Why Not Realize Your World?

"Worse, I observe that in the history of mankind there is never a solitary example of success, – taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, Why not realize your world?" – Emerson, from "Experience"








Blackriver Bay


Oh, the natural world! The love electric, it is true, I tell myself, as I sit inside that wonderfully gauzy hour at 4:30 in the afternoon looking out over our small chipped wood deck which overlooks, at certain months, one the grayest of scenes that one could imagine.

It is not one eagle, but two, and then three, four, five, all the way to ten, eagles, that I see sitting perched along the gothic limbs of the bayside oaks, so still as if to exude a strange thought of premeditative silence, small men hunched over with their black-coated backs set towards us.

One of them casually jumps out toward the frozen slate gray bay and then swoops back around, wings as long as blankets, towards the very direction that I am sitting comfortably inside, a good micro beer in hand. What wonder! Does it have the nerve to land on that thin saucer of its receding edge? I suspect it could do anything it chooses; a life lived without a single predator, above looming itself like a dark soldier.

Two or three follow suit and dance around, mechanically, as if wound up – not so elegant as in the air, talons on ice, I think, and watch their beaks like sharp clubs, peck down on the surface for what kind of scarce food I am not sure.  The scene becomes a show for no one. But we add the contours of drama, and wonder how precise these eagles' actions really are.

All the while my baseball game is on, the enormous screen, like a drive-in, five feet in front of me.  The batter is a starter in preseason and he carries himself seriously up to the plate. I have a very slight ring and hum of my jazz playing quietly in the background. That sounds nice against the graying of the day and the baseball game.

I wonder for just the briefest of moments, what would it be like to sleep inside that eagles' nest tonight, dangling there, legs stretched out over its course walls, cold, every second a fright.