Happy Birthday to Me!

 I usually get a post up on Sundays, but I was working on a new talk and I had to get it done. 

It's only supposed to be 20 minutes, and it'll be delivered at the Saturday banquet for the Sedona Hummingbird Festival (Squee!!). I've figured out that I work something like two hours for each minute of the talk. The amount of time and brainpower I expend on these things is ridiculous. If it comes out right, it sounds extemporaneous. Well, it isn't. Snort.

So I was tied to the desk all day, except for an insanely cool evening walk down Dean's Fork, the subject of its own post. Sunday happened to be my birthday, so I decided if I had to sit all day, I would count the blessings that came my way. Each one would be a present.

My first gift was a handful of protoplasm. A couple of days ago, I looked down at a tire rut at a construction site and saw a puddle of tadpole goo where the day before there'd been rainwater. Because it's late July, the only thing they could be is Cope's gray treefrogs.  I touched them and sure enough a few wriggled in a SAVE ME!! kind of way. Oh no. More than a mile from home, and it's going to be a blistering hot day, and there is no natural water I can reach in shorts for at least another mile, unless...

I glanced around the site and saw a gallon of drinking water on a folding table, with a stack of plastic cups. Eureka!

I scooped up the taddies and a good bit of silt and plopped them in a cup, pouring life-giving water over them. Imagine how good that feels to a tadpole on its dying day. Jogged that mile home carrying the cup of taddies, laughing to myself about how that must've looked to the neighbors. Poured it in a plastic jar and added beaucoup rainwater. I gave them a couple of days to rehydrate before releasing them, and they needed it. When they started acting like tadpoles instead of crumpled bent fetuses, I knew they were ready to go.

This was my first birthday gift.

For future reference, they love koi sticks. Nomnomnom.

On this morning, I took the jar down to our fishpond, fed the comets to repletion, then installed the jar on a shelf in the pond.  One by one, the taddies who had survived their ordeal came up for air, saw the great expanse of water and delicious algae, and swam off into the deep. 

This one swam curlicues, dove, wriggled through the algae; its joy on being in proper habitat that wouldn't dry up was palpable. Honestly, I don't know how tadpoles do it, always watching the water levels, praying for rain, facing the imminent prospect of death by baking. Ugh.

There being no puddles left anywhere in the sweltering July heat, our water garden was my best choice. I had to hope the fish would leave them be. Comets aren't very predatory where small swimmers are concerned. As I was monitoring their exodus from the jar, I saw a tiny comet, the first spawn of my four fish, swim by. If he can make it, they can, too. 

Second present: BUN.

 There's a litter of three young cottontails in the yard who, having grown up in the sanctum sanctorum of Indigo Hill, have no frame of reference for humans as dangerous animals. They barely recognize Chet as a threat, which (let's be frank) he barely is. So these foolish little animals perk their ears attentively but go on chewing clover when I speak to them, kneel down and take iPhone photos of them from barely five feet away. Dumb bunnies. But of course, I adore them. So, Bun. They're all three named Bun.

I have a little family of brown thrashers in the yard! I don't know if any of them are Cletus, Melba or Harper; I think not, because the adults aren't tame at all. But oh, being able to look out and see thrashers doing thrasher things, dust bathing, sunning, hunting bugs or, in the case of one of the parents, grabbing a sunflower seed and pounding the shell off--it's just the best. This is a juvenile. Gift 3.

Seeing the laborious way a thrasher, which doesn't hold seeds in its toes for shelling, has to pound the hull off a seed, I spread sunflower hearts in all their favorite spots. Watching them gobble them down: Gift 4.

Present # 5: Someone dribbled squirrel! He appreciates the sunflower hearts very much. He ooches around on his belly picking them up one by one. I have to say I love my squirrels. They annoy the hell out of me, but they're such fun to watch! So they're paying their way, at least partly.

The sunflower hearts brought in MamaCoon and her three kits! Gift #6: July 24 was first day she's brought them out at noontime.

It's amazing how long those raccoon babies are dependent. The smarter the animal; the more complex and comprehensive its diet, the longer the juvenile dependency period.

It takes a long time to learn to be a raccoon.

Gift 7: the yard robin resents crowding by a ruffian house sparrow, tells him to back off! Just having a robin in the Spa, ahhh. But this combo was too much.

 

#8: speaking of Back Off, a mourning dove warns a squirrel it's too close.  I am big! I will beat you with my wing! Interestingly, a dove would NEVER let a chipmunk get that close. Chipmunks are far more dangerous than squirrels. They're nastya-s little animals. Chipmunks remind me of the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

 Adult male Cooper's hawk makes two passes through the feeder zone. I manage to capture its bill, leg and foot, enough to identify it, as it fetches up in the Japanese maple. Not a great photo, but still gift #9.

This just in!! July 25: I saw the Coop take a pass at some doves just now and scuttled with camera downstairs to shoot it from the bedroom. This is through two panes of glass, at a terrible angle, but OH MY. Talk about a gift, hurled from the Other Side. Thanks DOD!!

On the first shot, I captured the whole hawk. When it turned toward me, I lost my head and focused on its face. Ah well. Too excited to shoot well.

Please note that this hawk is perched in a retired, or as I love to say, recovering bonsai. DOD, you place your gifts so well. He adored my bonsai. 

You beautiful thing!! Please help yourself to mourning doves, and  take a house sparrow as a chaser, willya? You're also most welcome to squirrels, but please not the one who sccoches around on his belleh.

#10: Seeing a gray squirrel use its tail as a hat and parasol.

At this point it's 98 in the shade,  easily 102 in the sun, and I'm so thankful to be inside mostly (not) working on my talk. 

 # 11: a rubythroat investigates the coneflower, seeming to find a sip of nectar in the disc. Not something I see every day, but these midsummer juveniles try everything.

There has to be nectar in this big fat bud. Just has to. I'll wait for it to open. This photo: Gift 12.

I have a variety of wire supports for my tall cardinalflower and Fuchsias, and the hummingbirds adore them. Hummies appreciate thin perches. They can watch for Cooper's hawks from them. It must be nice to be too small and fast to bother with. But you still have to stay vigilant. 

 

This photo: Gift 13.

Meanwhile, fall migrants (yes, I said it; fall begins in July for warblers!) are sifting through the yard. A young yellow-throated warbler on its leisurely path southward. Or westward, or eastward...they do a bit of wandering.  This has to be one of my favorite warblers, Gift #14. Get the picture? Everything out there is a gift. I had intended to put all my birthday gifts in one blogpost, but it's evolved into at least three. And that is a gift in itself.

Happy birthday to me! Now you can see why it takes me so dang long to put together a talk. Or a blogpost. A giant set of Venetian blinds for the studio window would probably go a long way toward increasing efficiency, but ignoring the show going on just outside those windows in late July? Unthinkable! All but a couple of these photos were taken through my studio window, through the crop netting screens that cover them. Gift #14: having such a big, comfortable blind for a house!

Blessed, that's all!

And What Kills the Killer?

If these fitness trackers you wear like a lojack do anything, it's get us out, even when the sky weeps and the chill goes to your bones. I'm thankful for that, though I'm having a heck of a time reaching my daily quota (10,000 steps) when trying to get over a cold. In decent weather, I fly past that picayune mark  every day. 

We went out for a slog through the shredded wheat meadows, trying to keep the dog clean by walking on grass. (I'd just washed him after a muddy run down Dean's Fork). 

It was a day without much visual promise. And those are the kind of days you want to watch out for.

We were coming up the middle path in our field when we all saw this thing lying in the middle of it.

It had been rained on, but by the size and content it seemed to be an owl pellet, a big one.

I started speaking in tongues, the gibberish my family is used to hearing when we've found something BIG. Do you see what I see? I was jabbering in something other than English.

That's the entire foot of a raptor.  In the pellet of an owl. I know it's a pellet because there's very little odor and the bolus is made up entirely of bone and a few digested feathers. It's pretty fresh and quite cohesive. If this were a coywolf dropping, which by its size it'd have to be, there would be colored fecal matter acting as a binder, obscuring the bone fragments, and stinkin' up the place. Plus, I can't see a coyote crunching a raptor's foot down whole. What mammal would swallow talons like that? I mean, besides a Labrador retriever? that was for Floridacracker.

My mind was jumping all over the place. Though I had already figured out whose pellet it was, I was mos def going to figure out whose foot it was. I tried to imagine any owl gagging down the entire needle-taloned foot of a raptor. 

The only owl I could see being able to do that with any aplomb is a great horned. Nope, just can't see a doe-eyed barred owl gagging down a raptor's foot. 

My first thought was that it might be a barred owl's foot, since great horneds are known to prey on all smaller owls. It's a tough world out there. 

By the time we made it back to the house, I'd been turning that pellet over in my hand, and I'd figured out that this was not an owl's foot. How? 

These. These are two rows of scutes, or scales, that run down the tarso-metatarsus (the visible yellow part of the leg) of a hawk. Owls have feathered tarso-metatarsae. The part you can see is covered with fine hairlike feathers. What few scutes they show are all on the foot proper. The exceptions are some of the fishing owls, but they're in Africa, not here. The possible owls here in a meadowy-wooded part southeast Ohio are great horned, barred, screech and saw-whet, and they all have feathered shanks. 

So it's a scaly-legged hawk, with rather long toes. Bird-catching toes.

Bill asked, "You think it could be a Cooper's?"

Synchronicity being the word of the day (remember I'd just photographed that blazing beauty in the birch an hour earlier), I replied, "I think you've got it."

If this was a Coop's foot, it was a big Coop, a female. Just a hunch. I'd have to make some measurements to confirm it.

I thought about how the kill would have been made. The great horned owl, detecting a slight movement or sound from the Cooper's hawk, who was perhaps sleeping tucked into the Virginia pines on our oil well road. Owl flying soundlessly closer. Hearing her breathe, hearing her settle her feathers. Planning its kill. Coming in from behind, strong talons closing around the hawk's skull. Bringing her to the ground, severing her spinal cord with a single nip. The Coop may never have known what took her. I hope she didn't. For what else could kill a big strapping female Cooper's hawk? And how else to do it, but by surprise, in the night? She who surprised songbirds all her life, now facing the last great mystery, and ending up in pieces in an owl's pellet. Egad. I'm glad I sleep in a bed, in a room, in a house, under blankets.

This, amazingly enough, is not the best thing I've ever pulled out of a great horned owl pellet. On the shore of Selden Cove, Connecticut, under  huge hemlocks now long dead at the sucking mouthparts of wooly adelgids, I found the carving block of a great horned owl. And there I found a pellet that had the entire, intact skull and hard beak of a belted kingfisher. Swallow THAT. Great horned owls are the honey badgers of the sky. Great horned owl don't care. She's hungry.

Because I am a Science Chimp, and have been properly permitted to make and store specimens salvaged from window and road kills for most of my life, I happened to have on hand a specimen of Cooper's hawk, and I remembered that it was a large immature female. 

I called out to the kids, "Come down here by the washing machine and I'll give you a lesson in bird foot ID."  Phoebe replied, "Let me tweet that first, and I'll come down." Which made me laugh. She has made a Twitter account called (pardon me) @ShitZickSays

which has a rather intermittent feed, since I'm not the one tweeting away. I have no power there. But I do find it amusing, to have it revealed occasionally what my kids find amusing about me.

I pulled out my Cooper's hawk skin.  Laid the pellet next to it. Talon size looked real good. The big talon you can see in the pellet, that still has its outer sheath, is the inner front toe of the bird's left foot. The one you're seeing clearly on the skin in my hand. That's the killing toe.

Started dissecting the pellet. It smelled, disgustingly and surprisingly, of turkey. Turkey! And Phoebe agreed, recoiling, her nose wrinkling. This gory remnant should not smell like something I eat. I was so glad we'd finally finished the last of the leftover turkey soup from New Year's. I think it's going to be a good solid year before I want to smell turkey again.  Couldn't get it off my fingers...I remember my specimen prep days...yep. That clinging smell. Bleh!

photo by Phoebe Thompson

Back to science. Measured the talons, just to be sure.

photo by Phoebe Thompson

Perfect match. Not only did we have a Cooper's hawk's left foot, but we had a female Cooper's hawk's left foot. The talon in the pellet was ever so slightly longer than the immature bird's talon, which might mean it was an adult bird, but that's farther than I want to take my avian CSI. The foot belonged to a female Cooper's hawk. And that, my friends, is some nice sleuthing. Helps to have the reference resources right on hand, down by the washer...

Even the metatarsal length was perfect. This was a big female Coop. That's a foot-long ruler there. Dorsal view

and ventral view.

Look how perfect that foot is next to the specimen.

Here are the scutes, gleaned from the pellet, that initially told me it was a hawk's leg and not an owl's. I'm holding them up to the hawk's leg so you can see how perfect is the match. 

Just for fun, look at a male sharp-shinned hawk in the same setting.

He's 10" long to the female Cooper's 18 3/8".

Just the foot size difference is astounding. And we get so confused, trying to tell them apart.

Based on what I see on bird ID forums (10 gazillion photos of Cooper's hawks in people's backyards, all of them asking for ID, over and over and over), I have proposed to rename Cooper's hawk "FAQ Hawk."  Think it'll take?

The Cooper's hawk's head.  That rusty flammulation is typical, as are the fine, teardrop breast streaks. Young sharpies look messier, more boldly streaked, and lack the orange flaming.

And her label. Here comes the synchronicity again. Look who collected it. Well, picked it up dead. My dad, Charles Dale Zickefoose, on December 22, 1983. I was 25 and already well versed in skinning and stuffing bird specimens, thanks to experience both in college and in Amazonian Brazil, where I prepared specimens for a small museum at INPA (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas de Amazonas). I remember her crop being dead empty, no fat reserves, nothing left of her breast muscles, either. She'd burned herself up trying to survive. HY means hatch year. I've got total length (TL), wing chord (WC) and other measurements. A pitiful 12 oz-- a well fed female Coop should weigh 16 oz or more.

On the flip side of the tag, badly oiled by age and fat in her skin, is her story. I found that a small twig had pierced her right eye, blinding her. She was probably diving into thorns to get a bird, James Bond style, and that simple accident ended her career.

I was so honored that my father would think of me and pick her up and bring her to me that I painted a life-sized death study of her, freshly dead. I'd show it to you, but I gave it to my brother. It's nice. I did a lot of death studies back then, learning from the birds how they are built, how things work and go together.  She did not go to waste. Someday she'll go to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where they already have probably 150 Zickefoose specimens in their collection.

Here's one from that period of my bird-painting life, a pied-billed grebe that hit a wire in the night and plopped dead onto a golf course in Connecticut. You can imagine what the Cooper's hawk looked like, and see what I learned about it just by painting it, dead. Click on it to read the writing. It's life-size. I still have a penchant for working exactly life-size. It makes sense to me. Look how small the wing is for that dense, compact bird! Look how the legs work--like oars at the stern. Look at the bird of this hour.

I'm still writing everything down, still picking things apart. And that grebe is still with me, like the hawk, stuffed  with cotton and with all its data intact on a tag. I'll save the hawk's leg, too, because it tells a story, and that's what I do.

I watched my little family make their way back to the house on this dreary afternoon.  I lagged behind, shorter of leg, always behind; and now carrying my precious find. 

But I was all lit up with discovery and curiosity, and burning with the certain knowledge that my Dad is still with me, placing inspiration right in my path.

This just in from Facebook friend Steve Huy:

 A friend and mentor of mine, recently departed, 
had studied raptors at the Appalachian Environmental Lab at Frostburg State in MD. His name
was Floyd Presley.

he told me that he was surprised at the number of Cooper's hawk remains they found in barred owl nests

apparently barred owls have a knack for picking off sleeping coops

We don't always know the whole story. We can pick at the edges...

A Gift, Hurled from the Other Side

I was sitting at the drawing table, trying to keep my spine straight as I finished the last of a tedious couple of months of edits and revisions to a how-to book I put together 15 years ago. One doesn't really "write" a how-to book. One puts it together.

 I entered the last edit on p. 230, pasted in the painstaking revision of a six-page Resources section, every entry and detail of which had been obsolete, and sent the dang thing off to the publisher. Don't get me wrong. It's a good book. How-to's just not my bag, never was. 

I took a deep breath and started a status update for Facebook, the little crutch/reward system I lean on when my work threatens to grind me to powder. 

"Just finished an incredibly tedious, months-eating rewrite, edit and update of Natural Gardening for Birds, a book I put together 15 years ago for Rodale Books. The thought that I might now...

And before I could continue with 

get to do something I want to is a heady one...

a great big dark shadow swooped through the feeder area just to my left. A roar of wings as doves and finches, sparrows and cardinals exploded in panic. I was off the drafting stool, lunging for my camera, and sock-foot skidding to the foyer window before you could say COOPER'S HAWK!!

My first photo was diagnostic, but not stellar. I was skidding to a halt, after all. So was she.

My second photo was The One. Jesus Mary and Joseph what a beautiful killer she is, clasping the branch with her crooked yellow hands, her eye ablaze, her outer tail feathers exclamation points!!!

Sure, there are branches crossing her, but I love this photo. She's landed in that birch like she was hurled there.

 She's just alighted and she's already planning to leave. Might as well go for it, might get lucky.

My third photo is her leaving in pursuit of juncos and white-throated sparrows.  She wound up diving right into a brushpile Bill created about a month ago, literally dove into the center of it trying to get a sparrow. Came out empty fisted, beat deep into the woods. Total elapsed time from seeing the blur of her incoming rocket to her departure: about four seconds. Raptors make my heart beat faster. Accipiters make it fibrillate.

It didn't take long for a big smile to creep across my face, as I looked at the photos and it hit me that my Dear Old Dad was mighty proud that I'd finally shoved that damn book across the finish line (again), 15 years after I did it the first time. 

And maybe he sent that beautiful Coop to say Huzzah! and Life Goes On! and Join the Party! and maybe just Hello, Julie. I'm here. You are accompanied.

He works with hawks. Hawks are his apports, the gifts he sends me from the other side.

I didn't know that word until my friend Charles taught it to me today, as we compared notes about synchronicity and messages from the departed. Far, far too many perfectly timed gifts arrive on his doorstep and mine to be chalked up to happy chance.

And the synch-up contintued when my friend Caroline from South Dakota (via New York) posted a link today to an interview with photographer Ken Van Sickle. Everything he said about photography resonated deeply with me.  Perhaps my favorite thing he said was 

"If you were there when the Hindenburg caught on fire, and you took a picture of it, that’s a great photograph. But you’re not a great photographer, because you can’t repeat that in everyday things.

"What a great photographer does is, they are consistently able to make something in a style that’s personal to themselves. My pictures don’t depend on extreme sharpness. They depend on the composition and on the subject and on the way I see it."

If you'd like to listen to his brief but spectacular interview, go here, to PBS News Hour's page.

I don't pretend that my Cooper's hawk shot is a great photograph. There's no composing a photo when you have your camera set on center auto focus, and the hawk is perched in front of you for perhaps two of the four seconds it takes you to get off your ass, grab an 8-pound rig, and skid down a hall and into a foyer. You center the thing on the bird, hold your breath and try not to punch the shutter button too hard. You punch it on the first shot, squeeze it on the second and third, and the hawk does the rest. Time's up.

However, I was there  and I did have my camera so in my view this qualifies as a Hindenberg moment. And that, and my Dad sending me a honkin' big adult female Coop as I was running my victory lap, is plenty enough for me.

More hawkish synchronicity in the next post. I'm not leaving South Africa behind. But every once in awhile the present bursts out of the woods, grabs me by the shirtfront, shakes me down and demands an audience.

What is a Vortex? And: Being Stupid in the Desert

On Friday morning, July 31, I had a whole day to myself. It felt like Christmas morning. I could do anything I wanted to. And everywhere I turned was beauty so searing I just stood and stared.

I went over to the festival hall, the Sedona Performing Arts Center at Red Rock High School, just to check in and make sure I was where I was supposed to be.

The first thing I saw was a family of Gambel's quail.

It would be hard to design a more appealing bird. Pleasingly plump, alert, beautifully marked, with a little bobbing topknot atop the sweetest masked face. They look like someone dressed them up in doll clothes. 

There are six quail chicks in this photo. Believe it. And each one had a mini topknot. I croaked.

I think there are seven chicks with the adult in this shot. They're crummy, I know, but they're what I got. And I only got them by imitating the chicks' soft whistle, which drew the family out for a look at me.

Phainopeplas were everywhere. This striking member of a tropical family, the silky-flycatchers, is our only one in temperate zones. Males are shiny blue-black with mostly white underwings. This is a female. That stuff coming off her head is her crest. Crazy. Phainopeplas eat the fruit of desert mistletoe, mostly, and they travel around in bunches like waxwings do.

I decided to go for a hike. I didn't know where. I drove down to Red Rock Crossing Park, but they wanted $10 just to go in. I didn't have any money with me. I drove up on a ridgetop and saw a trailhead sign off Red Rock Loop that said, "Secret Slickrock Trail." Well, that sounded good to me. So off I went, in mid-morning, big camera rig by my side. No water with me. Duh. Well, it was my first hike, and I didn't think I'd be gone all that long. I started seeing things.

Here's why the quail babies need to be so cryptic. A Cooper's hawk waits for her morning Cornish hen.

She launches like a bullet

and I track her against the hard light

getting one lousy shot after another. I'm out of shape, lenswise. I've been shooting iPhone photos all year.

I'm enchanted by the little verbena that grows amidst prickly pear. It reminds me of the peach-colored one I have at home, except that it's what Thalassa Crusoe calls "paradise purple," the color that all flowers seem to revert to.

Paradise purple goes really well with green, blue, red, everything. If you are wondering what color to paint your garden bench, try Paradise purple. I guarantee it'll go with everything. My personal theory is that that's because shadows have lots of violet in them, and shadows are everywhere. My favorite watercolors are the ones where I remember to make the shadows violet.

Before I know it I'm a pretty good piece from the car. But it's soo beautiful. I keep walking.

A new vista opens up with every few yards I walk. How can I stop?

A rock wren (Salpinctes obsoletus) urges me onward with a call like a short in a wire. I love its Latin name. This is a monotypic genus, which means there's only one species in it. Such a cool little bird. The last rock wren I saw was spookin' around a pile of concrete slabs in the middle of the prairie in North Dakota. How it found those make believe rocks, I will never know. It was good to see this one on honest rocks, even if he was a bit molty.

It wasn't long before I realized I had been stupid to leave on a hike without water. I could only marvel at how hot it was getting, for 10 AM. And how dry I was feeling. I'm used to running for three hours or more at home in Ohio without drinking anything. This was much different. I stopped in every little bit of shade beneath the small junipers, then moved on. I came to what must have been the Secret Slick Rock, and walked out on it. Far below, I could see the park I had hoped to enter. I could see the entrance booth, and it looked like if I could find a way down the steep cliff face, I could circumvent that and get into the park. I figured there had to be water down there. 

I picked my way down the cliff, finally reaching a dead end with a drop of about 20'. D'oh. I backtracked and found a rock cairn. A trail! OK. Let's follow that and see where it goes. To my delight, it started to descend. Now we were talking. I hiked down into the canyon, getting thirstier with every step.  I reached the shade of deciduous trees and found some blackberries. They were big, juicy and fruity as marionberries. Yay. That helped. I do believe I will!

Sure enough, I found my way all the way down into the park, and glory be! there were a couple of hosetaps! I stuck my head under one and drank and drank. I knew I'd have to tank up to make it all the way back up to my car, maybe two miles distant. But first I wanted to explore a bit.

 A beautiful creek flows through the park, and there were views of Cathedral Rock from there. The bottom was extremely slippery, so I decided to leave all my electronics on the bank rather than risk a fall with them into the water. I took one last iPhone shot before I crawled like a hurt frog across the creek to the red rocks on the right side. I literally had to navigate on all fours or wind up on my butt, floating downstream.

After lounging on the rocks for awhile, I crossed back and made my way to the vortex site. There are a number of vortex sites around Sedona, and everybody knows about them, makes pilgrimages to them to do yoga and meditation and hang out. It seems that kinetic or magnetic or beneficial or female energy (take your pick, mix and match) from the earth comes up and out at these sites and does all kinds of wonderful things for you. It also is said to make the old junipers on vortex sites grow in a spiral. Hmm. I'd never heard of anything like that. I was bemused by the residents' stubborn use of the plural, "vortexes." And decided to continue to refer to them as "vortices," because I have more than a passing familiarity with Latin usage, and I couldn't do otherwise. I got corrected once, which made me snort a little. Find out more, but not much more, here.

I strike a pretty good balance, at least in my own mind, between the skeptical scientist and the hopeful mystic believer. Rather than accept them at face value, I want some kind of proof of these claims, and I'm more than happy to be my own guinea pig.

I walked out onto the deeply grooved and groovy rock and faced the Cathedral formation.

And I felt this nutty sensation, this sort of spiraling lift of zoop!! that started at the soles of my feet and shot through my body and out the top of my head. I stood there breathing hard, exhilarated, looking around like a newborn foal. Well, that was different!

When I came back through, having made my way to Buddha Beach, I was talking to some people  I'd fallen in with who had asked me about vortices (heh) and I failed to feel the zoop. That's OK. I felt it the first time, when I was alone, and it was pretty neat. 

I thought about the characterization of the vortex energy as "female." And I found myself in an open, receptive state to whatever might present itself. Not questing, not goal-driven. Just willing to wait and let things happen.

To me, that's a feminine outlook, more passive, Zen-infused, if you will, than questing or acquisitive. It's a state where I live most of the time.

Kind of like sitting back and appreciating whatever birds come by, rather than charging off trying to tick bridled titmouse off your list, because you've done your homework and you know they're supposed to be there, and by gum you're gonna be the one to get 'em.

More on that anon.