On my walk today, this question: what specific kind of yucca is this and what creature nibbled it down to this state?
Day one, trying to pay attention. I'm turning to John Burroughs for aid in this quest for sight. Indisputably the voice who defined the nature essay, Burroughs lived from 1837 to 1921 and was a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Walt Whitman. His type of nature writing is out of fashion these days (again with this fashion note!) but I'm reading his work for the first time as well as some secondary critical collections about him because the man knew how to look, see, and pay attention. Today, this prescription for paying attention:
Keep senses (all of them) open.
Learn where, when and how to look.
Be open to the unexpected, be ready to find what aren't looking for.
General, I know. Like a drawing instructor saying something like, "well, you just look, squint your eyes, and draw what you see." Difficult. Yet, one must begin somewhere and somehow. So I took a walk. I meandered off the road and found the yucca I photographed. What strikes me about this first walk is just how little I know about this place. I don't even know how to ask an intelligent question about what I'm seeing. I don't know how to tell what kind of yucca this is and of all the possible critters that might have eaten it (ground squirrels, mice, rabbits and packrats), I don't know how to tell which is the culprit. My guess? Rabbits. Only a guess, based loosely on some notion I have about a garden travesty some time ago. I went for this walk at dusk. I caught a glimpse of a few birds but don't know what they were. I saw Mt. Taylor backlit by the setting sun. I wondered why some areas have a concentration of juniper while others don't. Mostly, I saw garbage. People dump all kinds of garbage out here. New since yesterday: a pile of drywall odds and ends. I found a plastic bag caught on some brush and started collecting alluminum cans. Once I started this, I found cans everywhere, more than I could fit in the bag. I can't say that the garbage was unexpected (that my openness to it is a good thing, fulfilling the third instruction) but I can say that I'm a long way from learning where, when and how to look.
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