Walk with a painter

Anyone who has read some of my previous posts would most certainly come to the conclusion that we very much enjoyed and loved our dogs. They were truly part of our family life. For as long as I can remember I’ve felt an affinity towards animals, particularly when it comes to wild birds. Watching and hearing Canadian geese high above on a chilly fall day or seeing all the activity at our bird feeders in winter eventually prompted me some years ago to take a home study course in Ornithology from Cornell University. I was fascinated reading about the migratory habits of these songbirds and how some of the ones I was watching were indeed possibly ones that had been there the previous year! It wasn’t long before I joined the Audubon Society and made two October trips to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in eastern Pennsylvania to observe the annual hawk migration southward along the Appalachian Mountains. Watching those magnificent birds, and actually being able to look down on the backs of some of them, gave me an incredible sense of peace and wonder.

One of the most interesting books I have ever read concerning the natural world was written in 1928 titled The Outermost House by Henry Beston. This enduring classic is the chronicle of a solitary year of life in a small cottage on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Written in longhand on a kitchen table, it tells of the ceaseless rhythms of wind, sand, and ocean, the migrations of birds – the events of a passing year. In a 1964 ceremony on the dunes, the Outermost House itself was officially proclaimed a National Literary Landmark. Unfortunately, a massive winter storm in February 1978 swept the house off its foundation and out to sea. The following excerpt from Beston’s book has been printed in poster form, one of which I had framed and now hangs in my studio. Enjoy!

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”