Lifting Off the Loxahatchee
consumed with freedom
I’ve always been consumed with and by freedom. Probably why I’ve had layovers at airports that lasted longer than most of my jobs, why I prefer cats to dogs, and why I far prefer baseball to other organized sports.
Indeed, the older I get the more consumed with and by freedom I become. Maybe because the physical freedom of my youth is far behind me now in the rearview mirror of my life, and I feel myself closing in on the day when I may need some help to get around and manage my affairs. And although I don’t fear death, I do fear the physical deterioration that rides shotgun — if I’m lucky. Hopefully, my yearnings for spiritual freedom will continue to grow even as my physical freedom wanes. Not at all sure how that will manifest over time, or how I’ll deal with it if and when it does.
Lifting Off the Loxahatchee memorializes a gloriously free moment in time as a common boat-tailed grackle lifts out of the cool Loxahatchee waters after a delightful sunset bath. How simple. How grand. How free.
When on the moss-green hill the wandering wind
Drowses, and lays his brazen trumpet down,
When snow-fed waters gurgle, cold and brown,
And wintered birds creep from the stacks to find
Solace, while each bright eye begins to see
A visionary nest in every tree —
Let us away, out of the murky day
Of sullen towns, into the silver noise
Of woods where every bud has found her way
Sunward, and every leaf has found a voice.
Mary Webb, Freedom
Execrable flick about irredeemable characters but at the end, The Manson Family on celluloid steroids gets to go out to Free Bird & the music gives them undeserved wings.
Bernoulli music: an increase in the fluid flow speed decreases the pressure.
But birds on the wing (especially hummingbirds) & music, & the feelings those elicit, preceded mathematicians’ transcription-descriptions of them … & what Alfred Hitchcock did with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOadx4ZICaQ
Dirty Phoenix Birds apparently. Or catbirds El Dorado-seated at less than 9 lives. They got a cat o’ nine flogging by good old TX boys, but lived to tell a sequel tale. A trilogy it was, in fact (I only saw the one was enough).
Ah, well, despite Huxwell, cue Kiki Dee ~ what a chickadee! ~ who does it better than me & so I’m glad she’s out there :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3ZtImowdLU