In tune with nature and the feminine and the archaic I go for a walk again, down into the woods to birdwatch.

I find the fish have returned to Rock Creek, alewives, holding in the current.  A pleasant surprise, nature doing its thing.

I'm reminded of the Raymond Carver short story, about the guy from the lumber mill named Dummy who receives a 50 gallon container of juvenile fish to stock his pond.  The character of the idiot who has some gut level emotional connection to nature.  I am reminded of Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams crossing the proverbial bridge back to nature in Big Two Hearted River, standing above looking down at trout holding themselves steady in the current above the pebbly bottom.  The return to the gut level human-being-in-nature heartfelt cleansing response, that bird watchers and cherry blossom seekers know, finding a way to be in touch with the feminine, with nature, and the archaic.  A background in Moby Dick, the experience of the sea though the eyes of the 'savage harpooner' Queequeg.

There is the political side of it.  Robert Kennedy defiantly going out of his way in a scary helicopter ride to visit a tribal chief during his visit to South Africa, not a welcome foray in the eyes of the official state, the same bravery to face the inner-city crowd the night Dr. King was shot that might come from being aware of people as people, predating, as it were the modern society that treats people so.  Not unnatural for a man of Irish extraction, a society not far away from the tribal original in custom.