Words that continue to bolster and cajole me even as they irk me. “Yes, but” I want to argue. I want to give him a personal laundry list of grievances. A list so long he’d be moved to…what? Applying a gold star for “non-conformancy” to my furrowed forehead?

Much more realistically, I imagine his hawk-nosed countenance peering at me (not unkindly, oh, not at all unkindly), and after hearing all my woes and sorrows, simply inquiring this: "Who do you wish to be? Your Self? The woman who has endured great suffering to be here, and who is even now carving a life on this rocky earth. Or the woman who now believes she’d been better off never having taken the first journey up this mountain because, well, to be honest, up here it is really difficult attempting to conform to all the expectations of 21st century life?"

“Who are You?” I hear him ask. (Beyond RWE’s voice, I hear the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the Meeting of Minds parlor. Steve Allen looks so snappy in his ascot. Our tea has grown somewhat cold.)

RWE leans back and crosses his legs. He knows I know that he knows I know.

We smile at each other over our tea cups.

One inescapable truth of my life is this: Growing up in post-assassination Memphis with parents who established a hazardous waste recycling business in the heart of the African-American ghetto, I learned early not to define what I was capable of. Which is to say, I learned not to put an arbitrary limit on it. Limits didn’t matter. Coping with the situation was what mattered. Enduring was what mattered.

This is not to say that everything I’ve endeavored since has been a roaring success. Far from it. It is to say I’ve rarely shied from the attempt.

If you’ve learned early on that there’s no point in limiting what you can endure, then there’s little sense in limiting what you can attempt.

Quite literally, trite as it might sound, how does one know what it is she can do until she has tried? And this 45-year-old woman, like that girl who first read RWE 29 years ago, sees little point in living life sheltered from the discovery of what it is that she can do. (Which is not the same thing as saying I don’t have my dead-dog-discouraged moments, or long days and weeks of doubt.)

I also know something else, taught me with incomparable efficiency by my childhood in Memphis, and my later tuition under RWE. And it is this: There is no certificate of competency, no graduate degree, no class grade that would somehow qualify me for living here, at Brightside. No imprimature from an outside authority that would give me special dispensation in dealing with the weather or the wilderness or the wild animals or the manifest difficulties of off-grid life. To be sure, various societal authorities have endowed me with their seal of approval, but unless backed by my personal integrity and my steadfast belief in my ability to see it through, come whatever is required, of what worth is such a seal?

It is worth nothing. When snow is falling and the generator stops working and there is no communication with the outside world short of 15 mile drive, no diploma is gonna bail me out. And no government agency or local utility either. I’m on my own. Left to my own wits, my own, perhaps previously untapped capacities. Capacities I must be willing and ready to tap. And fearlessly so.
This was RWE’s most important point.

What society authorizes you to do is one thing. Societal authorization creates a feedback mechanism which, today, I would call co-dependence. (RWE might call it conformance.) In society, you can only do what you do if you’re authorized a priori from an external authority. Such authority must continue to support you in what you do in order for you to continue to believe you are worthy and capable of doing it.

What you can do by pushing yourself to find out if you, indeed, can do it (regardless what all those outside authorities might say) creates a different sort of feedback loop.

I really don’t think RWE would mind if I call it Self Reliance.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com