I've been meditating on this Cardinal while waiting for my computer to function this afternoon {my "Desktop Agent Tray" has stopped working according to messages from either Windows or Chrome}. It occurred to me that the Cardinal might have been seeking repose for the purpose of obtaining relief from the constant sensory pressure of the sounds and sights of the outer world in which he dwells. The way toddlers, tired from an afternoon of play, often withdraw while awake from the activities going on around them -- thumb in mouth, holding one's blanket, eyes a bit glazed over, expressing the message "I'm not getting involved in all this." On the other hand it was shortly after dawn when Bonnie saw and photographically captured this Cardinal up in the trees above her pool and he might have simply been asleep [but what is sleep but the rest needed by all living creataures to reopen to the presence of the sensual, tactile, tangible world in which they, like we, are embedded?].
That all living creatures need sleep diurnally means that waking life is filled to the brim with sensory experience (to the extent that the creature's doors of perception are open). Reminds me of the most valuable, for me, contribution made in the comments to Greer's most recent blog by a person who linked a very interesting book concerning sensory channels and gating. Ooops, checking now I find that the commentor's suggested book merely led me to this book linked at amazon:
Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth May 3, 2014
by
Stephen Harrod Buhner
With this author's insights still in mind from a generous section of it that I read last night at amazon*, Elliot's lines
"Teach us to care and not to care. / Teach us to sit still" came to mind for me as I meditated on the resting Cardinal. Reminding me of course of Sorge/Care as Heidegger identified it as intrinsic to human consciousness -- and I think also intrinsic to animal consciousness and already germinal as Maturana and Varela showed in the autopoiesis of primordial cellular life. MP wrote "man is in the world and only in the world does he know himself," but that's also obviously true for MP of all living beings. The natural world draws us out of our own being into its being, into the continual activity of the world's body and the activity of the other consciousnesses that permeate it, energizing us with bodily nourishment, responsive touch, and sensorial inspiration to follow our perceptive channels into exploration of the world's being, which becomes deeply fulfilling
aesthetic experience as well as a range for our own activity and development.
[We have not yet explored the aesthetics of the natural world's phenomenal appeal to consciousness, and we should.] I'm currently reading a wonderful book elaborating on MP's insights -- Louise Westling,
The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (Fordham University Press, 2014) which I recommend to anyone wanting to pursue this inquiry into the origins of consciousness/subjectivity in nature.
*Here are the sections of the first book I linked above, concerning sensory channels and gating, available to read, if you interested, in the amazon text sample: Chapter 2, The Doors of Perception, and Chapter 3, "And the Doorkeeper Obeys When Spoken To."