"Not being out; not wandering somewhere wild—seems sinful. There’s something wonderful I’m not witnessing." Resolute words from poet J. Drew Lanham (Born January, 1965) that softly demand we inventory what we have last witnessed. What caught our attention? What pulled us from ourselves into something bigger?

From Mary Oliver's stream worship and Thomas C. Clark's ode to becoming lost, to Una Marson's vivid plant nostalgia, we use many words, many metaphors to capture the feeling of being in nature, the effect is has on us. 

Nature is an abandonment of artifice, a stepping aside, away. It is an attachment to the natural, a stepping astride, towards. Lanham's Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts is a sure-footed, bold-hearted guide to what it takes to be in nature, who we must be, and who we must leave behind. How to simply be in the "expanse" between those things.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

We abandon widgets, bills, and deadlines for acorns, hills, and sunsets. Small things for big things. Movement for stillness. Lanham insists: stop squandering and go be. 

Real world means inside obligations to tend to. Widget making. Deadlines pressing. Bills always due. More and more four walls feels like a trap – a cage with no escape. Not being out; not wandering somewhere wild – seems sinful. There’s something wonderful I’m not witnessing. Some bird or beast flies or creeps by as I stare into someone else’s expectational chasm. It’s an expanse I’m increasingly unwilling to span. A new sun warms in brilliant hues. The same tiring orbs sinks into the abysmal blues. When that coming and going cycles absent by firsthand witness, I’m squandering time. If wildness is a wish then I’m rubbing the lamp hard for a million more wandering moments.

What is that spotlight feeling when we look into a pupil-less bird eye? Register a smile upon a smile-less face? Watch wildlife keep to its own code? Recognize the depth of animal being that has nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with our existence? What do we witness?

Photograph by Scott Danzig.

Nature is a wormhole straight into a suppressed, pre-history self. An instinct so deep and blessed, a familiarity instantly upon us when we leave the urban behind. We go into nature, as Lanham lucidly observes, to witness. What is it we witness? Dead, death, dying, hunting, sex, failure and triumph - a depth of species that has nothing - absolutely nothing - do to with our existence. What do we witness?

He was nose-to-ground in doe seeking mode. I stumbled upon him, wandering on the far edge of eighty or so acres that had been liquidated. A favorable wind and a glint of antler in late morning sunlight gave him away. A few grunts and bleats later – careful aim through the hyperventilation and the concentrated contraction of my index finger against the spring-taught metal sickle reduced curiosity to fatal flaw.

The nearly sixty pounds of venison the buck sacrificed are nearly gone now, but my memories of him, the hunt and how this place once thick with forest – but now denuded except for stumps, sneeze weed, and sweetgum sprouts – haunts me.

We register powerlessness - that of others, that of our own bodies and minds. A witness - Lanham's word I return to - is powerless. Mute in the occasion and only vocal after the fact. In the during, in the being, a witness will stand and watch. Smell, taste, register. Nature is a sensory feast, we dive into sounds, smells, tastes, more smells, more sounds. We witness a depth of ecology that has nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with our existence. (At some past point this was true).

Like birds sorting out their own lives, holding their own agendas in their own language, abiding their own code.

Who takes care of whom? 
Knows the itches to scratch? 
Can find the place where you retreat 
within your own wildness to escape – 
but leave you there trusting you’ll return? 
The right or wrong questions to ask? 
It’s all a matter of timing – 
the who and what of our when-ness. 
The birds find their own answers to these questions. 
Simply living by codes we can’t quite figure out 
except to guess, really. 
I’m okay with not knowing it all, these days. 
Five cerulean eggs lain warm in a cup fashioned of pine straw and rootlets wound just so are proof of my human built conceit. 
Who taught them this?
From J. Drew Lanham's "Egg Blues"

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The knowledge of birds. the knowledge of forged nests and tree nooks. Of unbreakable egg shapes. They have a knowledge, a knowledge of how to be a bird, that we lack. Do we know how to be human? We know how not to be human, often times. Most importantly perhaps, Lanham - a person of color, a person in the wild, a seeker of birds - bears witness to this as well. This unbeing of humans.

Going out this morning to sit in my pickup truck on the side of the road to watch birds. To escape for a few hours in other breathing beings’ lives. To envy who they are. To revel for just an hour or two in their songs. But then, I hesitate, wondering what’s happened overnight? What city burns? Who’s alive? Who’s dead? Can a blue grosbeak change human plight? Can an eastern meadowlark’s territorial claim to sunrise, orange sky, or the right to breathe without death in the offing, become for a moment my own dream? Just thinking there might be some way to be where I am in my Black skin and not wonder if I’m being trailed, tailed, watched, surveilled, sized up to be brought down? Still thinking on it – whether I should go to some wide open field with clouds and grass; sit among grasshopper sparrows balanced on thin wire concerned with nothing else but being themselves. Lucky birds. Troubled man.

Lanham is an ornithologist, poet, memoirist, and magnificent seer of things. He believes everyone has a bird story. Knowing someone in the world is out there holding that belief, holding us to a higher bird standard, a higher human standard, gives me rest and joy. May we all exist sin-free as nature's witnesses.