2013년과 2014년의 경계에서

시간의 단위가 있다는 것에 항상 감사한다. 끝이 정해져 있기 때문에 우리는 늘 아쉬움이라는 감정을 느끼게 된다. 그리고 그 아쉬움이 우리 인생이 자극이 된다. 2013년 12월 31일과 2014년 1월 1일 차이는 아무것도 없는 것 같지만, 나에게 있어서는 그 의미의 차이가 엄청나다. 사실 삶의 목표가 뚜렷하고 하루하루가 너무나 충실해서 그 두 날짜가 큰 차이가 없는 사람들도 있을 수 있다. 하지만 나같은 평범한 사람들에게는 늘 죽고 새로 태어나는 삶이 필요하다. 데드라인이 있어야 겨우겨우 벼락치기하는 스타일이기 때문에;; 

한해가 끝나가는 시점에서 뉴욕 타임즈에 좋은 기고가 올라왔다. Life on the Edge. 자연을 보면 경계지점에서 항상 예상치 못한 변화와 다양한 생물종이 번식한다는 것이다. Diversity, vitality를 볼수 있는 곳이 edge 라고 한다. 그리고 작가에 의하면 시간에 있어서도 경계는 우리에게 과거와 미래를 이어주는 지점으로 새로운 가능성을 발견케 해준다는 것이다. 나 역시 경계에 다가서고 있는 이 순간이 나는 즐겁다. 2013년의 아쉬운 일들도 있었지만 감사한 일도 많았다. 그 일들을 돌이키면서, 2014년은 나에게 또 어떤 예상치 못한 의미와 즐거움으로 다가올지, 그리고 그 행복을 내가 감히 계획해보는 일들을 앞으로 며칠간 해봐야겠다.

Edges arise where two habitat types come into contact.

(Wikiepedia Link : Edge Effect)

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December 26, 2013

Life on the Edge

By AKIKO BUSCH

IN environmental parlance, the ecotone is the zone where two habitats merge, that threshold where water meets the shore, where the forest comes to meadow, or where woodland ends at a cultivated lawn. It is the edge habitat where everything — soil content, vegetation, moisture, humidity, light, pollination — changes. It’s also where species from both sides converge, rendering it a place of complex interaction and diversity.

All of which makes it a good place to work. My small office here in the Hudson Valley of New York is situated at the edge of our yard, where the woods of oak, maples and hickories meet the brambles, the rye grass and timothy. Things are always happening here: White-tailed deer wander out from the woods foraging for something to eat, and wild turkeys often parade through the long grass. Once, at dusk, I saw a coyote slipping through the trees, and for a few brief moments two winters ago, a small gray bobcat. And one morning last summer I was astonished to see a black bear amble out from the trees.

The view from my window is of a place of constant change and unexpected appearances. Such a landscape can be helpful when you’re trying to distill a nebulous idea into a handful of words. It could be nothing more than a ring-necked pheasant pecking at the dry leaves, its iridescent green feathers picking up the glint of afternoon light, but a glance outdoors is enough to remind me of the intensity and complexity in these places of transition, where one thing manages to become another.

Aldo Leopold, forester, writer and dean of American wildlife conservation, articulated the idea of the edge effect in his 1933 classic, “Game Management.” Observing how different species search out different peripheries, he wrote that the grouse hunter looks to the edges of the woods “with its grape tangles, haw-bushes, and little grassy bays,” while the quail hunter “follows the common edge between the brushy draw and the weedy corn,” and the deer hunter “the edge between the oaks of the south slope and the pine thicket of the north slope.”

“We do not understand the reason for all of these edge-effects,” he wrote, “but in those cases where we can guess the reason, it usually harks back either to the desirability of simultaneous access to more than one environmental type, or the greater richness of border vegetation, or both.”

Humans, too, have some primal appreciation for this piece of environmental real estate. We seem to know that the edge is where the action is, or the place you push things to for the best results. When you understand the periphery’s purpose and significance in ecology, it gives you another way to understand different edges in human society and how their energy is created, whether you are talking about the borders between diverse populations in urban communities or more abstract reflections on how ideas intersect and are cross-pollinated.

In an essay about ethnic identity, the historian and essayist Tony Judt wrote about his preference for the edge as “the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another.” Margins and edges, he suggested, offer us “a decidedly advantageous perch.”

And it occurs to me now, as we edge into a new year, that time has an ecotone of its own, some thin cusp where before meets up with after. Because surely the edge effect can be a circumstance of chronology as well as one of place. And surely the way the months, seasons, years brush up against one another can produce a similar influence of change, diversity, vitality.

Perhaps it is possible to imagine year’s end as having some temporal edge effect, to see it as the place where desire and expectation intersect with actuality. And to look at this time of year as an interval during which one is suddenly more attentive to that friction between the finished and the unfinished, the energy that lies between the done and the undone.

If adjacencies of terrain nurture biodiversity, maybe this juncture of years can generate similar sudden sightings of unexpected possibilities. How many minutes, hours, days are equal to a few feet of wild grass and bramble? And who knows what could show up during that time? It could be anything. The bears are asleep now, but it could be a turkey flapping in the brush, a gray squirrel practicing its aerials, or a coyote slipping by so elusively that all I’ll ever notice are its prints in the snow.

Akiko Busch is the author of “The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science.”