Easter Morning Magic

Next to the morning after Halloween, my favorite morning for walking is Easter. Because I get to see how some families are getting set up for their egg hunts, I know that children’s excitement is soon to follow, and that some good memories will be made for those families. On top of that, I have always felt Easter morning has an air of magic. As a child, I walked to Sunday school every week, but walking to church on Easter seemed special because the morning sun always seemed to be shining more intensely, and there was that elevated sense of sacredness. In fact, I have a bit of a superstitious belief that Easter is always a sunny day, because I can’t remember one that wasn’t. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to town this morning for my walk, because I was buried under a truckload of coursework. I did finally get out locally, in the late afternoon, and am noticing that the trees are starting to shed their bud scales, though they are not yet piling up in windrows. Nature writers have pointed out that everybody notices the fall of leaves in autumn, yet the shedding of the bud scales is a second kind of fall, which largely goes unnoticed.

Robin World Returns

Before it’s even light, I can hear the morning robin songs and calls; when I step out the door to go to work, I immediately see robins flitting by; and when I return from work, robins are dotting my lawn and sitting on my roof. This is why, in Spring and Summer, I refer to all of outdoors as “Robin World.”

I have been out walking in the fields, even though they are still kind of muddy. When I’m outdoors, I like to reflect on how the metaphysical elements of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water are intermingled. Each Spring I observe that the fields have pushed up new rocks—which makes me happy because I like to look for fossils and puddingstones, though the rocks are an annoyance to farmers. It’s fairly rocky ground around here, and we also have a lot of ground water, so it fairly seems like the rocks are able to swim through the earth, like animate beings.

Spring Unveils Winter's Roadkill

Today I saw my first buzzard of the season—and I’ve been watching for them. This buzzard has arrived later than the robins, blackbirds, grackles, killdeer, and sandhill cranes. Possibly the buzzards have been detained because they had to work their way up by first cleaning up the roadkill in Indiana and Ohio. At least there is no excuse for any buzzard or coyote to starve in Michigan. Roadkill is one thing you notice while walking, and it’s especially noticeable when you first get out in Spring, once the ice gets off the roads so you can walk. Not only have you previously been prevented from getting out, but a lot of carcasses had previously been covered by snow—though they are well preserved due to being frozen. Out here in farm country, there is at least one dead deer for every mile of road frontage, (and sometimes more).

Every carcass marks not just the end of the trail for some poor animal, but also the end of its story. Sometimes you wonder about the story’s end. A very short walk from here, in a tree just a few feet from the road, is a narrow crevice about three feet up from the ground. Hanging out of that very tight crevice are the tail and hind legs of a dead raccoon, and I wonder, did the raccoon get stuck climbing into that crevice to explore it and die there, or did he maybe get hit by a car, crawl to the side and try to climb into the tree crevice for safety, and then expire there? Because I see it every time I walk that way, I can’t help but wonder what happened there.

Robins Bringing in the Spring

Because my course-work fills my evenings and weekends, I have been able to get to neither my blogging or my walking in a good while, but happily things are lightening up now.

Walking is a great way to get to “see the spring come in,” (as Thoreau put it). On today’s walk, I saw how a tidal wave of robins is flowing across the landscape. In an extensive field that was sporting some new, green growth, hundreds and hundreds of robins, spaced out but a few feet from each other, were hopping along. In the adjacent fields and wood margins were even more robins, and they spread throughout my larger neighborhood, (which would be described as an “agribusiness” area), so this must have amounted to thousands and thousands. Unlike blackbirds, which form large flocks that criss-cross the skies, robins move northward more by flitting from branch to branch or hopping from lawn to lawn, so their migration isn’t as visible as it would be if they all formed a tight flock and flew overhead.

I suspect there probably weren’t as many robins back in Indian days, because there were fewer fields and lawns. Robins did like to frequent Indian villages, and the legend goes that the robin was once a boy whose ambitious father forced him to stay on his dream fast longer than normal, in the hopes that his son would gain greater supernatural powers that way. Despite the boy’s pleas that his dreams were boding evil, the father wouldn’t relent, and the boy was transformed into a robin. As related by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, “He looked down on his father with pity beaming in his eyes, and told him, that he should always love to be near men’s dwellings, that he should always be seen happy and contented by the constant cheerfulness and pleasure he would display, that he would still cheer his father by his songs, which would be some consolation to him for the loss of the glory he had expected, and that, although no longer a man, he should ever be the harbinger of peace and joy to the human race” (164). Elsewhere I have read the Ojibwe name for the robin is “Pitchi” or “Peechee.”

By the way, Jane Schoolcraft (1800-1842) was half Indian, and her Ojibwe name was “Woman of the Sound that the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky.” Her story about the robin is included in a book by Robert Dale Parker, “The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky.” Parker asserts that Jane Johnston Schoolcraft is the first known American Indian literary writer, and he has tracked down and published her manuscripts in his book.

Walking Therapy (cont.)

In my last post, I described how the eye movements one makes when walking, (with the eyes darting to either side of the path, and also looking high and low, as the gaze moves from one thing to another), actually help the brain to process whatever issues a person might be working through. In fact, all of this eye movement may give us some of the same benefits as the REM phase of sleep. In addition to that, I would say that the motion of walking itself plays a therapeutic role, because walking is a whole-body activity, so having to coordinate your arms and legs and everything as you walk must surely have a brain integrating function.

I recall listening to a recent (of not too many weeks ago [?]) NPR report on wrestling, and I’m a little foggy on it now, but I think it may have been about how wrestling has helped people with learning disabilities, or memory problems, or something like that, because so many parts of the body are worked, and therefore many parts of the brain are engaged. (I can’t easily track down this information online, because my Windows 98 and rural phone lines dial-up make it painfully slow to get into sites.) If wrestling can do that for you, I would assume that swimming and bowling would too, as swimming has been described as the most complete exercise, and bowling as second best.

Brain integration is a big concern for people with Asperger’s Syndrome and other neuro-processing disorders. Activities that help to get the hemispheres and different brain modules working in tandem can help mitigate the brain fog, which so many of us suffer from. I believe that it also modulates mental energy—what one might describe as the flow of mental “chi.” When a friend whose child was suffering from migraines looked into Chinese medicine, she was told to have her child sit with her feet in a pan of water that was as hot as she could comfortably manage, as a way of drawing energy from the head to the feet. The theory here is that a migraine amounts to too much energy in the head, which is plausible, when you consider that a migraine has been described as “a firestorm in the brain.”

I believe that in Jansen’s study of “The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire,” some of the people described were suffering from mental breakdowns due to what some of their traditional African medical practitioners diagnosed as “too much thinking,” a state of overload ascribed to city living. I wonder if Africans who are used to an enormous amount of walking have problems re-modulating when they have to adjust to a different way of life. We ought to consider how too much energy in the head is part of the modern condition, and build time for walking back into our routines, to walk off some of that energy.

Walking Therapy

I have mentioned how I notice birds’ nests when I am out walking in winter, and how that stimulates a flow of associations related to “the dream of the nest.” If, when you walk at different times of the year, you are looking around for different things such as birds or nests, or trying to identify specific things like trees, herbs, or flowers, the darting eye movement combined with the motion of walking has a potentially therapeutic effect.

It was an ordinary walk that gave rise to EMDR therapy: “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.” Francine Shapiro, the originator of this therapy, took a long walk one day while working over some disturbing thoughts and personal problems. By the end of her walk, she felt a great sense of resolution—no longer troubled—and ascribed this to the eye motion that one is naturally engaged in while walking. (We can appreciate the benefit of eye movement when we consider how “rapid eye movement,” the REM phase of dreaming, is important for peoples’ ability to process the day’s events, as well as other issues they might have, and how people suffer when they are deprived of that REM phase.) Impressed with the therapeutic implications, Shapiro developed EMDR to help people process traumatic memories and other sorts of conflicts. In its early stages, the therapy involved having the patients follow the therapist’s finger movements with their eyes, to achieve bilateral stimulation of the brain. This has evolved into a more high tech system, where your eyes track a moving light, and audial and tactile stimulation are also utilized. Of course, there is a lot more to it than what I am describing here, and care is also taken to create a psychologically safe space for patients, so they can alternate between processing traumatic material and returning to the safety of a comfortable setting in the present moment.

Persons with major psychological problems should naturally seek professional therapy, whether it be EMDR or some other. However, for ordinary people with the ordinary load of daily problems to deal with, why not go take a long walk, like Francine Shapiro was doing when she made her initial discovery? To bring in more eye movement, you can make a point of looking for specific things, as mentioned earlier. (Getting a field guide to birds, butterflies, trees, or whatever will be helpful here.) Walking lightens one’s worries for a great number of reasons, so it can’t help but benefit you. At the very least, you will get a nice walk out of it.

Nesting Places

Continuing on the idyll of the nest, I’ve been reading Winifred Gallagher’s “House Thinking” (“a room-by-room look at how we live”). She mentions that Frank Lloyd Wright arranged domestic spaces to accommodate areas for what he described as “nesting” (refuge) and “perching” (prospect), i.e. cozy areas such as an inglenook, and then large open areas where one has a broad view of interior and exterior spaces. Modern home designs based on open floor plans with a “great room” tend to lack secluded areas for “nesting.” (Women tend to prefer the nesting areas, while men prefer the prospects.)

Some birds’ nests, on the other hand, seem to combine functions of nesting and prospect: birds feel safe when they hunker down in their nests, but when perched high on ledges or certain types of trees, the view from the nest may provide a commanding prospect of a wide area.