summer’s height: the magpie edition

alas, the tuxedo-clad bird, decked out in what seems at swift glance a crisp white bib, along with obsidian jacket and tails, is reputed to be a plunderer of shiny baubles, be it crumples of tinfoil or pop tops of aluminum cans. as such, its reputation is nastier than it deserves. it’s thought to be a mischievous thief, a rapscallion of the ornithological world. one who surveys the landscape for the juiciest morsel to scavenge.

in that case, i am showing my magpilian virtues this week. i am, in summer’s height, plucking and gathering, assembling but a brief collection of baubles for your consideration.

lest we let the poor magpie’s reputation flounder down at the bottom of the seed barrel, science leaps to its rescue with news from the university of exeter that, in fact, the ‘pie is not a thief. it’s been exonerated by exeter’s ornithologists, it seems. according to a study published in the journal Animal Cognition, the bird is merely curious, and actually suffers from a malady known as neophobia, fear of new things.

here’s how the ornithologists explain it:

“The Exeter University study found that magpies were actually more cautious and less likely to approach shiny or novel objects, even when food was nearby. In 64 tests, magpies only made contact with shiny objects twice, picking up a ring and immediately discarding it. This behavior suggested they were trying to determine if the rings were food, rather than expressing an attraction to their shine.”

if only shakespeare had known. over and over, the bard plucks at the so-called plunderer.

“And chatt’ring pies in dismal discords sung;”

this, from Henry VI, Part 3 (Act V, Scene 6, Line 45), but one example.

again and again, shakespeare draws on the corvids—the raven, crow, rook, jackdaw, jay, and magpie—luring them into his scripts. and except for the blue jay, they often appear, according to those of the literary cognoscenti, the ones who read the bard closely, “together in ominous flocks to plunder the dead.” the magpie, specifically, was thought to be “possessed by the devil and channeled his evil words while chattering,” an idea traced back especially to king henry who in Henry VI pulls out “chattering pie” as the cutting-est put-down he knows for his archnemesis, the dastardly duke of york.

audubon’s plate 357, american magpie

nearly a quarter century later, j.j. audubon himself attempted to rehabilitate the bird’s roguish reputation, writing in his journal, the birds of america, of the american magpie in plate 357:

“It is extremely shy and vigilant in the vicinity of towns, where it is much molested, but less so in country places, although even there it is readily alarmed. When one pursues it openly, it flits along the walls and hedges, shifts from tree to tree, and at length flies off to a distance. Yet it requires all its vigilance to preserve its life; for, as it destroys the eggs and young of game birds, it is keenly pursued by keepers and sportsmen, so that one might marvel to find it maintaining its ground as a species, and yet it is not apparently diminishing in most parts of the country.” 

all this to say that at this sauna-like point in the summer, when the air outside is thick enough to cut with a butter knife, and the sweltering has us curling up in arboreal shadows, i come bearing plundered fruits. i am the magpie of ill repute, the one before the reputational rescue. (a warning: not all fruits are sweet. some, too bitter for words, though words are one sure means of conveying even a hint of the harshness.)

joanna macy

for the third week in a row, i come bearing tribute to a great woman whose death leaves us once again with a great voice silenced, and a soul we pray lives on. joanna macy, the buddhist ecophilosopher and translator of rilke, died over the weekend at 96. four years earlier, in conversation with krista tippett, on the occasion of her and anita barrows’ then-new translation of rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, macy had this to say about living in the moment, and opening ourselves to the beautiful, during this moment in history she refers to as the Great Unraveling:

Well, it seems clear that we who are alive now are here for something and witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before. And so we who are alive now and who are called to — who feel called, those of us who feel called to love our world — to love our world has been at the core of every faith tradition, to be grateful for it, to teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how — if it must disappear, if there’s dying — how to be grateful. Every funeral, every memorial service is one where you give thanks for the beauty of that life or the quality of what — and so there’s a need, some of us feel — I know I do — to what looks like it must disappear, to say, “Thanks, you were beautiful. Thank you, mountains. Thank you, rivers.”

And we’re learning, how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be — has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it. I kind of sound like I’m crying, and I do cry, but I cry from gladness, you know. I’m so glad to recognize each other. You can look in each other’s face, see how beautiful we are. It’s not too late to see that. We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.

the thing about being a magpie in human form, is that shiny objects—the true kind, the sort that carry weight and depth all on their own, shininess aside—come all but hiding under rocks. i never know where i’ll spy one. might be bound between the covers of a great book, or might simply be scrolling along when i’m stunned in my own tracks. and so it was when i came upon this sumptuous reply to a post from suleika jaouad in her isolation journals recounting her recent breathtaking birthday trip to tunisia, where she spent much time during her childhood summers. someone named kim wrote this, and set me off on my own voyage into the uninvited beauties that populate and punctuate my world:

In my own world, beauty doesn’t knock. She slips in uninvited—smelling faintly of burnt sugar & sandalwood. She hides in the scorch on toast, the chipped bowl I can’t let go of, the silver cutlery I keep polished for no one but me. I light incense for no reason. I turn the spoon the right way in the drawer. I whisper thank you to the kettle like it’s an old friend who stayed.

you never know where poets are poking about…

but, oh, the reverie in my mind as i, too, considered the beauties too many to count…

i’m going to wade into troubled waters here, and there is nothing but tragedy and horror in the words i feel compelled to leave as the lingering ones of the week.

we cannot let ourselves be living in a world that has children too malnourished to let out a whimper, children whose every rib you could count as if an x-ray with the barest of flesh. in a world of abundance, a world where each night alley dumpsters are spilling with portions too overzealous for even a glutton, in a world where essential nutrition can be picked into space-food sticks, or gel packets meant for mass distribution, there is NO godly or ungodly reason for children or infants or mothers or fathers or the ones who’ve borne them to wither away, for flesh and sinew to waste (the medical term for the breaking down of tissue as the body desperately seeks energy), for breathing to be labored because even the muscles of the chest wall have wasted, and the barest of life-sustaining functions are on their last gasp.

read this statement below, issued yesterday by Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and decide what you might do to respond to the cry of this so-broken world:

“People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses…. One in every five children is malnourished in Gaza City as cases increase every day. When child malnutrition surges, coping mechanisms fail, access to food & care disappears, famine silently begins to unfold. Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak & at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need…. Parents are too hungry to care for their children. Those who reach UNRWA clinics don’t have the energy, food, or means to follow medical advice. Families are no longer coping, they are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened.”

we cannot look away. what will we do?