Doing Nothing

Part of my children's childhoods was a book created by the Caldecott-Award winning artist and story teller Leo Lionni, called Frederick, the story of a mouse illustrated in simple torn, cut and painted paper collages that sparked my imagination as well as theirs. Frederick did not work alongside the other mice, gathering and storing plump wheat berries and acorns for the onset of winter. No. Frederick just seemed to be sitting on a rock doing nothing. My day yesterday was a watching day, too--watching birds with master birder Bob Collier, whose book on the natural world is about to be published by University of Tennessee Press and sponsored by Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center. He brought a scope which bird watchers know, a sort of telescope on a tripod so that when the birds are kind enough to sit still, a group of people can take turns getting a better-than-binoculars look at the winged. We must have seen 20 or 25 species in a couple of hours.

It was one of those days here when you start your clothing out layered and then ditch the jacket, ditch the turtleneck sweater and end up walking in a shirt, the sun benevolently warming your back. During a stop I left my binoculars in the loo, so had to trek back down the mountain after we carpooled up it to find a particularly juicy birding spot where we were lucky enough to see a yellow-bellied chat, and to hear its four-part song. The chats are seen briefly in trees in the spring, and then they descend to the low-lying brush where they are not spied by humans again all summer.

When winter came for the mice in Lionni's story, it was Frederick who kept the mouse community entertained. Because all along, he had not been doing nothing at all. He had been gathering images, colors and stories to tell during the cold and boring winter. My late husband called the gathering process thatching. He said when an artist appears to be doing nothing, they are not. They are always somehow either taking a much-needed respite and in some way feeding their creative hunger, though it may appear to them and everyone else that they are lazy good-for-nothings. No. They've been gathering poems and music and stories and colors to splash on canvases and carve out sculptures to entertain the people, to feed everyone's soul. Thatch is what we call the dead grass that falls to the bottom of the lawn and transforms to compost to feed the newly growing grasses. "Doing nothing" is an integral part of the cycle of life.