I wish I could write only about birds.

That I could go back to how it was, when my dreams held shards of words and images of flitting sparrows, dreams of opening eyes to the wonder of the natural world through birds. Dreams of articulating connections with the earth so deep I feel the words but cannot speak them. These dreams are skies filled with murmurations of starlings, clouds of thousands of birds, so thick that all I can do is stand and watch as they swarm around me in mesmerizingly complex shapes. A cohesive flock responding as one but with no leader, sinuously pulsating and shifting, no bird touching another, close enough that I can feel the air from their wings as they pass inches from my face.

I want to write about the dipper, the water ouzel, the small dark bird the color of wet slate, a bird that lives the streams of my heart-country here in the West. The dipper pliés along the stream’s edge, barely visible against the slick-black rocks. Waiting, dancing a ballet in time to the music of the stream, bended legs and wings suddenly propel the bird into the water where it dives, plucking insects from under rocks to feed its growing young. I watch dippers when I need assurance that the world is not as harsh as it appears to be. The truths of the individuals are the truths of the species, we tell ourselves. I cannot watch all dippers to know what they do, as much as I might wish to. My sample size is only a tiny fraction of the whole. It’s accepted that what we see in these few means something about them all. As an ornithologist I accept this to be true, but as a human I sometimes refuse the evidence.

A shorter version of this letter to the editor was published in the Autumn 2018 issue.

As I read Benjamin Rachlin’s “Prescription for Change,” I couldn’t help but think about how the environment, these places that so many of us love dearly, could be destroying us. Destroying us as we humans have worked so diligently to destroy them. Perhaps not destroying us, but disabling us.

Though disease is not equivalent with disability, and most especially disability is not equivalent with disease, this article prompted thoughts on the effects of the environment on the experience of disability.

People with disabilities have long known how the environment affects health, and how changing the environment can have positive, or negative, effects on their lives. When our environment becomes unfavorable to healthy living, we become impaired. This is the social model of disability: that impairment is a function of external characteristics—the physical environment, societal attitudes, systemic barriers—not individual ones. Someone who uses a wheelchair isn’t disabled because they cannot walk; they are disabled because they cannot live up to societal norms, which are designed, for the most part, by those who are able-bodied. When we are in environments that allow us to be healthy and to live as we choose, we are not impaired, no matter our physical or mental diagnoses.

And I thought, okay, okay, this is excellent.

I do not deserve more.

This is what you stash away and hope to remember when your time on the earth is just about over.”

 

— William Booth

Summer evening in Wilson, Wyoming.
August 2012.