Uncategorized

by Hob Osterlund

Recently the National Weather Service reported a bizarre cloud formation moving erratically over southern Illinois. The “biological targets,” as the NWS called them, turned out to be a huge swarm of monarch butterflies migrating south. Despite risks related to drought and dwindling milkweed, they were headed to Mexico. If you’re an insect that weighs less than a postage stamp, how do you even consider a trip across the border? What if your brain is no bigger than the tip of a pencil, then what?

Laysan albatross are gargantuan compared to monarchs. Still, you’d be hard pressed to get a radar image of them unless they’ve gathered to feed at some mass squid spawn or the smorgasbord surrounding a factory fishing ship. At sea there is nothing albatrossian that resembles flocks of finches, parliaments of owls, or murders of crows. “Colony” is a collective term, but it only refers to the time they spend on the ground during nesting season. In other words, about 5 percent of their lives.

To make an accurate map of meandering albatross, you have to be a scientist with permits and access to a sizable colony. You have to capture and release a few parents, then wait for the birds to return with data. The good folks from Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, Pacific Rim Conservation, and the US Geological Survey accomplished all these tasks in the summer of 2014. They taped temporary lightweight GPS tags to the back feathers of a dozen birds and tracked them over a time span of seventy-nine days. They assigned an individual color to each bird and superimposed their flights on a map. The visual result: bright multi-colored lines — each line depicting the travels of a single bird — extending over a vast expanse of ocean.

I showed the map to a few friends, and it turned out to be an interesting Rorschach. One person saw strands of candy, sweet and full of promise. Another person saw a frightening pattern of ocean depletion and pelagic plastic. One person saw the earth exhaling, another saw a fire. One Seattle artist saw an image of colorful streamers billowing in the wind. He was most impressed with how the birds’ origins and destinations were always the same. “What’s most mind-blowing,” he said, “is not the fact that they can fly such long distances but that they find their way home at all.” Like dozens of swifts diving down a chimney to roost, the streamers converged, swirled, and disappeared into a single point, signified on the map by a bright yellow star.

Of course, the birds’ real destination was minuscule, and much smaller than the yellow star made it appear. The actual geographic location on Kaua’i was a fenced bluff at the edge of a botanical garden with an area smaller than an American football field. About forty pairs of birds nested there, and dozens of subadults came and went, searching for the perfect mate. With such easy access to the trade winds, it was a great spot for a colony. There was no need for a runway. The birds simply walked to the cliff, spread their wings, and were summoned heavenward. Once airborne, they banked north toward Alaska.

If the distance from Kaua’i to the southern Aleutians is roughly two thousand miles, and the birds’ eastwest foraging range is about the same, the colorful streamers were billowing over an area of about four million square miles. Compare and contrast: the entire United States is 3.8 million square miles. In other words, to find food for their chick, a pair of Laysan albatross may search an area the size of the entire United States.

Talk about your hard-working parents.

Even though traveling such distances is unimaginable, the feat is trumped by the extraordinary fact that albatross can find their way home in such an empire. If a pyramid can be declared a Wonder of the World and a person can be anointed a saint, shouldn’t there be awards for nature’s most astounding achievements? The competition would be crazy, but if I ever got a chance to serve on that nominating committee, I would lobby for albatross navigation. Ask yourself if you could find a few tiny acres in so many millions, especially if you had no landmarks to guide you. Of course you couldn’t; none of us could. Even if you were a sea captain with a sextant and a feel for celestial guidance, Pacific skies are often layered with clouds, so steering by the stars would prove difficult anyway.

We humans are just starting to learn how it is we can find our way across town. The 2014 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to three scientists who discovered the mechanism of our inner GPS. They described “place” and “grid” nerve cells that are responsible for giving us an idea how to get places without having to consult maps at every turn. Their first clue to the discovery came from studying a rat’s brain. If we can learn about wayfinding from caged rodents whose ancestors have lived in captivity for hundreds of generations, imagine what we could learn from the wild, long-distance travelers among us. Author and conservationist Carl Safina, author of Eye of the Albatross, spoke of their many talents. He described how dolphins and bats virtually image a high-definition sonic world, in darkness and at great speed. “Many creatures,” he said, “blow us away with sight, hearing,smell, response time, diving and flying capacities, sonar abilities, migratory and homing abilities.” The list goes on.

What if albatross don’t find their way home with their brains? Even if they steer by the earth’s magnetic field, magnetoception doesn’t tell the whole story. Even if they’re guided by what they smell, their olfactory expertise doesn’t complete the picture either. Plus there’s the matter of timing to consider. Not just time of year, but the rendezvous time coordinated with mates whom they presumably have not seen for months. How do they know whose turn it is on the egg, and whose turn it is to feed the baby? Even if we think “instinct” alone entirely answers the question, that doesn’t mean instinct itself isn’t a miracle.

Maybe the birds match each other’s frequency. Maybe they visualize the outcome they want and follow that vision. Maybe they just go with the flow, trusting wind, gravity, stars, smells and magnetism to guide them. Maybe they are swayed by stories they hear from other birds. Maybe they find their way home with all their hearts, guided by love. Who can rule out any of these possibilities?

Just like they are rooted to their place of hatch, I am anchored to certain immutable truths: when and where I was born, who my ancestors were, what my primary culture admires and abhors, what wars exploded, who broke my heart. All these details sleep in my bed with me, beyond my awareness and more central to my life than I can possibly imagine.

Old friends of mine, a married couple, volunteered for a medical mission many years ago. They adopted two infants from Bangladesh and brought them back to the United States. One daughter did well, but the other was troubled. By the time Maria was fourteen, she was regularly skipping school, using drugs, and doing her best to get pregnant. To prevent her from running away, my friends had to sleep on the floor outside her bedroom. When she did manage to escape, Maria often mysteriously wound up at the city train station. Her exhausted parents ran out of viable therapeutic options, so they took her for a visit to Dhaka. They hoped her birth home would ground her and give her a sense of belonging. They sought counsel from the adoption agency. When the representative opened their file, my friends discovered an astonishing fact: their daughter’s biological mother died in childbirth. She had been living in a train station.

Maybe my primary job is not much different than Maria’s, or that of an albatross. Maybe I don’t have millions of square miles to navigate, but I do have countless judgments that keep me from finding my way home. Home: a place I belong, a place where I am forgiven and forgiving. A place where I am authentic, where I laugh, where ancestors visit my dreams. A place where there is justice. A place where swifts dive down chimneys and butterflies have all the milkweed they need. A place where birds lead the way.

In order to do my job, I’ve had to learn to be vigilant for predators. Some are human, some are mental. People have judged, manipulated, scared, and angered me. They have inspired guilt, caused me to lose sleep, blamed me, underestimated me, lied to me, wasted my time, hurt and betrayed me. But my own mind has been more than an equal co-conspirator: it has judged, manipulated, scared, and angered me. It has inspired guilt, caused me to lose sleep, blamed me, underestimated me, lied to me, wasted my time, hurt and betrayed me. If I want to stay above all that chaos, I have to lock my wings like a switchblade and fly steady — albatross style. Most days the task seems impossible.

But isn’t impossibility a crucial aspect of any pilgrimage? If it were easy, I wouldn’t value it. It has to be unfathomable. How possible is it for a monarch to migrate across a continent? For an albatross to find her chick on a tiny volcanic rock in the most remote island chain in the world? When I consider the challenges my fellow beings face, how can I not emulate their creativity and courage? As author Dani Shapiro says, “We cannot afford to walk sightless among miracles.”

Hob Osterlund is a nurse at Queen’s Hospital in Hawaii. This essay is drawn from the book Holy Mõlí: Albatross & Other Ancestors, published by Oregon State University Press. 

By Lauretta Frederking, from a forthcoming collection of essays by University faculty about how they are not primarily professors of their subjects, but of something else altogether, to be edited by Shannon Mayer and Jacquie Van Hoomissen.

My richest learning and teaching haven’t happened in the classroom, or in the formal places of intellectual exchange. What I really teach has happened at those in-between places, the falling down moments, when I purposely shed my expertise. What I really teach seems to have happened when I am not teaching at all, just living a relationship of communion with students.

A few years ago I was introduced to the word ‘sophrosyne’. There is no precise translation of the Greek word into English. Really it can be explained only by a run of complexities, a balance of contraries: success and failure are equal imposters; everything matters for who we may be becoming and simultaneously nothing matters in terms of who we are. When pressed, it can be described with simplicity as “temperance” or “wisdom” though neither fully captures its essence. Sophrosyne is what I teach students during those in-between places and falling down moments. Things are often not as they appear on the surface or in the moment. Be cautious with good news because it may not be what you hoped for and be open to bad news because it may be the first carving out of a path of self-discovery.

I remember the long arc back to my college years when life appeared in binary terms — success/failure, acceptance/rejection, love/loss — and I vividly remember the stings and ecstasies of both. I see that similar disposition in students. A ‘C’ grade ruins them, a heartbreak destroys all future possibilities of happiness, and then on the other track an ‘A’ grade glorifies them, and a triumph affirms their superstardom destiny; and again and again, I try to be the sandpaper that reminds them an ‘A’ is a challenge, just as a ‘C/D/F’ may be an opportunity. Success and failure are equal imposters.

Most often, this teaching happens outside the classroom. One of my students came to me in the process of, and then in the final stage of, being dismissed from the university. He was devastated and also entirely to blame for the actions that led to his dismissal. I assured him that this might be the most defining moment of his life, not at all because of failure but because of its opportunity. “This could be the moment when you discover who you want to be and not be. Seize it. Wallow in it. But don’t ever forget that life is long enough and grace is powerful enough that this horrible moment may be your great opportunity.”

I have caught more than one student in the midst of cheating on a quiz, a test, an assignment. Certainly the University has a protocol for cheating. However, more important to me than the administrative steps, I ask a student if he or she is a cheater. Almost always, they respond no, no way, this was an accident, a mistake, etc. My response is simple and always the same: ‘If you cheat, you become a cheater. If you aren’t a cheater, don’t cheat, not even once. This is your time to figure out who you are. Let me know when you have figured it out.’ Often I see the outcome. He or she declares the turnaround to never cheat again, and they don’t. I believe them. Sometimes there is silence, or the student drops out of the class. While troubling, maybe those students have figured out who they are as well. I trust that our students’ roads extend beyond their time here on The Bluff, and each student carries the experiences and conversations and moments of reflection with them. Grace rarely happens in an expected way.

The University of Portland invites students and professors into relationship. I accept that a lot of my job is sharing information and expertise; but after 13 years here I realize there have been students who, for whatever reason or spiritual mystery, reach out in a way that invites me into being part of their life journey, figuring out who they are. We can keep it clean and transactional — you give me a paper and I give you a grade — or we can open it up to be a potentially meaningful place of growth. In so many ways, our students come to us socially hard-wired to think like strategic calculators when it comes to teachers and academic environments, and I want to tear down that assumption. We are different here, where teaching is more than being the most learned person in the room. Being there when students are overcoming adversity, and penetrating their authentic purpose, puts us at the center of who they are and what they will bring to the world. I hope our students have many successes and many failures — not to learn how to avoid the latter and win more of the former, but rather to learn that who they are is the same good and growing person regardless of what society gives them. Living from a place of who we are, less driven by illusions or expectations of where we think we need to be going, takes practice. We provide a safe place to figure it out. Sophrosyne.