21—The Great Blue Question

To: Friends and Family

Subject: The Great Blue Question

From: walden@intermind.net

I’ve been pondering the question that appears during every low tide in the shallows at the foot of my hill. in the past, I’ve called this question a great blue heron and admired the stately bird’s grace and elegance. However, for the last several days, G. B. Heron of Netarts Bay has led me through my spotting scope into an adventure of of mind and soul. 

I first began to notice G. B. as something more than a study in grace and elegance when I saw him coming in for a landing, his six-foot wing span ballooning him into the shallows as if he’d been engineered by an aeronautical engineer on downers. He then shook himself into a still and solitary figure gliding through the melancholy of the fading winter-white light like a Chopin nocturne. 

I’d been looking into the distance for whales but turned the spotting scope on him. And that’s when the question began to take shape—the yellow, rapier-like beak widening into a small white head, roughly the size and shape of a driving iron, curving down through a long narrow gray neck into a feathery blue-gray body supported by two long spindly black legs. 

Heron by Walter Van Campen

When I began looking into the question, it was G. B.‘s eye that caught mine. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, G. B.‘s is a large black pupil ringed with a bright yellow iris. This expressionless eye lies right above the throat-end of the yellow beak. Above the eye, an indigo streak slashes backward, across the temple and around the head into a jaunty twine of feathers that dangle part way down the bird’s long thin neck in a kind of regal insouciance. 

Initially drawn to G. B.’s saucy charm, I also marveled at the speed and precision with which he could nab a small fish—all the more remarkable when I considered the size of his brain relative to his comparatively large body.

There were no extraneous movements. Just stillness allowing the opportunity to create itself clear and whole.

“Stillness,” Master Lao always says, “is the most important part of motion.”

One day, I noticed G. B. standing with his long neck tucked between the indigo epaulets on his gray wings. The huge wings were rounded about him like a cloak so that he might easily have been take for the spy from MAD Magazine. After waiting impatiently for Heron to move, I decided to be still and see who would move first. When G.B. finally turned his head, I thought I’d won but then realized that all the while I’d been watching, he had fully and extended his neck but so slowly as to be imperceptible. It was at this moment that Heron became my guru.  

I knew, of course, the way would not be easy. Great blues are notoriously temperamental birds. One day while walking on the beach, Heron allowed me to walk close enough to his tidepool to observe him without binoculars. Convinced that my admiration had made me special, I paused to appreciate the moment. Immediately, my guru lifted off toward the chimney tops with a ratchety FRRRONNK which he punctuated with a great white snowy spray of poop. Surely, I thought, a simple fronk would have sufficed.

Accepting that I still had a lot to learn, I continued my observations—

Heron facing left: an unmoving question 

                                                                         a Grecian urn
Stillness is motion, motion stillness
Is that all I need to know?

Heron facing right: a question reflecting upon itself 

Heron walking away: a Follies dancer bustling aloft on lithe legs

Heron facing front: white streaks rising abstractly out of a feathery gray

Heron turns: violas flowing after violins  

Heron by Walter Van Campen

Heron on land: an odd assortment of parts in a stilted trot, taking care of business, getting back to the mind’s watery edge where slowly, one black stilt leg rises after the other, each bending unhumanly backward, lifting four long thin finger-like toes, setting them down in the gray water without a ripple, a most predatory delicacy and then the wait—until

in one pure moment of movement the body pivoting stabs the water    the rapier beak coming up with a small wriggling life    a pause    and a deft tip and twist of the heron head flips the fish around ensuring that the hapless creature will make its final journey head first so as not to scratch anything with its gills as it squirms for dear life all the way down into the great blue stillness    G. B. standing there, his feathery do dangling down that long thin line between flat-out funny and ruthless   and in that expressionless black truth ringed in yellow
the fact of life’s most profound tragedy—
we all have to eat...

leaving us each with the question of where and how we will draw the line between grace and predation. 

Heron at Sunset by Walter Van Campen