Month: December 2012

I’ve Run Out of Pictures and Ideas

After a lifetime of following school schedules I find it difficult to get much done during the Holiday seasons other than decorating the house and getting presents. Blog posts have historically fallen off this time year, partly because the number of visitors also declines this time of year, whether I post or not.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems like a better alternative than blog entries at this time of year. It doesn’t take much effort to link to an article with a brief comment that summarizes my reaction to current events. And since I regularly check my Scrabble games, it’s easiest to post there.

Besides, I doubt many people that aren’t also linked to me on Facebook are really interested in my views on gun control or on the NRA and their ilk. I’m sure my views are obvious from what already appears in my other entries.

Meanwhile, I’ve developed a renewed interest in “happiness,” and what it takes to be happy, inspired by a course I ran into while browsing iTunes U courses. Although there’s only 10 TED videos, running about 10 hours, each video is complemented by additional sources. I’m sure I have spent more than 10 hours just reading a small portion of the supplemental materials for the first two lectures.

In fact, I’ve spent more than that taking tests and browsing reading materials at the Authentic Happiness site. Much to my amazement, I discovered that I had been there before, apparently to take some of their “happiness” tests. This time around I find myself much more interested, possibly because I’ve spent time wondering if Christmas has lost much of it’s magic as the emphasis has shifted to over-consumption.

Unfortunately, I haven’t quite figured out how to blog on what I’m watching or reading about happiness other than just provide a link to sites. Hopefully all my friends with iPads have already discovered iTunes U and can find the TED course on happiness if they are interested. I’m sure it must be available on other media, too, though I haven’t tried to find it online.

Port Orchard Revisited

December 5th’s visit to Port Orchard wasn’t nearly as exciting as the week before, perhaps because I was able to get so many shots I liked the week before. Basically, I saw the same birds both times, and it was hard to improve on the shots from the week before.

I did like this shot of a Pelagic Cormorant because it leaves no doubt that the bird has a green sheen when seen in full sunlight

Pelagic Cormorant

and because it is one of the few times I’ve managed to ever get a shot of those unique feet.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to improve on last week’s shot of the male Hooded Merganser,

male Hooded Merganser

but this shot does a nice job of balancing the black and white areas, one of the hardest things to in a bird photograph.

I also noticed that the small band of male Mergansers seems to be splintering, that some of the males have begun to pair off.

pair of Hooded Mergansers

There did, however, seem to be an increase in the number of Barrow’s Goldeneyes this week

Barrow’s Goldeneyes

with a number of small flocks throughout the marina. As I said, if the week before hadn’t been so spectacular I would have been quite pleased with these shots.

Better Late Than Never, I Guess

For better or worse, the weather has been rather bleak around here the last two weeks. “Better” because I have been busy getting ready for Christmas and busy doing some serious “winter cleaning.” I finally managed to copy all the comments from my Battleground and Prairie yearbooks to my computer and clear away an entire shelf. All I need to do now is put up some hooks to hang bags from and I’ll finally be able to walk into the closet and vacuum the carpet. If there had been a sunny day, though, there’s no way I would have finished those jobs.

December 5th was our last sunny day, and I spent it at Theler Wetlands and Port Orchard. I’ve never seen the water as high as it was that day due to flooding and a very high tide. In fact, the caretaker told me that if I didn’t turn around I might have to take an alternate route back because parts of the trail would be under water.

The high water levels changed the entire dynamics of the wetlands. I saw very few ducks, but there were gulls like this Ring-Billed Gull right next to the trail, something I’d never seen before.

Ring-Billed Gull

Great Blue Herons are a common sight at Theler, but seldom as close to the trail as this one was,

Great Blue Heron

so close I had to join two shots together to get it in the frame.

This female Northern Harrier was much close than usual, too, close enough she actually seemed to notice me.

Northern Harrier

There was also an unusually high number of Double-Crested Cormorants in the river, though they took flight quickly when anyone walked down the trail.

Double-Crested Cormorant

It wasn’t great weather and it wasn’t great birding, but seen in retrospect after nearly two weeks of solid rain, it almost seems like a perfect day, and I felt lucky that I didn’t miss it.

Say What?!

One of my recent goals while walking is to practice “tai chi walking”. I try to totally relax while walking, which is much harder than it sounds. Certain muscles unnecessarily tighten up while walking, particularly when you’re trying to walk as fast as possible. You have to learn to distinguish which muscles are tight because they’re helping you to walk faster from those that are tightening up unnecessarily because they’re not directly involved with walking. Finally, you have to learn how to make those muscles relax.

That’s not easy to do. In fact, it’s only in the last few years, after a lifetime of walking, that I realized this was a problem. Of course, I’ve only been doing Tai Chi regularly for the last seven or eight years and only recently have been able to relax while executing the moves. Aging has undoubtedly played a part in the discovery, too. When I was younger I didn’t seem to have to worry about tiring while walking; I didn’t tire unless I was carrying a heavy pack, and I don’t thing any amount of relaxation was going to make that easier.

I seemed to be tighter than usual today, possibly because I have been spending a lot of time sitting at the computer. Tai Chi had also run longer than usual, and my hip had tightened up a little more than usual. I didn’t think I was going to manage to get in my usual 40 minute, two mile walk. In fact, at twenty minutes and a little over a mile, I began to think it was time to call it a morning. After all, I had been exercising for an hour already.

Instead of giving up, though, I focused on the pain and tightness, trying to make the muscles relax. As I tried to relax, I focused on the komuso music playing on my iPod and it seem to make it easier to relax.

Suddenly, I had a rush of old, unexpected memories. The next time I looked at my watch 20 minutes had passed and my pedometer showed I had walked a mile and a half. Equally amazing, the soreness had disappeared; I didn’t even feel the normal tightness when I returned home. I still don’t.

Did relaxing the muscles somehow cause the memories to arise? Did the combination of Reiki music and focus cause the memories to appear? Did the release of the memories cause the muscle tightness to disappear?

Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. The closest I’ve ever come to the feeling is being “in the zone” while playing basketball or meditating during yoga, but this was quite different than that. This felt an awful lot like a waking dream, and not the kind you get when you’re sleepy and drift off.

I wonder if spending the last few days copying comments from yearbooks somehow contributed to this phenomena, even though none of the memories had anything to do with high school.

Truthfully, the incident raised more questions than answers. I did remember reading about a theory that muscles can hold memories, a theory I dismissed out of hand when I read it. I ended up going online and finding “Precise touch to re-educate the muscles in the process of changing the tensions can re elicit memories from the past. It is as if the muscles actually held those memories.” I’m not ready to buy into that theory just yet, but I’m probably going to try to recreate the moment when I walk in the future.