The Great Chain of Wonder: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun
Most mornings, a great blue heron hunches on the dock, considering with rapt concentration the lake where I’ve been living for two months. I stare out at him. Sometimes the mist is so thick he’s barely a grey ghost. Sometimes the sky and water compete for the bluest ribbon. This is all wondrous to watch. Yesterday, I saw the heron’s long snake neck lift, her body lean forward, her beak a forty-five-degree angle to the sky. She’s going to fly, I thought. But she didn’t. She held the pose, frozen. I’ve seen a heron stare intently and fixedly at the water, fish-stalking, but never at the sky. So, I followed the line of the beak up and across the water—to a bald eagle in the top of a fir. For thirty minutes, neither the heron nor the eagle moved. Although it’s rare (I learned later) an eagle might attack a healthy heron. Was that why the heron was staring? Pure wariness? The heron wouldn’t be worried about nesting young in October. But I can’t help imagining that m...
