Every day has its beauty. One of my journaling practices, when I don’t have much time and energy to write, is to jot down the most marvelous detail I noticed that day (since I generally write at night, just before going to bed). The observed details are often minimal but significant.
Today has been a winter day of overcast skies and dim light. The midday walk to Prospect Park was slow and silent, not brooding but quiet. Only the black crows were cawking, though a solitary cardinal called from the leafless brush. People walked, ran, or biked without enthusiasm.
From the shore, the sky over the lake looked like a blinding-white dome over a still sheet of ice. The effect was not saddening but sobering.
As I scanned the winter landscape, a red flash, worthy of a short poem, struck my sight:
A red-tailed hawk
soared over the ice-gray lake,
well above the dark-brown
and drab-yellow shoreline,
startling into frenzied flight
the flock of seagulls
that had been resting on the ice.
I stayed there, observing how the hawk danced in circles above the seagulls, each of these flapping its wings and swiftly veering course with the urgency of survival.
I read Ralph Emerson’s Nature recently with my students of American Philosophy and so am quite attentive, right now, to the moral discipline that I might find in these encounters with Natura.
But I am also reading Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, an intellectual biography of my life-long friend Thoreau that I inherited as a gift from Ol’Moose, and so am also attuned to detailed observations of nature without interjections of one’s own emotion.
This whole intellectual mood makes me want to read Goethe also and maybe even take up Coleridge. But life is full of demands and, of all its possible paths, only one can be walked, so, for now, I stay with Emerson, Thoreau, and today’s mighty red-tailed hawk.
Daniel G. Campos 