Perspectance

This is personal and I’m not sure where the autopoiesis will go, but I’m listening to the Heart today. Read on only if you are interested in wading through my reflection pool or connecting with me through mindshares.

I’ve been gone a long time on a professional journey and have fallen somewhat ill. Nature-deficit disorder might be the dominant problem. Richard Louv is popularizing the term with his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder:

Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses (p. 30).

This midMayDay I’ve taken my first emergent personal time off to BE outside in the arms of the Mother, doing whatever She leads me to do with Her in my own back yard.

*I use this term a lot. It came to me from Jami Sieber’s song, Arms of the Mother on her album Hidden Sky, which I listen to almost every morning. Wanna listen?


Hidden Sky by Jami Sieber
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November 16, Sunday morning fog fighting sun, five mile walk, down to Canyon Park Starbucks and then on to the little wilderness behind the business park down 228th. Way at the beginning, blocks from my house, the 9:30 LBFJ birds are playing after breakfast. So too the Crow trios on telephone wires. I’ve learned to hear these robins, chickadees, and juncos. Is that the peer peer peer of a Redtail in the distance? The Cok-a-ree of blackbirds? But we’re miles from a marsh yet. (more…)

Saturday our bird class toured Whidbey Island. Armed with some old Binuxit 8×30 E.Leitz Wetzlar Coast Guard binoculars, a laminated chart of water birds, and a recording Ipod, I headed for the Muliteo ferry to meet the group.

Saturday, October 11 – Field Notes

enroute: Western Tanager? A yellow bird with black wing, tail and head (from underneath). It came out of a fir and pine forest at the edge of a clearing and
strongly paddled the air across the highway enroute to our first stop.

1. Crockett Lake @9:30 AM Sunny, breezy. Some beach cleanup group parked and let some spaniels run after a bit, but that did not seem to affect our sightings.
Bald Eagle - sitting atop phone pole in the parking area. From that perch, he was able to survey the vast saltmarsh, lake and Admiralty Bay. He flew off in the direction of the lake. Not bad for first spotting. Sue’s Swarovsky scope allowed us to see every feather. A few minutes later up the road, we watched it clean blood off it’s bill from eating.
Great Blue Heron, at least one big one in the marsh.
2-3 other herons, Sue says likely Great Blue, but we wonder if it is a Little Blue or a Green Heron. Seemed smaller in comparison, but Sue says to notice the size compared to stop sign. The two in dispute were a little bigger than the sign. One sat for a long while on a fencepost, the others hunted in the grass. In the scope, we see green on the head of one, another had more of a whitish head, and to me at least two of the herons looked much smaller than the magnificent Great Blue that took off flying.
Rough-legged Hawk – Saw two of these hunting over the marsh. Got a great look underneath: One large checker under each wing. White band under black-tipped tail, white speckles on wing w/ black tips. As it lit and sat on a post, we observed it was greenish around bill, had white shin feathers blowing in the breeze, and as it spun around and stretched, showed the tail barred on top.

2. Keystone Ferry? Though this was not a stop on the map; I am going from memory days later, was driving follow the leader and one of my notes says Pt. Townsend ferry, but that doesn’t make sense. There was a little ferry dock in a tiny bay I think. (I need to keep better notes!) First we looked out to an old large abandoned pier in the water where dozens of cormorants were gathered.
Double Crested Cormorant – sunning in characteristic wing-drying position was markedly larger than the others and the scope revealed yellow near the bill.
Pelagic Cormorant - was not listed on my chart, but the Brandt’s was. Brandt’s not enough smaller however. In the guidebook, we see the pelagics do live here and are enough smaller.
3 diving ducks – Harlequins according to id from classmates and Sue who says this is one of her favorites that she sees on Greenlake a lot. Had red on side and a “fake white eye spot”, grey neck. One was a female.
Common Loon – This was a little tricky because the bold markings were gone as the bird was mottled w/ gray (starting to get winter color), but still had the charateristic neckband. I thought it seemed smaller than 23 inches though.
Marbled Murrelet? – This was my favorite sighting of the day because the bird could have been so many things. I’ve always wanted to see one of these mysterious creatures who nests far inland in old-growth forests and, Sue thinks, walks to the sea! I sketched the little mottled gray squatty bird floating in the protected cove near the ferry dock. It’s bill seemed to me to distinguish it from a Cassin’s Auklet which is what I first thought from its gray color on my chart. I don’t think everyone was conclusive on this id though.

3. Ft. Casey State Park – cold, sunny, very windy
We gave up looking out to sea, too windy, just lots of gulls. The group fans out. Sue and I go up into the woods where there is lots of bird sound and flitty action high in the trees. I record several things onto my Ipod- later will link to what I saw and have learned to identify:
Red-breasted nuthatch – “Yank, yank, yank” Sue first identified the call, and a little later I saw three or four crawling and chasing each other down the bare part of a fir tree.
Yellow-shafted Flicker – heard all over the forest before seeing red and black moon swooping tree to tree.
Chestnut-backed chickadees – brown patch on the side in back of of black head, soft gray bodies, and Mountain chickadees (no brown) cheerful and busy at many levels of the conifers.
Juncos – everywhere in thickets of staghorn sumac “Eh, eh, eh, eh”
Sue says she thought she heard the high-pitched sqeak of a Kinglet.

4. Ebey’s Landing (Again, I think this is where we stopped.) My yellow index card-sized postIts each have sketches and marking notes about birds, but I forgot to note where they were. Sue had provided us with maps and marked stops, so I had thought it would be easy to remember where things were by the stack order of my postIts. Not so. Next time!
Surf Scoters – many swimming together offshore seen in scope with yellow, black and red bills
Horned Grebes – two swimming offshore looked like Western with black and white neck, but squattier and much smaller than the Western. Scope showed red eye on white winter feather which distinguised it from the Eared Grebe.

5. Coupeville, lunch stop
Janet and I headed for a warm coffee and sat in the sun on a bench outside the bakery eating our lunch for a long time, learning more about her work. With only 15 minutes left, we jaunted up to the public path and saw a bald eagle in flight (Kevin had reported it flying right over him as he napped), and a juvenile bald eagle also. At first, we thought it was a very big hawk, but we noted the similar broad wing shape and size since it was flying near the other eagle. I sketched the long white streak pattern of the under wings which matched the picture in the Peterson field guide back at the car.
Belted Kingfisher - Sighted from the pier in Coupeville, we saw it catch a little fish after it dove off a tall boulder next to the water. Flew back to some dead branches on the beach.
White Winged Scoters - hundreds it seemed flew into the bay near the dozens of commercial mussel piers which we were able to see up the hill from downtown Coupeville. They were mixed in with surf scoters too, which was easy to tell once Sue set up her scope under the Madrona tree. Eyes of the white-winged are red on a white patch.

6. Kennedy’s Lagoon?
Another Kingfisher, but this one seemed noticably larger to me. Wonder if this is because we watched from a closer distance or are there two kinds? It was fishing in the lagoon on one side of the road. There was the water of Penn Cove across the highway with more scoters I think. Missing notes for this stop.
Ring-necked Pheasant – Right before the stop sign to turn left onto the big highway (20?), there were hunters in the farm fields to the left and we were noticing how much the high grass must shelter other things hunters would want. Just then, a magnificient pheasant climbed p out of the ditch. The other cars were already in the intersection, so they missed it.

7. Partridge Point
Looking west over the big water, we spotted more grebes. With just binoculars I could tell they were the squattier ones again, but it took Sue’s scope to see the red eye on white and confirm Horned Grebe again.

8. Dugualla Bay, north of Oak Harbor
I think because it was getting late, we skipped Sunset Beach, driving on through Oak Harbor. I think it was here we saw some ducks that were hard to identify. Conclusion of group (mostly w/ Sue’s prompting) that they were American Widgeons. They had a white head stripe (on top)and top of neck and throat, lightly ruddy underneath the body. There were different ages and sexes too which mottled things up a bit, but I guess the white top of head was the key marker for this kind of duck.
Kildeer - two or three or 4 brown and white flapping flags swooped right over and past us in tight formation, shish kabob legs lighting so gingerly on the cobbled beach.

Home again…About 4ish, the group split up with the Seattle group friving up to Deception Pass for one last stop before heading home via I-5. As I didn’t need to transport anyone back, and because I had driven that long stretch of freeway twice the past week, I decided to feast my eyes on more of the pastoral island scene and catch the ferry home. It would have been faster too had I not arrived at the ferry just as it was pulling away. The day had been relaxing for me and I melted away to gull music as I waited, glad to have spent a day this way and looking forward to more bird reading.

Field guides

– Although I own a number of field guides, Sue had said something in class about how birders often don’t do a lot of guidebook searching while in the field. The readings were also indicating much more emphasis on recording observed detail rather than dissecting the subject with a book. But because I have tended to look out at the water and mentally categorize everything simply as either gull or duck, I wanted at least a cheatsheet of hints. Mac’s Field Guide to Northwest Coastal Water Birds was a great introduction for me. I would know that these birds actually live where I would be looking and I would not get lost in pages of irrelevant detail. Sue brought plenty of guidebooks too, and we spent a lot of time at each stop looking birds up in them. While my cheatsheet was helpful to get oriented to at least the type of bird, and others in the group used it too, there was a point when I was confusing a Common Loon (obvious to Sue) with possibly a Pigeon Guillemont. Sue suggested I needed to stop referring to my chart so much and get into the guidebooks to distinguish features. The books are really necessary because identification of species is complicated by birds having various markings at different seasons and ages of the bird’s life.

My back yard is full of birds! It always has been, but I have given the backyard bird society minimal attention over the years. As my vocational mind has evolved in virtual worlds with virtual tools, my treasured relationship with the natural world has suffered. I only know the names of a few birds who visit my feeder, and fewer of their voices. This is one reason I finally chose to take a birding class at Antioch University (alumni have lifetime audit privileges!).

Professor Sue Woerhlin’s “Birding in the Imagination and the Field” is a combination of face to face meetings where we discuss lots of readings, take several day-long, guided group field trips, and work on really cool personal birdwatching and field journalling assignments. Sue is also great model of constructivist teaching and was one of the first people to help me assemble a vocabulary of participatory design – another of her subjects.

Always one to dovetail my experiences (no pun intended) and make a learning adventure out of everything, I’m planning to blog about this experience. Why? Because I need a creative outlet and the possibility of connection with others interested in ideas. I am still new to blogging, new to an online identity, and insatiable in my appetite for learning, technology, ideas, and the natural world. Playing with all of it in a blog will help integrate the pieces of me.

Did you know that there are island vortexes of garbage out at sea? When my family brought this up over dinner last night, besides being fascinated, it struck a nerve. I sensed it has something to do with my absence in the online communities I’ve ventured into, maybe even my inability to write this summer. They said it was like the Sargasso Sea, only with garbage instead of plants. Hmmm…. (more…)

I’m reading The End of Theory, a thesis article written by Chris Anderson editor of my favorite magazine, Wired. Loving it. Identifying with the principles; like finally, something written to my sense-making style of living and being. Citing Google’s search engine technology, Anderson asserts that the applied mathematics of data analysis provides a more complete construction of the way things are than tedious empirical experimentation.

I am not done reading yet, but suspect we live our lives empirically testing out what the data of a trillion attention points seems to show. “All models are wrong”, and “Out with every model of human behavior from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology.” These challenges to sacred ologies draw me further into Hansel and Gretel’s woods.

“Data without a model is just noise”. Righto! We go through life with models our empirical little selves have tried, tested, and concluded into belief systems. We have models of the way the world is. Then along comes data, which must be disequilibrious to even attract our attention. Aha, I propose, before I finish reading the article, that the DATA is getting our attention somehow because of its aberational qualities – and we are compelled to integrate the information – make sense of it. Maybe this is just the way I work. But what if it is the way most of us work and construct realities. What then are the implications?

I hold dear somehow nevertheless draw me in.

I’ve started some domains, some different blogs, and now struggle with focus. I feel like I want to write, but to myself, and that is too much trouble outside of my paper journal. Real blogging, on a topic, for people who might benefit by stopping by is another kind of writing I want to do, but I am struggling with focus.

Lorelle on WordPress has some great encouragement and guidance:

The best part of blogging with a narrow blog focus is that I have less self doubt about my abilities and my ability to blog. I know my subject matter. I know it from a variety of perspectives. I’m constantly challenging my information, resources, sources, and expertise as I write on the subject from different angles and points of view.

My problem is that looking at everything, well maybe not everything, but so many different things, about the way we learn to “be” in the world – is a broad, not focused topic. Actually, that right there is a more focused topic than I had arrived at ever before. Lorelle is inspiring though, and I want to work more with her concept of pulling a thread:

As you consider your blog’s focus, I want you to look at your entire life, all the threads that make up the tapestry of your life. They all make you, the resulting “fabric” of your life as it is right now. On that fabric you will find colors and patterns repeating themselves. Loudly. Vibrantly. Or possibly they are subtle and almost invisible, but when you look with fresh eyes, they start to stand out from the rest of the threads.

Lorelle prompts me to look for passion threads that “repeat themselves throughout the fabric” of my life and how “that could define the blog’s focus and content.” I’ve been doing a lot of this, and am choosing now to post publicly as a matter of showing myself progress toward this goal. In some small way, it’s holding myself accountable to write.

I’m excited about Ning Networks! I’m excited about the level of help available among people who’ve started social networks and landed there with their questions and answers, and that I have learned the power of social learning. I’m excited that Ning makes it easy to pull a site and group together with little or no technical expertise, then turn over keys to the back door, basement, closets, and attic with the click of a button. There is so much I want to explore and do with our new site, and I just expect to be able to do it with a few searches of the Ning resources. 

Why was I writing this again? Oh yes, because the Ning page provoked it! So there’s this Primer….written by developer Diego, and I can see that if I read all the way through it, maybe a few times, I will LEARN all kinds of stuff about not only Ning, but the principles of database theory in general. This excites me so much I had to stop reading and capture what is happening here.

OK, my Mac is back, and I’m gradually re-acculturating myself to getting work done on it. I was a NooB to Macs during the three months before my crash, just long enough to store up plenty of works in progress – including ideas to blather about. 

So in classic SueW style, on my MacBook Pro desktop, I have stickies open on 5 projects, my twitter tape running on the right (hoping for happenstance helps), Dreamweaver open to edit my homepage, edits for a friend’s doc in Word, my iGoogle collection (did I have an appointment today?), Horde email up on my server, Skype, the wikispace I’m moving stuff from over into a spanking new Ning network for WAM, and finally…..the Ning Developers Network page on The Ning content Store - which I was in the middle of making sense of when starting this post.

Finally, a container. Now when I get my laptop back, if anything was recovered from my hard drive, I’ll copy some posts here.