Waiting for The Odyssey

These past couple of months I’ve been re-reading The Odyssey trying a bunch of versions - the Fagles, Emily Wilson, Lattimore (the version I am quoting from) - all in anticipation of the Christopher Nolan movie which seems to have excited historians, philosophers, literary types and movie buffs alike. Homer and Nolan seem like a match made in heaven - non linear narration, blurred lines between myth and reality, and family relationships at the core of a story. Inception one could argue was a practice run for the real deal -a father trying to get back to his kids and his home battling imagined and real threats. Wait, wasn't that also Interstellar or The Prestige. And here you thought Chris Nolan was an original (jk)!  For that matter, it is not an exaggeration to say that most of the stories in the Western world spring from Homer! I am super excited to see the movie this weekend and hope it lives up to all my super-charged expectations. 

I didn’t encounter The Odyssey in school in India. It was not mandatory reading, but the key plot points have always been in my consciousness and I can’t trace the source (most likely my dad). I came to The Odyssey by way of James Joyce. I had wanted to read Ulysses for a long time and realized knowing The Odyssey would make it a tiny bit easier. Back then, the focus was always on the middle bit - Odysseus’ adventures - Cyclops, Circe, Hades, Sirens, Scylla & Charybdis, Helios and Calypso. The Telemachus and Penelope books were the boring bits to get through to get to the adventure! It took me nearly 20 years to finish Ulysses and at times I thought having read The Odyssey once was enough.

Then my daughter had to read the Emily Wilson’s version in 9th grade and I read it again alongside her. Suddenly I found my lens had changed. If we set aside the questions of history, was Homer real, and the patriarchy that is inherent in any epic, it is at its core a darn good tale raising serious questions on who is a hero, what does it mean to grow as a human being, the importance of family, doing right by others, what it means to be loyal, who bears the consequences of war and violence and perhaps most important of all - how do you face whatever fate/gods/ life throws at you and keep going! No wonder Joseph Campbell uses Homer to illuminate the Hero’s journey and the spiritual implications of such a journey.

One of my favorite books in the poem is Book V. When Calypso offers him immortality and a life of unending pleasure and Odysseus turns it down, that’s when he shows what it truly means to be a human. By the time Calypso makes him the offer our hero has dealt with the horrors of cyclops, losing all his companions and has braved the wine-dark sea for weeks, but he still says 

“if some god batters me far out on the wine-blue water, I will endure it, keeping a stubborn spirit inside me, for already I have suffered much and done much hard work on the waves and in the fighting. So let this adventure follow.” 

To view life with all its ups and downs as an adventure is a philosophical aspiration for most humans. And he turns down Calypso even though his Penelope is not ageless or not nearly as beautiful for I like to believe that their companionship meant something more to him. She is as canny as him and has shown remarkable endurance and ability to face whatever the fates threw at her. In that sense Homer shows us a glimpse of what a well matched couple could look like (again if I ignore the patriarchy).

He is not a hero like Achilles of the Iliad whose death caused immense sorrow and whose name remains on everyone’s lips long after his death for his bravery. But once again Homer throws us a curve ball in Book XI when Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles in the land of Hades. When reminded of his honor Achilles says 

“I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.” 

How are we to interpret this? Is Achilles saying glory means nothing? All of one’s achievements pale in comparison to spending time with your family? Is that just me reading into the poem based on my own life stage or is this a foil that Homer inserted for a world obsessed with achievements and glory? But this is not the only instance that Homer reiterates that heroes are over rated. When Odysseus was “No Man” he survived the Cyclops but when his pride made him reveal his name he brought death and destruction to his companions and immense misery to himself. A lesson that he learned the hard way that when he re-enters Ithaca he enters as a beggar and endures taunts and insults without revealing his name. 

I can go on and on as each time I read the poem I am finding something new to focus on. In the last reading I was touched by Telemachus calling the lowly yet honorable swineherd Eumaios as Father even as his own Father was standing next to him! A nod to non-biological families and relations. I hadn't paid much attention to Argos the dog when I first read the poem but now that I’ve experienced the love of a dog through one of our friends’ the episode was just moving (it better be there in the movie Mr.Nolan!). 

But the thing I’ve been pondering the most about this past week is that the poem does not give a satisfying end. It doesn’t say Odysseus comes back to Ithaca after 20 years and reunites with his family braving all odds and they lived happily ever after. The End!  That is the version we choose to remember but that’s not the ending that Homer intended. We are reminded that he has to undertake one more journey to many cities until he meets a man who knows nothing of the sea so he can finally appease Poseidon and meet his end in an “unwarlike way” in old age. No rest for the wicked (If you want to know more about the crazy ending look up Telegony). Perhaps some lives are not easily summed up, some battles are never truly won and some sequels are not meant to be.

At the end of the day it is just a story and what one takes from it is entirely up to each of us. But some stories have staying power because they have something timeless about them and this is perhaps one of the most immortal stories of Western civilization. The last adaptation of The Odyssey that I thoroughly enjoyed was O Brother, Where Art Thou by the Coen brothers. This one by Chris Nolan has all the makings of a true epic and unlike Odysseus I can’t wait! 

Close Encounters of the Swamp Kind

"Dreary and wearisome. Cold, clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long forgotten summers." This was the landscape of the Dead Marshes that Frodo and Samwise had to pass through on their way to Mordor. A place where Frodo encountered the "candles of corpses" in Middle Earth.  From the moors of Wuthering Heights to the dangerous Grimpen Mire of The Hound of Baskervilles, marshes have always had a bad rap and have often been used to create "atmosphere" for fantastical stories. Re-christened as "wetlands" they are being rehabilitated into the human imagination. As the writer Tom Blass says "wetland is a good, clean healthful post-superstitious word. But a more archaic taxonomy using marsh, bog, fen fenny and quagmire says more about our experience of such places before ready access to insect repellent, boardwalks and nature trails robbed them of their mystery." 

These meditations on wetlands are a  result of my visit to the Kendal Frost Marsh yesterday as part of the annual Love Your Wetlands Day (LYWD). As I sat down to record my oral history at the event I was suddenly overcome with nostalgia. This was my 12th LYWD and the third without my daughter who now goes to college in the North East. She fell in love with the marsh when she was 8. Wearing the long boots, crisscrossing the water channels, and letting her legs sink into the mud, she thought it was the greatest adventure! Over time she became a docent for the marsh and before leaving home led tours of the marsh during LYWD. As I recounted this story for the oral history project I realized how often the cultural and spiritual value of places is overlooked and I got a momentary insight into the long association the local Kumeyaay have had with these wetlands and how important their stories are. At the event we also heard from a young researcher studying the Tijuana estuary. She talked about how swamps in the South East have sheltered her ancestors as they escaped from slavery and were seen as a place of refuge from the so called civilized world.

However, from our first President to our current one, from Julius Caesar to Saddam Hussein men have always wanted to "drain the swamp", many literally and some figuratively.  As Blass says, there is always someone with a scheme to "drain it, pluck from it its riches and return it to the world settled, compliant, well ordered (or non existent)." It is no wonder that 90% of wetlands have been lost in the last 300 years, 35% since 1970 (most numbers I quote are from Parth Dasgupta's Economics of Biodiversity). 

Wetlands do wonders for the biosphere. In broad terms they offer three distinct services:

1. Provisioning Goods - things we get from the ecosystem. Could be food, wood, medicinal plants etc
2. Maintenance & Regulating Services - controlling erosion, flood management, carbon sequestration
3. Cultural Services - spiritual connection to the land, recreation opportunities, social relationships

These things are intricately bound to each other and have real impact on our lives. Dasgupta notes that the wetlands reduced flood damages from Hurricane Sandy by $625M. It is estimated that the insurance industry could save $52B a year through reduced losses by protecting coastal wetlands. Nature based infrastructure projects are also estimated to create an additional 4 million jobs by 2030. While quantifying the positive impact of wetlands and other ecosystems can help us value the "natural capital" Dasgupta warns that there are critical differences between natural and produced capital. 

 Damages to ecosystem can be irreversible, they can collapse abruptly, and it is very hard to replicate a degraded ecosystem. A healthy ecosystem is dependent on biodiversity and to preserve biodiversity we need habitat conservation. In some cases focusing on keystone species or charismatic species has led to habitat protection but very often focusing on habitat protection will lead to conservation of non charismatic species and even those species that are currently not accounted for.

Which is why yesterday's LYWD was so inspiring! San Diego's ReWild Coalition has been at the forefront of making sure our last remaining pocket of wetlands in Mission Bay are restored and expanded. A restored wetland would help our city face the challenges from climate change and sea level rise and also provide opportunities for San Diegans to forge a cultural and natural connection with this ecosystem. Just as biodiversity is critical to the health of an ecosystem a diverse coalition of stakeholders is critical to the mission at hand. I met groups trying to keep tobacco product waste from entering the wetlands of Mission Bay, I talked to a young researcher from Baja working to re-introduce the California red-legged frog (a non charismatic species) into the wetlands of Southern California and groups like the Climate Science Alliance working to integrate indigenous knowledge and participation in climate adaptation planning and stewardship. Sometimes the daily news cycle can make one lose hope or feel very overwhelmed. Wandering around the wetlands yesterday I felt re-energized. 

I wanted to close with a different image of a swamp from the greatest TV show ever (at least according to me). Every summer my daughter and I watch The Last Airbender  (the original) from start to finish and I must've watched the show with her at least a dozen times. Unlike Frodo, Avatar Aang has a very different experience when he and his friends get pulled into the Foggy Swamp of the Earth Kingdom. Initially spooked by the mystical visions and the mysterious swamp bending tribes, the Avatar realizes that he has a lot to learn from the swamp.  And it is amazing that the wisdom is revealed to him by a Banyan-Grove tree (death and life intertwined) which shows him that the swamp is just one big living organism and "if you listen hard enough you will hear every living thing breathe together." Now that's some Hindu/Buddhist/ Transcendental swamp wisdom I can get behind completely!

 

 

May the Fourth Be With Us

 Today is a big day on many levels for me. I came to admire the Star Wars franchise a lot later in life and through a series of Middle Grade books called Origami Yoda. That series gave me amazing insights into how much this franchise is part of the cultural psyche and made me appreciate the original more through the eyes of the parody. But today is special not just because of Star Wars. My dad if he were alive would have turned 81 today and it is still very difficult to imagine him as a senior citizen as he left us when he was 59. Wherever I was in the world, I knew he would be waiting for me to call and wish him on the 4th of May and these days when I wish my daughter May the Fourth I cannot help imagining my dad as Yoda in Dagobah somehow just in exile but still imparting his wisdom through the soul-force. 

But today's significance didn't end there.  Our daughter's college choir sang for the last time under their outgoing Choir Director Prof.Christmas (yes, with a name like that...). Due to technical glitches or human error the event was unfortunately not live-streamed or recorded and sitting over a thousand miles away I can only imagine the performance in my head. It must've been very emotional for her as he has been a ray of sunshine in her artistic life. One of the reasons we chose a liberal arts school for our daughter was to allow her to marry her scientific and artistic pursuits without feeling like she has to give up on one to pursue the other. While personally not very artistic, I grew up in an environment enriched by art and music thanks to my paternal side of the family and I had always wanted that for our daughter. She is definitely more musical than either of her parents but she was very low on confidence with regard to her musical abilities until she went to college and joined the Choir. The Professor had created such a warm, kind, nurturing environment which was very different from what she had experienced until now in the performing arts space. Under his guidance she gained confidence in her own abilities and the Choir became a space for her to find and be herself. She once told me that he managed to organically build a community instead of simply stating that a community has been built! Under his coaching she performed last semester in the College's production of Into The Woods as the witch, a role she would not have even auditioned for if she had not had his support and his faith in her abilities. Because of the college choir, she also ventured into the town and started singing in the UU church choir (although we are not members of the UU) and in that process found a warm and welcoming community there too. A couple of weeks back she sang a Requiem at the funeral service of someone she never knew but learned about a life well-lived and enriched in art.

I had no great words to thank Prof.Christmas for all that he had done and so I turned to Ferdia Lenon's book Glorious Exploits, one of my favorite books of last year. What does music, literature and theater mean to prisoners of the Peloponnesian war fighting for their lives while being held in quarry pits in Syracuse - everything! Lampo at one point says

I play, though of course you couldn't really call what I'm doing playing, but it clashes with the scurrying of rats, their awful screeching, and in my mind, those rats aren't just rats, they're everything in the world that's broken. They're the things falling apart, and the part of you that wants them to. They're the Athenians burning Hyccara and the Syracusans chucking those Athenians into the quarry. They're the invisible disease that ate away at the insides of little Helios till he couldn't walk or, in the end, even speak, just cry with pain. Those rats are the worst of everything under an indifferent sky, but the sound coming from the aulos, frail as it might be in comparison, well, that's us, I say to myself, that's us giving it a go, it's us building shit, and singing songs, and cooking food, it's kisses, and stories told over a winter fire, it's decency, and all we'll ever have to give, I say to myself, as my lungs burn and my eyes water, 'cause I don't have much left, but I keep blowing away at the aulos, playing my song...” 

I spent last evening watching a 1000 year old vampire being drawn to the power of music albeit with nefarious intentions, but as Ryan Coogler says in Sinners, every culture has stories of those who can pierce the veil of space and time through music. I don't know if the Bowdoin Chamber Choir has the power to pierce realms but I would like to think my dad and his brothers and his mother were all listening in even when I couldn't. Thank you Prof. Christmas and to all those amazing individuals who create art especially as a group, in times of madness and encourage others to do so. 

GBBC 2025

Aldo Leopold said "There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot!" The tens of thousands of birders who are submitting checklists these past few days are proudly proclaiming that they cannot live without wild things. Yes, it is that time of the year when birders around the world get counting - they go out and make checklists of all the birds they can see either in their neck of the woods or in special places - as part of the Great Backyard Bird Count 2025.

This is how I chose to spend President's Day weekend - celebrate the species around us that make the earth what it is! It is also a demonstration of how nature and wildlife know no boundaries requiring humanity to work across lines on a map to conserve such wonders.

In my neck of the woods it is a great time to see winter visitors stopping by on their migration journeys that have gone on for millennia. The highlight of this year was the lone Long-Tailed Duck which seems to have had a faulty GPS and ended up in San Elijo Lagoon and becoming a mini celebrity. 

A lost Long-Tailed duck has become a minor celebrity

Here are some of the beautiful birds that made my weekend! 

Saw a pod of white pelicans fly by and settle down

A Black Necked Stilt

Magnificent Ospreys

Although I've seen Ruddy Ducks many time before this was the first time I got a great pic of their blue bill

Good things do come in small packages too

Birds are in the news for all the wrong reasons. As of December 300million birds have succumbed to the bird flu. 280 million of those cases were from poultry but wild birds haven't been spared. There is so much we don't know about the virus and this is an area that needs research funding. It is very hard to motivate the current government to do anything for conservation sake, but this one can have a direct impact on human health and so maybe this might get attention. 

In all I saw 52 unique species this weekend within 5-10 miles from where I live. And as I write this, 7862 species of birds have been observed by birders around the world in the past 4 days. Given there are about 10,000 to 11,000 known species of birds this is a huge achievement.  "For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television. And the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech" said Aldo Leopold in the Sand County Almanac. Even before I saw the Long Tailed Duck I agreed with him wholeheartedly!

 

 

Climbing Mount Fuji But Slowly

Compassion is no longer in fashion. Cruelty clothed in the name of efficiency seems to be in. Gratitude and humility are out. Corrosiveness and retribution clothed in the name of meritocracy and fairness are in. We are seeing the birth of a new religion, one that is so unlike any of the famous world religions. Whether you believed in Karma or Christ it used to be that showing compassion towards the less fortunate, knowing that your own position in life is fleeting and true salvation/ nirvana/ moksha lies in realizing the ephemeral nature of our existence were tenets to live by. Now that most of us have a religion-shaped hole in our lives we, (especially those of us who are fortunate) seem to have filled it up with self deluding myths about "deservedness" and "just rewards" as though each of us rose to our positions in life purely by self-effort. In this form of self-mythology, there is no room for chance, contingency, luck, and everything boils down to choice.

And it is here I am grateful for Robert Sapolsky’s monumental work Determined which I urge everyone (especially those who believe that they have succeeded purely on the basis of the choices they made in life) to read. His thesis in the book is stated simply as “we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck over which we had no control that has brought us to any moment.” He spends 500 pages examining every piece of scientific evidence from neuroscience, animal behavior, genetics, and even quantum physics on the question of free will and intent and concludes that:

“there is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered. You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.”

I am all for re-evaluating government efficiency, how our tax dollars are spent, and even removing some of the performative aspects of DEI. I would also like to see a reform of our immigration laws and definitely would like to keep dangerous people from endangering the lives of others and themselves. But the manner in which this whole exercise is conducted is just callous. If we are talking about dangerous people shouldn’t we also focus our efforts on reducing the 80 odd school shootings that happen every year? Shouldn’t we scrutinize defense budgets while we are scrutinizing education budgets? Surely, saving $15M over 5 years for gender affirming care in the military cannot be the primary source of efficiency? Surely protecting women and girls should mean more than just preventing 10 transgender athletes out of 530,000 in the NCAA from competing in women’s sports when access to basic healthcare is not guaranteed?

Are we really serious about making significant changes to the way government operates or are we just doing what is easy by bullying some of the most vulnerable people in the country? Eleanor Roosevelt used to say, “My interest or sympathy or indignation is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person whom I have seen with my own eyes. Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem.” This is a lesson our family has learned through our daughter. Ironically sending her to a private school and college with a generous financial aid program has actually helped us interact with kids from other parts of America and from social classes or family backgrounds vastly different from ours. What does it mean to be a trans kid or to be a child of undocumented parents or to be a first-generation college goer is no longer an abstract idea for us.

We are working hard in our family to incorporate more gratitude in our lives. We all know how random tragedy can be. But when it comes to fortune we are unable to see it as a random act and often attribute it to our own intellect or mettle or hard work. Does that mean we don’t deserve any praise for our accomplishments? Sapolsky argues that praise is only useful if it helps us replicate the positive acts. What about punishment for our wrongdoings? Sapolsky advocates for a quarantine-approach instead of a punitive form of justice so that a person deemed dangerous to society is quarantined but not judged. Hard to implement or practice but worth trying even if we fail everyday.

I have been working in my own small way to extend our community to non-human species and that seems like a Sisyphean task at this moment. As always when frustrated I turn to books and this time is no different. I was reading the Haiku masters Basho, Buson and Issa on a recent flight and was touched by the kindness and compassion they extend to all lifeforms from cormorants to monkeys and to flies and fleas. A seemingly impossible cause at this point when even compassion for other humans appears to be at an all-time low. John Donne preached that no man is an island. He wrote “Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind.” Such sentiments are not bubbling up in our society at this moment. Both identity politics and technology have eroded our humanity by giving us a false sense of interconnectedness and a pseudo-community. I don’t know what the solutions are or what the future holds, but I take solace in Issa’s words

Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
But slowly, slowly

And that's all I can do - one step at a time.

Tick became Snow Leopard became Peregrine Falcon became Jang-bu became Lama at Crystal Mountain

The texts arrived in succession "Mom! I got a ticket", "I got a ticket." It was 9 pm where I was which meant it was midnight where she was. I saw the three dots lining up on my phone as she was trying to say more and in those few seconds, my mind came up with golden, speeding, concert, flight - a neat little Connections group:  __ tickets. None of those turned out to be correct. She gave up on her phone's autocorrect and called me instead with panic in her voice. She had found a tick on her leg! 

The "she" is our soon-to-be 19 year old who is a rising Sophomore in a college 2500 miles away, on her first summer research stint. I knew next to nothing about ticks other than they can cause Lyme's disease, and I didn't even know what Lyme's disease was. But when she said that she will be right back as she tried to figure out the safest way to remove the said tick, my mind started racing again - tick, Lyme's disease, debilitating sickness - all in the matter of a few seconds. With help from a few friends she managed to remove the creature, trapped it in a jar as instructed, washed the leg with soap and water and cleaned the area with rubbing alcohol. She then called us back and said she will see a doctor tomorrow just to be safe and that was that - Good night!

For the next hour I went on a maddening, surfing trip on the Internet. By the time I was done, I could differentiate dog ticks from deer ticks, had identified from the hazy pic she sent me that it belonged to the dog variety, there was no Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in her state, the County's numbers for Lyme's was still very low and she had it on her leg only for a few hours, so she should be OK, fingers crossed.

I woke up after a bit of disturbed sleep last night and I thought about my meditation practice and all the lectures I listen to about mindfulness and the teachings of Vedanta and realized that none of them came to my help at a moment like this. While I was calm on the outside, my mind was racing and while I was aware of the phenomenon I found it hard to calm it down. As a rational person I knew there was nothing for me to do, she had done all the right things and now we just have to wait to see what the doctor says. 

"Expect Nothing" was the advice given to the famous writer Peter Matthiessen by his Zen master before he left for the Himalayas on a 1973 trip looking for Blue Sheep and the Snow Leopard.  It was a grueling journey, filled with difficulties - the terrain tough, weather brutal, and the governments not cooperative, to say the least. During the journey Matthiessen had numerous moments of realization, some even transcendent and all of that is beautifully captured in his book The Snow Leopard. But anyone who has read the book knows that the eponymous creature only revealed its footprints and scat to the author. At one point his fellow traveler the famous naturalist George Schaller says "Isn't that something? To be delighted with a pile of crap?" Matthiessen was able to accept that. He writes, "and in the not-seeing, I am content. I think I must be disappointed, having come so far, and yet I do not feel that way. I am disappointed, and also I am not disappointed. That the snow leopard is, that it is here, that its frosty eyes watch us from the mountain - that is enough."

These last couple of months, I have had my own Snow Leopard moments. I have been going to my local state preserve to observe a beautiful Peregrine Falcon family. The first time this season, I went in April with my niece who was visiting. I had charged ahead looking for the birds as I wanted to show her these beauties, while she came at her own relaxed pace with my husband. They were not to be seen and as I turned back disappointed, I saw her looking up and she asked me, "Is that the bird you are looking for?" and sure enough she had spotted the nest and the falcon! The next time I went in May with my daughter and by this time the chicks had hatched. There were 3 we could see and we even saw the mother kill a snowy egret, prepare the meal in a different part of the cliff and bring it over to her eager, hungry chicks and feed them. Since then I went back multiple times as I wanted to see the chicks fledge and train with their parents. But no luck. Each time, I let Matthiessen talk to me in my mind "that the peregrine falcons are, that they are here, that their dark marked eyes watch us from the cliffs - that is enough." 

 

This morning I was waiting for my daughter to call after she saw the doctor and instead of sitting around and waiting my husband and I decided to hike the preserve. I expected nothing and assumed the falcons must be away by now and so I didn't even carry my binoculars with me. We were at the top of the cliffs taking in the Pacific Ocean when suddenly I hear the call and sure enough I saw one fly overhead and land at a distant cliff. I have a hard time localizing sound as my left ear is practically useless so my husband turned me around and said that he heard the sound from the other side too - there was number 2 calling. And before we knew it, two falcons flew by so closely that we could see their eyes and their patches so clearly. If we put our hands out we could have touched them. We both ducked by reflex. Soon a third bird joined these two and I saw one drop something for the other two to catch. I have only seen this behavior where the parents teach the young ones to hunt in TV documentaries. We were both so stunned that we just stood still, we didn't reach for our phones. We stood there long after the birds had flown, just grateful and joyful to have witnessed that.

I was telling my husband how I could practice mindfulness in these matters but not when it came to our daughter and her tick situation. How could I get swept away in so many thoughts! In The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen narrates an incident with his porters and Sherpas. One of them was carrying his dry clothes and sleeping bag and was refusing help in crossing an ice bridge. Matthiessen gets angry because if the porter falls Matthiessen will have a very cold night ahead of him. But his mood turns "when the brave Dawa, attempting to catch Jang-bu's pack, hurled across a stream dropped it ineptly into the water. Wonderfully Jang-bu laughed aloud, as did Dawa and Phu-Tsering, although it meant wet clothes and a wet sleeping bag for the head Sherpa. That happy-go-lucky spirit, that acceptance which is not fatalism but a deep trust in life made me ashamed."  Matthiessen himself is frustrated when he realizes that despite the transformative journey that he had undertaken he was still beset by ego, emotions, irritations, what he calls as "the aching gap between what I know and what I am." 

Can I ever get to Jang-bu's state, especially when it concerned my child? Her experience with ticks took her to an urgent care with the help of a friend who is a godsend; she adulted her way out of her situation calmly and this was one more experience that demonstrated her independence and clear thinking with no contributions from me. Forget Jang-bu, I am no where near Matthiessen and his level of practice, so if even he could feel this aching gap I consoled myself saying I should give myself credit for only being worried for an hour or two, recognizing I had nothing to offer at this time, and figuring out ways to calm myself down - which included a hike this morning. Matthiessen writes "The teaching offered us by Lama Tupjuk with the snow leopard watching from the rocks and the Crystal Mountain flying on the sky, was not, as I had thought that day, the enlightened wisdom of one man but a splendid utterance of the divine in all mankind." 

What was that teaching?

Of course I enjoy this life! It's wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!

Conservation and Community - The San Diego Bird Festival (2024)

The San Diego Bird Festival of 2024 was nothing short of a triumph this year and I am proclaiming this just based on the quality of the keynotes. The outings and talks were outstanding too and the 1000+ people who had registered must be on cloud nine now. I have been attending the festival since 2013 when my daughter was 8. We only did the Family Sunday the first year, started attending a few talks the second, and then added in keynotes and trips as her interest grew. I remember we did a birding by ear workshop in 2017 which also led us to seeing the beautiful owls of Tecolote Canyon and one year we went on an amazing pelagic trip. This year was bittersweet for me as I was by myself as she is away in college but she asked me to quit moping and appreciate how lucky I was to be at the festival!

The festival's star attraction was Christian Cooper of Extraordinary Birder fame - a show that we love at our home. Parents with Disney+ subscription should watch it with their kids of all ages! (Some of the episodes are also available on Nat Geo Wild's youtube channel.) Not only did they feature some truly remarkable birds but the emphasis on conservation efforts resulted in the show featuring some remarkable birders too. Cooper's keynote at the Bird Festival delivered what it promised! It was funny, heart warming, inspiring and was a clarion call to all the groups working to protect biodiversity to expand their tent and incorporate multifactorial diversity in their approach.  The opening night keynote was by writer and birder Julia Zarankin who was very funny with a self-deprecating humor which was perfect for her messages -  it is never too late to get into birding, it is OK to make mistakes, and there is no one particular way to be a birder.

But the highlight for me this year was the keynote by Tiana Williams-Claussen who spoke about her 17 year journey to reintroduce the California Condor to the wild in the ancestral territories of the Yurok tribe and the Pacific Northwest. I think if there was ever a perfect talk this was it! It had everything - culture, chronicles, conservation, courage, continuity, and most importantly Condors. Graduating with a BA from Harvard, Tiana returned to work for her tribe and listening to elders felt that bringing the condors back would be the panacea for all things the ecosystem and her people needed. 

Condors hold an important place in the Yurok's foundational stories and their songs and feathers are an integral part of their world renewal ceremonies. The soaring Condors were said to carry the prayers of the Yurok upwards to the creator. She talked about how they were an indicator species to the ecosystem because of the important services (not just ecosystem but also cultural and spiritual) they provide and drew parallels between what happened to Condors and what happened to Native Americans.

The story of California Condors went from being a tragic one (when the birds were reduced to 27 in the wild in the 1980s) to one of conservation success  which has led to reintroduction of condors to their native habitats in the hundreds. San Diego has been at the heart of this effort with the San Diego Zoo playing a critical role in the conservation program. Tiana speaking at the San Diego Bird Festival was just perfect as she is part of the long line of conservation biologists who have worked tirelessly to bring these birds back into our landscape. Her work is by no means done. I was shocked to learn that even today DDT is having a huge impact on mortality of these birds. I mean - Silent Spring was published in the 1960s and these chemicals are still persistent in the bodies of marine mammals which become food for condors.

Condors being obligate scavengers can be seen as conjurers who create life from death and folks like Tiana are doing the same to the condors - snatching them from the brink of extinction and bringing them "back to life". The birds she shared with us were each given names according to their personality and what they meant to her people and my favorite was Ney-gem' 'Ne-chweenkah whose name in English was "She Carries Our Prayers." Tiana closed her lecture with a picture of her 5 year old and said how thrilled she was that her child was growing up in a time with condors circling the skies. I am not ashamed to admit that I teared up at that!

I left this festival with a lot of hope. Julia's keynote reminded me it is never too late to become a birder and find the sense of humor to laugh at ourselves, Tiana showed me how cultural connections forge strong links to conservation and communities and Christian asked us to expand our tent and be more inclusive as it is an all-hands-on-deck kinda moment. 

It also made me nostalgic as I looked back to 2013/2014 when my daughter and I started attending San Diego Audubon events - birdwalks, lectures, restoration events and the festival itself. We were an odd couple - my daughter and I. I was a forty year old who couldn't tell an osprey from a cormorant trying to keep up with an eight year old. We were welcomed by the SDAS community who made room for both of us and gave us our very first birding lesson in Tijuana estuary - how to tell great and snowy egrets apart! I am grateful for that and all the lessons we have been learning ever since and the 2024 festival was another step along that journey.