Where did we travel from?  We all came from somewhere else to America, and before too long we felt we were entitled, we assumed we belonged.  The indigenous peoples of this land knew they belonged – it was in their bodies and their connection to this land.  We, on the other hand, assumed.

When I travel to different cultures I often think about how we are connected, how we’re all humans on the earth just trying to survive.  Our skin color is different, but path is the same.  I like this sense of fluidity.  And I feel sad that many cannot see this.

My family’s ancestors came from England, Ireland, and France, and they settled in the Eastern part of this country, establishing communities of righteousness.  They had a hunger for freedom from the tyranny of the British, and then … They became those who tyrannized others.

My grandmother’s ancestors lived in South Carolina, one of the most important states of the Confederacy.  Slavery became the backbone of their society economically, and a horrific war was fought because there were two opposing views about how to have a Union, and how to treat the issue of slavery.  I can’t imagine a life where others are enslaved, treated and cruelly mistreated as property.  If I were to talk to Grandmother now, I’d imagine she would say it is morally wrong to own slaves, that she couldn’t in good conscience condone this, even though she came from a landscape where this was the norm.  I believe she was aware that this was perpetrated by many in her ancestors, and that her great great great grandfather, Christopher Gadsden, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was a slave owner.  Most Southern men of privilege were.  Does this mean they were to be condemned for being immoral and cruel?  Does playing one’s part in the social structure (owning slaves if you’re well off) change your character as a human?   Thomas Jefferson, an advanced thinker, humanitarian and politician of his time, had slaves.  And he penned the lyrical and courageous document called the Declaration of Independence.

Can you reconcile the social/political choices a person makes from who he or she is in his heart and mind?  I talked about this with a fellow writer recently – she said she couldn’t enjoy the art of Pablo Picasso because he was such a misogynist, because he demeaned women all his life.  That he was an extraordinary painter who transformed minds and hearts throughout his career made no matter to her, because he had succumbed to chauvinism.   Should you conclude that Jefferson’s contributions to our early history should be discounted because he had slaves?  And should I feel uncomfortable because this long ago ancestor of my grandmother’s was a slave owner and also a patriot?  This is an interesting, disturbing question.  I confess that I never allowed myself to accept the brilliance of Hemingway as a writer because I was repelled by how he treated and characterized women.  What I took for a certain immorality took precedence over any notion of learning from his extraordinary craft.

Immigration ...  I return to this again, haunted by the poetic book Exit West by Moshin Hamid, a writer from Pakistan who is also preoccupied with the concept of humans in transit.    We all have come from somewhere, we are all immigrating through different territories of our lives, and like mosaics, in a way, we carry a mix of ethnicity, personality, and vision.   Though we are mosaic-like, we reflect the culture where we live and work.  When we move on, if we do, we leave something(s) behind, as though shedding part of our skin. Is this now dead to us?

How much did my grandmother think about her ancestor as a slave-owner, and how would that have made her feel? While Christopher did not migrate away from his native South, she did, and in doing so she was able to leave behind that which was too hard to carry. She may have known the truth of her past, but she was able to break free, so she could continue to grow into a complex and different woman.

When I think of the Civil War and its dark inhumanity, I realize we may not be as far away from that divisive thinking as we’d like to believe.  These times we inhabit at the outset of the 21st century are terribly fractured and polarized, and they are colored by an escalation of emotions that is scary.  It occurs to me that I may not see the resolution of this rift in our culture or the discovery of a shared humanity, and all I can do with the despair and frustration is continue to reflect on this phenomenon of migration and the truth of our human sameness.  This reassures me somehow, and reminds me to continue to hold some hope for my future ancestors, and for all beings.

This morning the little wild birds didn’t arrive behind my house to partake of all the seed I lovingly put in the feeders, and right away I felt that things were amiss.  I have been spending a lot of time in my office these days and I was used to them swooping in and out, chirping, sparring with one another in the air.  My little wild companions blessing me with their beauty…  Why didn’t they come?  I was clearly taking it personally.  I chose to look further into this mysterious relationship in the hopes they’d return as I wrote.

I can’t remember when I first knew that I was fascinated with birds.  Was it back in the days when my grandmother took me to the duck pond at the Palace of Fine Arts, when I was 6 or 7, and I watched the fat glossy ducks snap up our stale bread, or was it later on in childhood when I saw all the white seagulls congregating on the beach as we feasted on a picnic lunch, or later when I picked up a mangled dead bird off the ground that my cat had teased and killed, her feathers all wet and withered?  Maybe it was when I saw egrets, flamingos, blue footed boobies, and ostriches on some of my trips to far flung places.  

When I learned that birds were descended from the dinosaurs, I was thrilled at the improbability of it:  these tiny delicate feathered beings are related to the tyrannosaurus and other megalithic creatures that traveled mainly on land.  I looked at them differently, I wondered about how they moved the way they did.  How did the animal that lives in the sky have a dinosaur as an ancestor?  How does an animal fly?  Magic comes to mind.  We can never know this.

That’s another thing I feel about birds: they manifest magic.  They sing like no other creature and they fly.  They tend their nests with the tiny pearly white eggs, they feed their young, and dedicate their lives to survival, pure and simple.  And then there are those amazing feathers.  Not just the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, with their brilliant green and red outfits, but even the common little goldfinch, whose yellow coat screams neon sunlight …  the red wing blackbirds that visit my house at the beach – their blacker than black feathers pierced with shocking red streaks at their wings.   How did this all happen?  Birds get to be beautiful just because they are born into a family – they are endowed with beauty - and humans have to go out and buy fancy brilliant clothes to make themselves beautiful.

Birds are comical too.  Just look at the pelican, the huge pouch hanging from his beak, his strutting on land or dive-bombing into the water to feed…  Or the little snowy plovers who skitter along the wet sand as the ocean recedes, as though practicing for a dance routine … or the blue jay who looks ever ready for an argument somehow, with cocked head and piercing eyes.  The magpie is another theatrical personality in the bird world:  he has a swagger about him, he is crafty, as he steals shiny objects or eggs for his own nest.  You forgive him his thievery because his iridescent feathers – brilliant blue and green blended into black, with tuxedo white accents - dress him up so beautifully.

I was named for the magpie.  The why of this is inexplicable to me, as my mother had never before seen a magpie. So, why did she choose this name?  All I can come up with is that she liked the sound of it, or perhaps she had learned somewhere that magpies were extraordinarily smart like their relatives the crows and ravens, and she was sure her daughter would be too.  When I lived in northern New Mexico I got to know these birds well and I fell for them.  They were clever, funny, and elegant.  I never saw them as mean-spirited and cruel.  I watched transfixed as a magpie or two teased my haughty black and white cat on the prowl outside our home.  The cat didn’t have a chance with these birds.

I have been courting hummingbirds for some time now with minimal success.  I have a good friend who travels the world to watch hummingbirds in their habitats and photograph them.  Catching this bird whose wings work at the speed of electricity seems implausible to me, but he is a driven person.  I understand the compulsion, for I have purchased and put up more little feeders for these elusive creatures than I’d like to admit.  I’ve learned the key times to expect them to show up (morning and very late afternoon), and I have also figured out that you don’t need a fancy feeder.  Nice colorful flowers are often a good draw.  But I believe it boils down to being lucky and very, very patient.  If you’re outside and quiet, you can sometimes hear them clicking at you, and feel the whirr of their wings as they dart past you.  They never linger, so you must continue to be patient.   

The most elusive and mysterious of creatures captivate us, they compel us to find and record them in some way.  It’s that “hard to get” thing maybe…  Even domestic cats can be that way:  marching to their own secret tune.  Birds of all kinds, whether they’re little house finches, wild parrots, or red wing blackbirds, lowly pigeons, noisy crows, or indifferent seagulls, live and survive through extraordinary efforts, and they’re not members of the human society.   They delight us when they visit for a just a little while, and then they recede effortlessly into vast air space.

They’re in bird world, and they’re free; we never know when they’ll come and how long they’ll stay.

Yesterday I killed two crabs as I tossed them into boiling water so that I could eat the succulent sweet white meat for my solitary dinner.  I felt a bit like the executioner of these strange snapping, flailing creatures hauled in from the cold waters of Bodega Bay  (and lusted after by so many during this winter season).  The only way I could manage this was to stay right in the moment with them, watching their shiny wet bodies dripping with salt water and frantically clawing at the air, thank them for their lives and then let them go, watching as their bodies turned from dark brown and twitching to pinkish red and quite dead in the cooking pot. Many of us eat animals without pausing to envision the moment of their deaths, that instant when they go from alive and vital to lifeless.  When I realized that the only way I was going to be able to savor the local crab on this New Years weekend was to cook it myself, I saw that I had a great opportunity both to face the reality of consuming living creatures head on, and to send the particular living being(s) off with great thanks and a prayer.  It’s true that I’ve never seen myself as someone who chooses to kill animals, but it is also true that I frequently eat animals that have been killed.  So, it was time to get real, be thankful, and do the deed.  After I carefully washed and cleaned the cooked crab bodies, I felt both sad and strangely satisfied...  Sad that I had been the instrument of death, and satisfied that I had looked death in the face and been able to breathe freely and not be frightened or disgusted.

Last night I very slowly cracked the pink shells, and pulled out the perfectly white meat and dipped it into melted butter laced with lemon.  I thought again of the crab whose body had to be pushed down into the boiling water, who had once been minding his own business in the ocean, just trying to make it from day to day.  A wave of gratitude came over me that I was allowed to feast on this sweet, delicate meat, the tangy flavor of ocean just barely identifiable as I ate.

Everything had unfolded as it should — mindfully and with reverence.  I now know exactly how it feels to perform this act, and it really isn’t terrifying.  There are no shrieks or screams of terror...  It is all about life that comes and goes, and about how we all need to feed ourselves in order to live.  The closer you get to what is in front of you, the more intimate and profound it is.  The Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico chant prayers to the deer and the elk before they shoot them, and they then consume every bit of the animal, including fur and skin.  I thought of the Indians as I cooked my crab, remembering how it made me feel when I first learned that many years ago; it allowed me to see hunting and killing animals for food in a completely new way:  normal ...not violent or evil.

Intention is everything.  And respect for life in all forms.

I think this meal of crab may have been one of the most reverent and delicious I have ever had.