Webbed windows and quiet attention

Amy Tan, birds, and caring a little bit more

I recently heard Amy Tan speak in San Francisco. Author of The Joy Luck Club, she is a renowned Chinese-American writer who recently took a segue from her typical genres to create a book that is a combination of prose and sketches documenting her journey of becoming a birdwatcher. I am not (yet) a birdwatcher, although I do particularly enjoy birds as my first daily conversation partners, reminding me that for the first hour or two of consciousness, it is a good thing just to listen.

A good thing to remember that the world has much to say before we ever need to follow suit. 

Amy described her house with glass windows on three sides and I imagined the light pouring in as she spent hours upon hours looking out those windows at the birds who would come to her backyard. Nestled on the 3rd floor of my apartment building (no backyard), I have my own outlook post of a not unbusy intersection of San Francisco. 

Amy watches birds, I watch humans. But the thing I am realizing we share, is that we both seem to be falling in love. She with the birds, I with the people walking “my” four-way intersection. I love the people who walk the zebra-printed crosswalks at the 4-way stop and pause in the middle with hands gesturing emphatically to underscore some point of their phone conversation, not moving on until getting honked at from multiple sides. I chuckle as I hear quicker footsteps on the pavement outside at 8:57 on a Tuesday morning and know someone forgot to move their car before street-sweeping. I hear other individuals at night rustling through the large dumpster outside the apartment building on the opposite corner, or someone else yelling to a person so viscerally present but only in their own world. I watch firetrucks and ambulances blare up Laguna, hear the 21 bus groan and then hiss as it turns right onto Grove, and feel an oddly deep affection for the people composing the specific thrum of life that I get to observe from my post. 

As Amy has watched and sketched her backyard visitors over recent years, she has become increasingly obsessed, buying thousands-upon-increasing-thousands of mealworms to feed them, discerning their preferences between foods, feeders, etc. She learned which ones reign which hours of the day, which ones are friendly neighbors with one another and which are mortal enemies. And she sketches. She sketches and sketches and sketches. It started with a beginner's class which she won at an auction, if I remember correctly. One class rolled into another, and she soon found herself spending hours of the day sketching through notebook after notebook, her drawings growing more precise and accurate both.

There was a story from the conversation with Amy that’s been lingering with me. As she began to watch the birds through her unidirectional lens, she realized it was just that, one-way. Not only could the birds not necessarily see her from the other side, but the windows of her reflective enclave actually posed a threat to their safety, as more than one aviary friend flew unrestrained into the luscious tree canopy . . . reflected from just behind them. Heartbroken, Amy went out and bought white acrylic paint and covered her windows with spider web designs so that the birds would see and turn away before impact. 

It worked. The birds dipped, dove, and then diverged before coming into contact with the glass. I smiled, imagining to myself how it would be to live in a house with windows covered in mock “spider webs.” She told the story with no hint of remorse in her decision to live in what now partially resembled a hypothetical insect’s-den. 

I wondered how different our world would be if I, if we, did the same. Not to cover our windows in white acrylic paint, but to so eagerly trade our own convenience to preserve the well being and survival of another.

How often do we watch birds crash and say “silly bird,” and it never crosses our mind to paint the windows of our society? Never crosses our mind that glass, not birds, are the imposition.

Like glass, cultures we take as normative often promote one-way vision for those so sure there is nothing there at all. From behind the window, it is easy to believe you truly do know the nature and extent of what is happening outside, while in truth the glass is permitting the sunlight yet blocking the wind. It allows observation without truly inhabiting the shared context of the observed. 

I love the people in the street in part because it is so clear we are each other and not at the same time. I was down on the street a few hours ago, and in a few more I will be there again. The shared-ness of our general state is not a question. I don’t have a car anymore to worry about moving on Tuesdays, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t the one who quickly dropped her bag from shoulder to hand and took off sprinting down Mission street last week chasing a bus I was sure I could beat to the next stop . . . and then the next, after missing its initial departure.  I see a sort of mirror in the urgency, tiredness, and range of emotions in the interactions outside---the “life-ness” of it, as though it is speaking or showing something back to me in a way that is hard to perceive when you are in it. And yet, in the midst of all of this, any two people are so obviously distinctive at the same time.

Amy did not know if it would work, painting the windows, but her growing love for these birds removed the option of not doing anything at all.

And I left the night wondering what actions might be necessitated, what compromises to my view might be unavoidable, if I truly care about the people I watch every day? What might I need to do to love them a little clearer and more honestly?

Each semester, we take the college students I work with to volunteer at City Hope. It is an organization in San Francisco that does amazing work in multiple ways, all with a commitment to building sincere and enduring relationships with an unhoused demographic in San Francisco that is often cast to the periphery of value and the center of judgment. Instead, when the evening meal is served at City Hope, volunteers greet each individual by name, grant the agency of choice in making selections related to their meal, and personally deliver the food to the table where each “guest” is seated. Each is a tiny action, but represents a complete reordering of the social and relational hierarchies that these individuals move within outside the four walls of City Hope, where staff and volunteers strive to create the “living room” of the Tenderloin district. The food is delivered by name and no one is rushed through the time or the space.

The economy centered on time efficiency loses its grip for a moment and the economies of presence and care take its place. There is an undergirding truth that hums under the interactions in this place, that our well-being is incomplete without the well-being of each in our ecosystem.

Why did Amy want to paint the windows, and why was there no calculation of how much it might help the bird versus how much it might impinge on the convenience of her view? I think it was because, first, she had fallen in love. She had fallen in love with the birds in her watching---the specificity of detail through which she saw them: each feather, expression, or mannerism of tendency towards a particular feeder. With each increasing detail of granularity, the cost of losing one bird, losing every affiliate detail of magnificence, was felt one degree more acutely. More personally. I would venture to say, more truly. 

The extent of this love will grow in correlation to the proximity of our view, the capacity to behold in detail. How would our lives look different if before we do things, we watch and listen closely? We must first pay attention. As we do, a foundation of love is formed. And when we move in and from this love, we can trust the subsequent inclinations. We allow our ingenuity to follow the pathways that center the well-being of what or who we love---birds, people, or otherwise. As we move into actions of tangible care, we must never lose this attention which is at the heart of love. Love must be cultivated and practiced, it must be sentiment and choice at the same time.

Sometimes love happens to us, knocking us over with all the involuntary nature of a tidal wave. Other times it is the smallest of practices returned to again, again, and again. Watching, watching. Sketching, sketching, sketching. Listening, listening. Spider webs on windows. One of the most beautiful expressions of love may be that of quiet attention, a willingness to learn that which you profess to care deeply about and for. Letting every sound and sight form a new groove within your vinyl heart, so that as you live a song is formed that bears the story of what you have loved and is a testament to your willingness to love at all.