Psychedelic Parrots and Confessions of a Nature Freak

Greetings from Domelandia,

The Viking and I were sitting in the airport recently reading a NY Times article about how many people, especially city dwellers, have no connection to the natural world. They don't really know (or care) where their food comes from, for example, or what gets sprayed on it while it's growing or right before they sink their teeth into it.

The extent of this disconnection amazes me. Strawberry Blonde daughter has a big garden and chickens. She is a generous woman and shares produce and eggs with people she knows. Her chickens lay green, blue, and tan-colored eggs. They eat table scraps and bugs and scratch around in the dirt. They live the way chickens were meant to live. The shells of the eggs are hard to crack, and the yolks are a deep yellow-orange with a rich, delicious flavor. She was dismayed to learn that one friend had thrown the eggs away because they weren't white and because they were hard to crack.

Besides trying to grow some clean food, I think the main reason we're here is because we need to feel connected to the wild world. I feel odd and out of sorts if I can't spend some time outside every day. Being outside makes me feel peaceful and centered. Maybe because the sky is huge. Trees, not buildings, crowd the landscape. The noises we hear come mostly from birds in the daytime and coyotes at night. There are millions of small lives being lived in each moment of every day. We're surrounded by Beauty. We are tuned in to the music of the spheres.

Before we came to the land, the Viking and I were frustrated city kids. Both of us had fathers whose lives had taken them far away from their farms. They talked to us about how wonderful life is in the country, how satisfying it is to provide food for one's family, how peaceful life can be away from the city. We dreamed of this life separately as children and then the stars aligned themselves so we could dream our life together. This was good, because neither of us would have been satisfied with suburbia. I think God has his quota of normal people, and then there's us.

We've learned how to live in relative harmony with Nature. I quit being afraid of bugs and spiders. It doesn't scare me when hummingbirds fly right up to my face to get a closer look at me. I enjoy getting to see them up close. From the beginning, we decided not to kill beneficial snakes (they eat rats and mice), though one bullsnake did a thoroughly believable imitation of a rattlesnake, and the Viking bought the act and killed it. (We had little kids, for gosh sakes)! We were both chagrined to find that we'd killed a 'good' snake. I sat down and cried. A few years back, the Viking decided that even rattlesnakes deserve to live. They get relocated far away from the house, because now we have grandkids, for gosh sakes.

Best of all, sometimes we get to catch glimpses of the Mystery. There is a pond on our place that holds runoff water, but for many months there is no water in it. Before the monsoons start in summer, the pond is baked dry. After the first pounding thunderstorm, the water seeps down into the dirt and the Spadefoot toads wake up. They start singing and swimming around in the muddy water and begin the happy job of making tadpoles. As the pond shrinks away in Autumn, the toads bury themselves and wait until it's time to start it all over again.

One of my favorite things is bird watching. I recognize most of the birds that come to our feeders, and look in the bird book to identify the ones I don't. I can identify some birds by their songs alone. I missed seeing the Evening Grosbeaks for a couple of years until my friend and fellow nature freak reminded me that some birds prefer to eat from perches and some like to eat their seeds on a flat spot. These Grosbeaks are one of my favorites and I nicknamed them The Psychedelic Parrots because they have large, fluorescent yellow-green bodies. You wouldn't believe a bird could look like that unless you could see it for yourself.

In true nature freak fashion, when they came back, it made my day.