Finding My Spark: Birding, Mindfulness, and Art

Willet flies above dunes at Moss Landing State Beach.

“Why do you love birds?” I think if you asked any birder this question, you’d get many different answers but a lot of the same sentiments. Birds make us happy. They help us to be mindful. Birds are beautiful. Birding helps us slow down. It improves our mental health and helps us connect with our community. Birds are just cool and interesting.

Birds have featured throughout history in art and culture; mythology and religion. Humans have long been in awe of these creatures. Is it because they can fly? Because their songs stir something in our souls? Do we see something of ourselves in their communities and habits?

In my first blog post I talked about my lifelong passion for nature and wildlife, and how my deeper interest in birds began during college.

During the summer before my second year, before embarking on an ornithology course, I read a book called What the Robin Knows by naturalist and tracker Jon Young. Young invites readers to learn from the birds around them, particularly from the sounds they make or don’t make. I was enamored by the idea that there was secret knowledge all around me that I could learn to tap into.

While visiting family in Pennsylvania that summer, I woke myself early one morning to sneak out to the back porch and listen to the dawn chorus. As I sat, as still as possible, the catbirds came out from their hiding spots beside me and the chickadees visited the bird feeder. I was near giddy at the spectacle and at feeling like the birds had accepted me.

People often ask “what’s your spark bird?” meaning what bird sparked your interest and passion for birding. But it can also mean a specific experience, place, or moment. Someone asked me this just the other day and I think I gave a generic answer, but as I started writing this blog I was reminded of that experience on the porch in summer 2014.

For me I think my spark moment was reading Jon Young’s book and experiencing that morning, surrounded by birds who were content to go about their day, with me a silent and still presence among them.

I felt like I was a part of something bigger than myself. I was connected to the natural world around me instead of apart from it.

As yet untitled oil painting: red-winged blackbirds over Carmel River lagoon.

I’m grateful that my introduction to birding was in this way, before jumping into the more scientific side. Many years have passed since I took that ornithology course and much of the technical knowledge has faded from my mind, but because of that experience, mindfulness and a simple enjoyment of watching birds is what has stuck with me. But there are other reasons I love birds, too.

I love birds because they are everywhere and you don’t need any special equipment to enjoy* them (binoculars help but aren’t necessary). *Edited to add: if you are blind or low vision, you can enjoy birds by listening to them. There are many ways to be a birder.

You can watch birds from anywhere, you don’t even need to leave your house if you aren’t able to. You can travel around the world seeking every species or you can get to know the birds in your own local patch– in your city, neighborhood, or even as hyper-local as what you can see out the window.

Once you open up that door and start noticing birds, you find you're part of a diverse and magical world. Birding helps me find joy in everyday moments and helps me be present in every moment.

Birds are going about their lives in rhythm with the seasons which inspires me to do the same.

Birds have a delicacy and a grace to them, but they are also powerful and strong, built to survive in inhospitable conditions.

Creating art that centers on the lives and stories of California birds is important to me and I think it comes back to that morning on the porch in Pennsylvania, to Jon Young’s book, and to nature journaling. It’s also connected to my disability.

I’m interested in the nature that’s right around me because of what it can teach me about my home and the Earth and because it makes me feel more connected to this land. Observing and recording the natural world around me and making art from it is a form of nature journaling, whether it takes place in a journal or not.

There are birds all around me all the time. They are charismatic and mysterious; surprising yet predictable. They carry out their lives with near indifference to me, which is somehow comforting. We are not friends but we are companions in life.

Because as a disabled artist, I’m not going to be traveling far and wide to create art, instead I’m connecting with what’s accessible to me. Which is okay with me because there is a lifetime of inspiration in the nature that's around me every day. This, too, is a form of mindfulness; something I’ve only lately realized is a huge part of my art. Mindfulness, simply put, is paying attention on purpose.

Creating art helps me see the joy and beauty in my own life by paying deeper attention to what is present. I am drawn to and inspired by the ordinary every day moments that can be transformed into something extraordinary under the light of mindfulness.

When you are in pain most of the time, and frequently waylaid by fatigue, it’s easy to get lost in the mire of your own suffering. And as a compassionate person it’s also easy to get lost in the great suffering throughout the world. Sometimes there is nothing left but to realize our connection to all things, and to take refuge in the beauty and joy of the everyday. Birds included!

When I'm able to, I love sketching birds as they go about their lives.

Another aspect of my love for birds is that they live very “queer” lives and I see myself reflected in them. For most species, the males are the more flamboyantly colored and adorned, looking feminine by human standards. There are hundreds of species of birds with documented same-sex pairings. There are birds who are two genders.

A bird certainly wouldn’t define themselves as queer. They just are what they are. Birds help me see that there is a place for everyone in the natural world and that I am a part of that world.

Birds are at home in both the air, on land, and often in water. Many are more active at dawn and dusk, or make their homes in narrow bands of transitional habitat (like the intertidal zone). These liminal, in-between spaces are not desolate and void of life, but often where the unique and highly specialized forms of life thrive.

I feel myself inhabiting in-between spaces in life, too. Queerness could be defined as an in-between space especially being non-binary and bisexual. Birds teach me that I can thrive in these spaces and I do not need to be only one thing or the other.

Birds hover between and are not asked to choose. Yet they live full lives. They occupy specific niches that form and adapt around them and with them. I think humanity could learn a lot from birds.

So, to answer your question, there are so many reasons I love birds and choose to paint them. As I pay attention to the world around me, as I notice the nature that is in my every day life and the nature I seek out, I create art from those experiences. Painting birds connects me to my home both within myself and without, and it is intimately connected to my body and its abilities and disabilities.

Birds are everywhere, all the time. So maybe the simple answer is that birds are there, and so am I, so why not? That’s not to say that I will only paint birds or that I will paint birds forever. But for now, I’m happy to be here with the birds.

All photos and art copyright Morgan Lewis.