niGht walks

The walk was something magical, with glimpsed visions as from an old-fashioned magic lantern show ... In the park, some young men and women who evidently work for the Chargers were practicing their cheer routines, using only the light from streetlamps - lifting each other up on their shoulders, flipping and twisting high and then leaping across the ground to great shouts of encouragement from each other. Just like coyotes playing ... On the second floor of the nearby Buddhist temple a monk at an open window, apparently sitting before his writing desk in the dimly lamplit room, and I heard what at first seemed the sound of monks chanting, too, so I crossed the street to hear better — the monk was actually singing along to Willie Nelson's singing "Always on My Mind" ... Then farther on a serenade of crickets suddenly chorused up from the canyon as I crossed it on the huge steel suspension bridge that arched high above it, swaying & creaking a bit in the darkness (so dark, one might have been crossing the void of sky itself), listening to crickets chanting their own sutras, I'm sure. Cricket sutras ... And, always as one walks, noticing the moving interplay of shadows and porchlight or streetlight on the textured walls and walkways — lengthening and diminishing, a tide of light ebbing and flowing — the sharpened geometries of plants at night, mysteries changing as one passes ... The key to retaining mystery is to keep moving.

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The crows are crazy tonight. Having a wild sunset party. Must be the weather changing again. Easily 50 or 60 of them, arriving from the west in groups of about 20, cawing and swooping & diving in the air like leaves like tornadoes of their own devices. Torn-apart pieces of reality, shredded. Settling to roost in the tops of trees — ensconced in the darkest tall pines or exposed on the scraggly highest limbs of the eucalyptus — then raucously bursting up up & away, fountains of crows, playing exactly like the coyotes one used to love to spy on years ago ... Teasing each other, racing around in circles, settling down only to burst up again in a raggedy, rollicking uproar of their voices. Like nobody ever had more fun than them, and they knew it. Wild.

Wild. You could tell there was a real *wildness* to all this. No wonder both crows and coyotes were seen by the old ones as trickster gods, playful to the extreme, to whatever cost.

Tonight there were lots of people jogging by underneath them or walking their canine friends, busy "doing their thing," but not a single one looked up to see (let alone admire) what the ruckus in the air was all about. Did they even hear them? And here it is, 40 years after Hitchcock's The Birds ...

Me being the observer, standing off from both groups ... One wonders which group to belong to more. I could easily resonate with the crows, but could not for the life left in me identify let alone imagine what it would be like to be so self absorbed as to not notice — let alone gawk, jaw-struck — at those lovely birds cavorting around in the sunset air, making such a noise as to drown out the traffic and every other thought in one's head.

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"Airplanes are now built to carry a pilot and a dog in the cockpit," says Arlen Rens, a Lockheed Martin test pilot. "The pilot's job is to feed the dog, and the dog's job is to bite the pilot if he touches anything."