Learning to Observe

Life couldn’t be more perfect: I’m comfortably propped up on a bench—with a backrest no less—watching the hillside at “my” Desert Botanical Garden!

 

 

The bees are buzzing all around the Chuparosa beside me with its intense yellow-rather-than-red-flowers.

A Curve-billed Thrasher is calling from the top of a Saguaro.

A Gila Woodpecker is carrying on somewhere behind me.

When younger, I could rarely just sit quietly like this. To still my mind—the incessant chatter—long enough to actually hear the buzz of the bees. I used to “bee” so “buzzed” myself that I couldn’t just hang out and take it all in . . .  To notice the clouds passing overhead. To be so in tune with practically every little nook and cranny of the hillside that I’d notice immediately if there was something up there—a Red-Tailed Hawk, a Roadrunner preparing for the brood

or a Western Screech Owl peeking out of a Saguaro

or the Round-Tailed Ground Squirrel sounding an alarm,

and to know the sound I’m hearing is the Ladderback Woodpecker’s squeak.

It’s so pleasant not to hear my mind-chatter. I can hear and see and notice now activities going on around me.

I distinctly and fondly remember the first time I started learning to observe things around me. It was the early 70s and I was with my friend Bob. We’d flown in a sea plane over to Lake Kathleen on Admiralty Island in Alaska.

We hiked out into the forest near the cabin; he with his camera and telephoto lens and I with binoculars. We sat—like I am now—only propped up against a tree, back to back.  He said, “Let’s just sit here quietly, start noticing, and see what we see.”

At first I thought, “This is crazy. There’s nothing out here. It’s too quiet. Nothing’s happening!” But, then, after awhile—once that mind-chatter started to relax—I became aware of hearing this incessant sound, but only intermittently. Then I noticed, right about that same time, there was movement too. Soon I realized that movement was a bird flying to the same area in a regular, yet intermittent pattern. I had noticed my first bird! Then I noticed there was something in a tree. Oh, my goodness! Could that be a nest? It was a Cardinal I later learned and she was taking food to her little brood. And I found it!