While out walking, I found myself amazed and delighted. A bird flew past my peripheral vision and when I looked to see what kind it was, I gasped: a Red-cockaded woodpecker. In all the years I have lived where I do, I have never, ever spotted one. I knew it by its back which is barred with white and black horizontal stripes, its black cape and nape the encircles large white cheek pouches. Despite its name, there was no red. Only the males have several red feathers that they show when excited. I just stood there and watched through my binoculars. It’s sad to think these birds are endangered. I wished there was someone else around so I could point and tell them, “Look! A Red-cockaded woodpecker,” though, perhaps, they might not be as excited as me.
I do not lead a big, boisterous life of being seen. Nor do I lead a life of “quiet desperation,” as Henry David Thoreau coined it. Yes, my life is quiet, but it is also fairly content. In a world that is filled with discontent and dissatisfaction, I am finding my way of moving about the world to be going against the grain of things.
The poet William Carlos Williams wrote, “I like my ability to be drunk with the sudden realization of value in things others never notice.” And he did. Trees, plums, a cat, a red wheelbarrow. Things he saw in his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey where he was a practicing doctor who wrote poems in between seeing patients.
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