Anyone can discover the undiscovered. That’s just a matter of walking farther than the next person. But to see the thing that’s been in front of you the entire time—the obvious; the ordinary; the mundane; to reveal with your mind that which your eyes have overlooked as they search the horizon for what is coming—this is my great revelation. I acknowledge that which is in front of me and find meaning in the simple joy of the present, let it fill me until I can no longer contain myself, and then write with purpose and intent to share my discovery. There is no greater act of love than that of leading someone to an amazing thing you’ve uncovered and saying, “I just wanted you to see this.”
I just wanted you to see this.
An old stump sits 12 feet off the back deck of my cabin. For years, I used it as an archery backstop but now that it is fully rotted, the arrows pass right through, so I decided to knock it down. As I walked past the other day a little black head popped out of a hole. A family of chickadees has made it their home.
Here’s an interesting thing about chickadees—every year, their old brain neurons die, and new ones are formed so the birds can adapt to changes in an ever-shifting environment and recall where they stored seed caches for the winter.
Dr. Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University in New York studies the growth of neurons in the brains of birds. He focused on the remarkable ability of Black-capped Chickadees to recall the locations of hundreds of stored seeds and his lab produced the first evidence that in the adult brains of birds, neurons are replaced periodically with the learning of new behaviors.
Dr. Nottebohm suggests that as demand for memory space peaks, chickadees discard cells that hold old memories and replace them with new cells that store fresh memories.
They discard that which no longer serves them to make room for that which does.
In The Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman wrote:
“… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul …”
I have always interpreted this to mean that periodically you have to look at what you believe to be true and toss out that which no longer serves you. It is solid advice as it is fear of change that is the great limiter and if you can release old habits that no longer work, you create opportunity and space for new ones.
But the entire passage reads as follows:
“This is what you shall do;
Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
It is a treatise on not how to become a new man, but rather how to be a better man. An easy man. A poem of a man. A man at peace.
I have changed. Casting off old neurons that no longer served me and after an unsatisfying life in the cities of the world, I found myself heading back to the woods and a simpler life. What was once a pursuit of glory is now a rediscovery and acceptance of this easier time. I wake when the sun comes up and sleep when I’m tired. My days are earthly, temporal, secular, spiritual, fleshly, carnal, and sensual. I take pleasure in rambling through a pathless wood filled with the loamy smell of the forest floor after a rain. I stop to listen to the silent whisper of the wind as it quivers the high leaves in the aspens. I am humbled by the 20-yard swoop of a chickadee as it targets and lands perfectly in a quarter-sized hole in a stump.
I am filled with the joyful mundane of my simple life and this rotted stump and its inhabitants. And when I can, I sit on my deck in the late afternoon and watch them flit in and out until the night grows too heavy to pierce.
It seems that most things in life can be learned from Walt Whitman or a chickadee.
And in a final act of love …
I just wanted you to read this.
About the Author
David N McIlvaney is a writer, angler, hunter, and sentimentalist who lives in the Catskill mountains where he draws water and hews wood while pondering things big and small.
