Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Posted on by Live & Learn

Notes:

  • Photo: Hongkiat (via Your Eyes Blaze Out).
  • Post Inspired by Richard Feynman: One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush.” Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” He says. “Its a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, It’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Mom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katana Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)

38 thoughts on “Monday Morning Wake-Up Call”

  2. OK; not asking how are you….. (Healing Grief….)
    This is sort of one of my Leitmotivs: I know a lot and I know absolutely nothing…. Beautiful exemple. I steal that for myself 😉

  10. It runs in my family, through generation after generation, to love birds. A world without them would be incredibly bland. I can never understand it when I see people out running in the countryside listening to their iPods rather than to the birds. Naught stranger than folk!

    1. Our plumbing is hereditary!

      “All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.”

      –William Faulkner

  11. Great photo and post. That bird is a very cool (and compelling) customer by whatever language one calls it. Thanks for sharing. [Said on a morning here in New Mexico while we have 17 migrating Sand Hill Cranes – 3 and 1/2 feet tall – outside our front door in the field here by the Rio Grande River]

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