Take That Step #25
Kiki Smith, “Evening Star”, 2023
1) I got a delightful book as a gift this week, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” a bestseller written and illustrated by Amy Tan. I loved this excerpt from the foreword by David Allen Sibley:
In the last few generations our daily lives have become more isolated from natural rhythms. Climate-controlled buildings and electric lights allow us to keep the same schedule regardless of weather, seasons, or the time of sunrise and sunset. Refrigeration and other technology make almost any kind of food available at any time.
Only a few generations ago all of our ancestors were more connected to nature. They lived in houses, on farms, or in towns, not in wilderness, but life still moved to natural rhythms. Food was local and seasonal, and activities were planned around the daily cycle of the sun and the annual cycle of seasons. It was useful for them to know the birds by sight and by sound. The arrivals and departures of different species of birds were like a perpetual calendar, marking important dates in the changing seasons. Some birds were food, some were competitors (eating crops), some were helpers (eating pests that could destroy crops). In a way, everyone was a birdwatcher, as humans had been for tens of thousands of years.
The ability to recognize and remember patterns-one event or fact being associated with another—is a basic survival adaptation. (…) It allows birders today to identify birds, and to anticipate where and when each species can be found.
Northern Cardinal: my favorite
2) And for those who get excited about birdwatching, here's a tip from journalist Jancee Dunn via NYTimes — the Merlin Bird ID app.
I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed lately, both by the news and by a bit of life stuff. I wish I could retreat to a mountaintop, but my more realistic plan is to seek out the smallest possible things I can do each day to give myself a lift.
Every morning, for instance, I open my Merlin Bird ID app to see if any new birds have shown up in my backyard. (This morning I learned about a Northern Flicker, a bird I did not know existed.)
Micro-moments of positivity like this really can improve your well-being, said Barbara Fredrickson, director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3) One could risk saying that birdwatching is a way of enjoying the predictability of the unexpected. Or the opposite of the feeling that Hala Alyan describes in her poem Half a Life in Exile (here in audio, in English): My Life in Exile (aqui em áudio, em inglês):
There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
4) The other day I was taking care of my garden and I had two insights (maybe obvious insights?), but I wanted to share them here. Every other day, you need to remove weeds. Gardens and lives have a lot in common. Getting rid of weeds is a repetitive, never-ending exercise — and it serves as an analogy for negative thoughts, bureaucracy in adult life, maintenance (of the body, the closet, the refrigerator, the house, life) that we need to pay constant attention to — brushing our teeth, washing clothes, watering plants, paying taxes, etc.
On the other hand, but also insistently, I had to deal with the difficulty of removing a tree from the ground. Roots are deep, well-spread, entangled in the earth… When I tried, unsuccessfully, to cut it, I remembered what Bob Marley had already warned: you can’t run away from yourself. Roots are roots — they inform and permeate everything that comes from them.
5) I'm going to visit a friend who lives in Austria and I reactivated my Duolingo to learn how to say (or at least understand) the basics, "please, thank you, hi and bye" in German. What I discovered while practicing my "tschüss!" was Duolingo to learn how to play chess. I'm more of a backgammon player, so I never really learned how to play chess. I'm having so much fun! Duolingo Math and Music are also options for nerds like me.
Marcel Duchamp in 1966 with a set from his fellow artist Max Ernst
6) While I think about birds, weeds, languages and chess, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI still makes things up:
“This is the tech you shouldn’t trust that much. People have a very high degree of trust in ChatGPT,” he said. “It should be the tech that you don’t trust that much.”
Full story here.
7) Dua Lipa made me cry by singing Nothing Compares 2 U:
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8) Poem by Brazilian Paulo Leminski:
reportedly
The world ending,
you can relax.
All that
will come back.
Reconstruct it all
according to the structure of my verse.
Wind, I said how.
Cloud, I said when.
Sun, house, street,
reigns, ruins, years,
I said how we were.
Love, I said how.
And how is it again?
translated from the Portuguese by Elisa Wouk Almino
9) My friend told me to get these Uniqlo socks… I’m in love too:
10) Today’s playlist was created by my younger brother, Fernando, and I listened to it while I was packing my suitcase (carry-on!) to spend the next few days on vacation in Europe (Helsinki, Vienna and Reykjavik). I still don’t know what will happen to next week’s newsletter… I just know that I loved the song I’ll Get Along, by Michael Kiwanuka: