[A few months ago my friends and fellow garden bloggers Linda and Mark gave up blogging. On October 22, 2012 Linda wrote: “I’ve decided I need to spend more time in the real world without always questioning if what I’m doing can be turned into a post. And Mark wants a break from being my photographer.” It really made me think about how much time I was spending ferretting out ideas for posts from my sometimes very boring life. Linda had wanted to do something tactile and wordless; I think she took up drawing again. Ever since the theft of my laptop last fall and the ensuing cyber-chaos I was plunged into, I lost my taste for blogging too. I knew I wanted to keep blogging but I also knew I wanted to change they way I approached blogging.  Instead of acting like a reporter hunting all the time for something to write about, I wanted some spontaneity. I often love the words more as they appear on the page in ink before they are ever converted to whatever this is: electricity? Light?

I am planning to scan and post some pages from time to time. Talk about time saving, and putting you closer to what I am actually doing as a writer; I do not write on a keyboard, I only transcribe here.

But before I do…]

Last week I was in Houston, Texas, a stop off before I headed south to the Rio Grande Valley, my past and lots of birds and wild flowers. I had only driven through Houston many times on trips to south Texas during my youth. This was my first visit. I landed in a nice part of town near Rice University at the home of dear fiends of mine. The air quality and heat hit me first, the smells second. And then the sounds, or should I say songs?

There were so many birds in constant song it nearly drowned out the noise of the traffic. It was mostly white-winged doves, scores and scores of white-winged doves in that very forested city. Even their wings whistled when they took to flight. You could not escape their song, which David Allen Sibley describes as a rhythmic hooting reminiscent of owls: “who cooks for you?” As I wandered through the live oak lined streets of central Houston on my way to the Menil Collection on my first day there it was an incredible chorus I heard not only of the ever-present doves, but mocking birds which whirred and chittered like an ADD child never able to complete a tune. And the boat-tailed grackles that always sound like machinery to me. And blue jays, the punk-rockers of bird song; sure they are more like PIL than Adele, but is it any less song?

What I began to realize as I walked is how neatly the bird songs blended with the traffic, even the blowers and mowers of landscape crews. How tightly knit these sounds were. Certainly the doves never entered the house but their constant questioning  “who cooks for you?” did. The sounds of this big broiling southern city became impenetrable as I listened closer and closer, trying to separate and identify them. They were sticky, glued together with the coo-cooing of the doves and yes, the drone of traffic.  I couldn’t separate them, they wanted to bind and braid. I relaxed into this whole massive murmuring and churning of urban sounds. At points it became so loud, so full, that it became silence.

I would have never heard this silence if I hadn’t had the idea of blogging about the bird songs in the city. Certainly always looking for a post is tiring at times, but sometimes it opens the doors of perception in a wonderful way.

[I noticed that Mark and Linda are back to blogging. Check it out: Each Little World]

                           {The sculptures in the lawn of the Menil Collection are by Michael Heizer}