Take a second look …
The yellow eyes of the Saw-whet Owl are so startling, their gaze so steady, that we tend to ignore everything else. It’s easy to miss the trace of blood just below the owl’s bill, a smear of something that changes the way we look at the bird, that deepens our understanding of it. What discoveries might we make if we took that second look more often, if we trained ourselves to see?
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The Wounded Mink
A few years ago, I was having a slow day on the Leslie Street Spit, the reclaimed landfill and Important Bird Area that juts into Lake Ontario just east of downtown Toronto. Over the years, I’ve seen more than 240 species of birds on this five-kilometer-long peninsula, including such local rarities as Connecticut Warbler, Northern Hawk Owl, and Boreal Chickadee. But on this late September afternoon, I wasn’t seeing anything other than a few migrating hawks. In fact, it may have been the hawks who were keeping the other birds out of view. I’d just decided to call it quits, … Read more
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The Good Light
Early in his career as a painter, Vincent Van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother in which he said, “There is no color that is not gray.” I have to assume Van Gogh would have loved Toronto in the winter since that season in this place is a study in gray in all its possible shades and permutations. On most days from December to March, the sky above the city is filled with clouds, and the sun, if it appears at all, only peeks through for a minute or two. The light is somber, and the cold makes it … Read more
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Thin Places
The term “thin place” has become popular to refer to a location where two worlds, two planes of existence, seem to converge. Heaven and earth, time and eternity, the sacred and the profane—in a thin place you feel the barrier that separates these different worlds has worn away or thinned out. Suddenly, your awareness shifts, and you seem to stand on the threshold of something unspeakably strange: a world that is just like ours but completely different from it too. I say the term has become popular because more and more articles about thin places are appearing in newspapers and … Read more
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