Murmur

After a two-week slurry of cold rain, snow, and hail, Sun has finally kissed the meadow and the old house in the Coast Range. The day has been a deafening buzz, bang, and screech of power tools, those kilowatt servants brought in to support my struggle to keep this place standing for another generation. Shadows deepen and lengthen into evening. Body and soul are beat down tired, and I’m longing for a small wild space to sit and become quietly attentive to the other-than-human world. There is a spot just inside the edge of the old forest, a place where Calypso orchids, the flower Mom taught me as “lady slipper,” should be blooming.

I trudge to the upper edge of the meadow, past the piece of corrugated roofing placed on the ground to provide refuge for rubber boas. Stepping inside the forest, I find a cushion of Oregon beaked moss to sit on. Douglas-fir trunks wider than my outspread arms make their straight and naked ascent to the first limbs three stories up. Two giants grow so close together that my shoulders barely fit between them, a couplet of trees much older than the human concept of thinning to “improve” these forests.

In the dying light, a decaying stump stares back at me. The notch is still visible three feet up where a platform was inserted on which people could stand and send their crosscut “misery whip” through two centuries of wood. The stump reminds me that this place wasn’t an edge less than a century ago, at time when giants like these were common. The Calypso orchids are here, nodding their tiny purple and pink assent, but darkness is rising too quickly for me to count them. I wonder how many survived that 112-degree day last summer.

My ears tickle with murmuring of various sorts. Pacific chorus frogs still murmur from the wetland on the valley floor, the strongest males holding out for one more receptive female before spring drifts into summer drought. Deeper in the forest behind me a western screech owl toots and murmurs. Evening wind on high branches carries thin overcast in from the southwest, a murmur of changing weather. My nose registers the murmur of decay, trillions of death-loving life-giving microbes recycling woody litter on the forest floor into elemental molecules available for root-bound mycorrhizal symbionts. If I listen deeply and with ears of imagination, I can hear the murmur of old trees discussing through their roots how best to meet an uncertain future in which retreat is not an option. All the while, my heart thuds along with all the other hearts in this place, creating a murmur of regurgitated atrial blood that I’ve had for decades.

I love the feel and sound of murmur on my lips and in my larynx, the duplication of soft M and throaty Urr. I would use it in the middle-of-the-night as a meditation for falling back to sleep, but this would wake my wife. Murmur is onomatopoetic. Of course it is. How could such a resonate word not be? Linguists call this kind of word a “reduplication,” a repetition of the root or entire word. And yes, it functions as both verb and noun. The Latins (murmurare), Greeks (mormyrei), and Lithuanians (murmlenti) could feel it on their lips. In the meantime, the other-than-human world has gone on about its 2.5-billion-year business of evolving soundscapes with no regard to human language.

The noun murmuration is my favorite derivative of murmur. It is a soft and lovely onomatopoeia mimicking wind on the wings of thousands of starlings synchronously swooping and swirling through a dusky sky on their way to roost. (I know, I know … North American starlings are an introduced pestilence. But so are all non-indigenous people, so let’s put that aside for a moment.) The birds are thought to murmurate as an antipredator behavior, a way to confuse a waiting raptor intent on finding dinner. I can imagine this logic. I’ve watched a Coopers hawk waiting resolutely on our local Agate Hall Chimney, eventually snatching a Vaux’s swift out of hundreds circling in to roost. Then again, sometimes I pull off my biologist hardhat and wonder if birds perform the airborne ballet of murmuration for the pure unbridled joy of dancing together.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Starling_murmuration.jpg

The mechanics of those nearly instantaneous turns necessary for thousands of individual birds to remain cohesive are more approachable with standard scientific methods. Research has shown that seven is the magic number. Each bird focuses on the behavior of seven of its nearest neighbors. Imagine the intrinsic trust. Imagine the split-second intensity, each flicker of neuron, each twitch of muscle fiber, each tilt of hollow bone and attached feather necessary for eight birds to remain inextricably knit together, synchronicity spreading throughout the flock to form that avian churn in the evening sky. All I can do is rub fingers over furrowed brow, a personal manifestation of awe.

Evening settles into tired bones. The moss is cool and damp on my butt. My mind becomes a disconsolation, the grumbling version of murmur in noun form, the definition originally implied by a fourteenth-century French word wizard. After most of a lifetime of watching, I have become deeply suspicious of modern human endeavors, especially economics and politics. I am especially suspicious of leaders who use politics and economics to instigate or condone wanton blood-letting, the most recent example being Ukraine. My pacifist ideals have been rankled, confused by anger. Again.

I wonder. Maybe meticulous attention to a murmuration of starlings or chorus frogs or mycorrhizae would take the edge off our human propensity for blood-letting. We now use biological design to improve all kinds of human systems and structures, aptly referred to as biomimicry. Even the word murmur is a form of biomimicry. Why not look to cooperation in nature in order to restructure our thinking on how to behave? What if we could learn the leaderless cohesion of a starling flock, or could sing and be silent together like chorus frogs, or share resources through roots grown strong in deep soil? Would we stop killing one another? This isn’t necessarily transcendence. Instead, it is acknowledging Nature as a keeper of evolutionary wisdom.

Ironically, I’m alone in this darkening dusk, disconnected from seven fellow humans who might keep me connected to the flock. But this evening my lessons will not be found in human companionship. I stand to leave. Aging bones and muscles grumble. The moss under my butt gives thanks. Softly, I repeat the word that is a repetition, a meditation, even a prayer. Murmur.

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An earlier version of this essay appeared in the May issue of Nature Trails, a publication of the Eugene Natural History Society.

On June 19 at 4 p.m. (also Juneteenth and Father’s Day!) I’ll be reading from my newest book Dancing with an Apocalypse with the inimitable Charles Goodrich at Tsunami Books in Eugene. Charles and I intend to have a blast, and we hope you can join us!