May 29, 2006

TODAY'S TUNE [ON/OFF]

"Birds of Morning"
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Through his essays in books and popular magazines, naturalist John Burroughs (1851-1921) taught countless Americans to appreciate nature. Burroughs was so interested in birds that he acquired the nickname John O' Birds and wrote: "The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds — how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives — and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!"

~ Chelle Thompson, Editor

From the Inside Out
GRANDMA OSPREY

From her tiny log cabin on a bluff overlooking a lake, the old lady warbles a love song as she rocks in her chair and peers through binoculars at the object of her affection. High above, a lone bird soars, wings outstretched, in a blaze of brown and white. The bird traces long graceful circles in the sky, its wings flapping slowly in a distinctive M shape. It swoops low over a raggedy nest perched atop a manmade pole. The bird's mate, a lighter chocolate brown, pokes her head out and begins a plaintive ''cheerek... cheerek... cheerek....'' Another spring, another rhapsody of birdsong and blossoms bursting around Arrowhead Mountain Lake. Another remarkable return by the osprey to the nest that Meeri helped make their home.

Thirty years ago these migratory fish-hunting birds were on the verge of extinction in Vermont and much of New England, their numbers devastated by the now-banned chemical DDT. The pesticide contaminated the food chain, poisoning the fish that osprey feed on and disrupting the females' ability to produce calcium for strong eggshells. Flimsy shells were crushed instead of hatched. Nests were abandoned. Now, in a turnaround that even state wildlife officials describe as almost miraculous, Vermont plans to remove the osprey from the endangered list. Seventy-one nests were counted in the state last year, producing 84 chicks. For the first time in decades the osprey are thriving. And much of the credit goes to a small, energetic woman, with a thick Finnish accent, a mop of gray curls, and a striking ability to charm and cajole. ''Grandma Osprey,'' she is called, and in her little corner of northeastern Vermont 84-year-old Meeri Zetterstom is considered as rare and extraordinary as the birds she protects. Meeri feigns bashfulness when asked about her role. ''Sisu,'' she says, the Finnish word for ''stubborn''.

She never set out to become champion of the osprey, Meeri says, though sometimes, when she rocks in her chair and reflects on her life it seems to have been predestined. Growing up in Finland, she remembers seeing osprey — thousands of them — on lakes everywhere. ''They were as common as robins,'' she says. Back then, she paid scant attention to the otherworldly beauty of their sky dance at dawn, or the breathtaking athleticism of their dive for prey.
Back then Meeri was more interested in seeing the world, in meeting the man of her dreams. His name was Kurt Zetterstrom, and they met on a passenger ship in Sweden where he was an officer and Meeri worked as a waitress after she finished school. He resembled Britain's Prince Philip. He made her feel like a princess. They married and traveled the world working on an oil tanker, stopping for adventures at every port: camel rides beneath the Egyptian pyramids, motorcycling in Italy, picking pineapples in Africa. And when they decided to settle down after ten years of seafaring, they chose San Francisco to start their new life.

But California proved too hot for their Scandinavian blood, and Washington State where they moved next, proved too rainy. Eventually Meeri pulled out a map and plunked her finger down on a skinny strip of blue in New England. They packed up their Saab and drove to Vermont. With their own hands they built a two-bedroom cedar cabin on the shores of Arrowhead Mountain Lake, a 740-acre stretch of water built by a power company years earlier. Meeri tended their horses. Kurt worked as a draftsman. Miles from the nearest town, they reveled in their solitude and in their wild neighbors. Their favorite was a lone osprey that would perch on the dead old basswood tree outside their window. They would watch in awe as it circled the lake, hovering at great heights before plunging feet-first once it spotted its prey, hitting the water with a ferocious splash. Often it totally submerged before surfacing, talons sunk deep into a fish almost its size. The osprey returned every year, though it didn't seem to have a nest — or a mate. ''It was such a mysterious thing,'' Meeri says, ''We didn't know if it was male or female, but we loved that bird. We would look forward to seeing it every spring.''

Their lakeside idyll was shattered when Kurt died suddenly of a heart attack early in 1988. Lost without her husband, Meeri grew even more despondent when the osprey failed to return that spring. The bird didn't appear the following year either. Staring into the lake, Meeri made a silent vow. ''I cannot bring my husband back,'' she thought, ''but maybe I can bring back my osprey.'' She read everything she could about osprey and their nesting habits, about the impact of DDT, about efforts by some states to build platforms to encourage the birds to nest. The more Meeri read, the angrier she became. Even Benjamin Franklin had praised the purity and agility of the osprey over the ''poor moral character'' of the bald eagle, a scavenger who will sometimes steal an osprey's catch. Yet there were only two known osprey nests in Vermont. ''People talked about protecting the loon, the peregrine falcon, the bald eagle, yet nothing for the osprey,'' Meeri says. ''The most beautiful bird of all.'' And so, as she tells it, ''I started making noise.''

By 1990 she had become so persistent that the power company, Central Vermont Public Service Corp., agreed to build two platforms, one atop the tree outside her cabin, the other above a 30-foot fiberglass pole on another part of the lake. That Easter Sunday, Meeri watched, ecstatic, as a pair of osprey landed on the nest outside her cabin. The birds spent the summer fishing and building a bigger nest, though they didn't breed. Not that Meeri worried. Young osprey often ''play house'' for a year or two, before starting a family. ''The honeymooners,'' she called them. Armed with dozens of photographs of the birds' return, Meeri persuaded the power company to build more platforms. She helped a local citizens group successfully petition the Vermont Water Resources Board to ban jet-skis on the lake and reduce the speed limit for motor boats.

In the next few years, more ''honeymooners'' arrived. But they continued to abandon their nests, driven away by boaters. Once, Meeri saw people actually shaking the nesting platform. Furious, she videotaped the offenders, dispatching the tape to all the local television stations — some of which aired it — and to the state and power company officials. ''Meeri was relentless,'' said Steve Costello of the power company. ''And she was right.'' Costello first encountered Meeri in 1996 on his first day on the job as public relations director for Central Vermont Public Service Corp. A former newspaperman and amateur birder, Costello quickly came to respect Meeri's knowledge and devotion. He marveled at how she could watch the birds for 12 to 14 hours a day. She knew far more about osprey than anything Costello had ever read in books.

Meeri took a liking to the dark-haired young man. They began working together and with the state to create an 800-foot buffer zone around the nests. They planted warning signs along the lake with pictures and information about the birds. They went into schools and talked about the endangered species.
And every spring, Meeri renewed her vigil, peering through her binoculars and praying for a miracle. In 1998, for the first time, the birds didn't abandon the nest. In fact, the mother rarely left it. And Meeri rarely took her eyes off it. And so, she was a witness in mid-June when a little downy head popped up over the rim. Breathlessly she watched as the mother tore strips off a pike the father had just caught, and, using her hooked bill, delicately place them on the chick's bright red tongue. ''I cried,'' Meeri says. ''I had never seen such a beautiful sight.'' In her diary she wrote, ''Today my first baby was born.''

Every year the osprey have returned. And every year Meeri welcomes them, noting in her logs the precise day and time they arrive. Meeri has mixed feelings about her role, pointing out that the Arrowhead Mountain Lake birds are just a small part of a successful state restoration program that has also seen ospreys return to other parts of Vermont. Still, in this part of the world, it is ''Grandma Osprey'' people think of when they see the majestic raptor. And it is Meeri they thank for bringing it back.

Meeri's eyes are failing now and she doesn't use the binoculars as much. They sit atop a pile of bird books in her cabin. Also in the pile is a children's book. Beautifully bound and illustrated, it tells of a young woman's remarkable journey from Finland to Vermont, and a bird's odyssey back to Arrowhead Mountain Lake. The book was written by Costello and published in 2000, and copies were donated by the power company to every third-grader in the state. The idea, Costello says, was not just to teach them about endangered species, but to show them what one person could do. The book is one of Meeri's most prized possessions. It is titled, ''Meeri Meets the Osprey.''

By Helen O'Neill, Associated Press
Meet Meeri at: www.cvps.com/osprey/meet_meeri.shtml
(Contributed by Kathy who lives in Huntington Beach, California)

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Yes You Can!
RELEASE ADDICTION TO NEGATIVE THINKING

Barbara sought my help because of her chronic fatigue. She had been going to different kinds of doctors and trying different nutrition plans for years and nothing was helping her. One of the doctors suggested that she try psychotherapy.

In became evident early in our work together than Barbara was deeply addicted to thinking the worst. Constant negativity went through her mind about every aspect of her life. She would get out of her car and worry about getting robbed. In social situations, she would tell herself that people didn't like her. She was always worried about money, even though she was a successful graphic designer. Her husband could never do anything right. There was something wrong with every doctor she saw.

Negative thinking causes much stress in the body. I told Barbara to imagine that she was telling these negative thoughts to a child. How would the child feel most of the time? Barbara could see that this child would, of course, feel anxious and stressed much of the time in response to all the negativity and catastrophic thinking.

The medical profession has long told us that stress is one of the leading causes of illness. Stress sets into motion the body's fight or flight response, pouring cortisol into the body and eventually exhausting the adrenal glands. Adrenal exhaustion can be one of the results of so much negative thinking.

While Barbara could understand the possible effect her negative thinking was having on her health, it was extremely challenging for her to give up her negative thinking. Barbara deeply believed that her negative thinking kept her safe from disappointment. She believed that thinking the negative thought before the bad thing would happen prepared her to deal with it. She didn't want to be caught off guard. She believed that she could not handle the pain of disappointment, so that if she knew about it ahead of time and actually expected it, she wouldn't feel disappointed.

In addition, Barbara believed that if she was vigilant enough and thought through all the bad things that could happen, she could prevent them. She believed that by thinking ahead, she could somehow have control over the outcome of things.

Finally, Barbara also believed that she could control how people felt about her by acting right and saying the right thing. She was constantly vigilant about her behavior with others in her attempts to control how they felt about her and treated her.

However, in trying to control her feelings, others' feelings and the outcome of things, Barbara may have been causing her illness. The underlying cause of her negative thinking was her devotion to this control.

The problem with all of this is that it is based on an illusion - the illusion of control. The fact is that Barbara could not foresee every event that could cause her some pain. She was devastated every time something happened that she had not thought of beforehand. How could something painful come out of the blue like that? How could she have not foreseen it?

The paradox of all of this is that, in trying to foresee future catastrophes, Barbara was not present in the moment. Real safety is in being present in the moment so we can respond appropriately to whatever is happening in the moment. When we are fully present in the moment, we are available to receiving information from our inner Guidance. All of us have a Source of Guidance that is always available to us, and that is here to help us and protect us. But we can access our Guidance only when we are fully present in the moment, not when we are trying to control the future.

Barbara is in the process of becoming more aware of her negative thinking. She is not yet healthy, but she has some better days now, days that are lighter and more fun.

Moving out of negative thinking is a process that takes time. If you are a negative thinker, you have been practicing this form of thinking your whole life. It is not going to stop in a day. But if you tune into the stress you feel and learn to connect your stress with your negative thinking, you can slowly change this pattern.

Vitality and joy can be the result of letting go of your negative thinking and learning to be present in the moment.

~By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
www.InnerBonding.com

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