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Through examples of different bird arrivals, recognition is framed as learning what is more than familiar, where attention and sound are reshaped in near-parallel phenomenological practice.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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Calgary, Canada  \nSeeing the frailty of your life through seeing the breath is the meditation on therecollection of death. Just realizing this fact—that if the breath goes in but does not go out again, or goes out but does not come in again, your life is over—is enough to change the mind. It will startle you into being aware. (Chah, 2001, p. 44)  \nI  \nI mentioned during a gathering of teachers seeing a Downey Woodpecker having at the stump in our backyard a few days earlier, how, over and over again, I could not quite resolve the bright yellow patch on the back of its head. I did my best to imagine that it might be an immature boy, and all this work was bent on maintaining myself in its presence and asking, repeatedly, that it yield itself up to my presumptions. Downey Woodpeckers are the only thing anything like this I’ve seen in these parts for the past 30 years.  \nFunny black and white back design, though.  \nThen that sudden, oh-so-familiar gulp of air. No, this won’t do: “Northern Three-Toed Woodpecker: . . . yellow caps . . . ‘ladder’ back. The female lacks the yellow cap”(Peterson, 1980, p. 192) .  \nSuch experiences are, of course, commonplace, and they involve a strange, experiential reciprocity. As it finally became what it is—freed from my presuming—I became myself all over again, freed from that very same presuming. Humiliation tinged with joy and uplift, just enough to feel fresh air, some buoyance under the wings. Exuberance (“be abundant, grow luxuriously” [OED]) .“Without gut level experience of the other, without sharing his aura, you can’tbe saved from yourself”(Illich, 1998, p. 6) .  \nThese aren’t exactly meant to be “metaphors.” They are meant, failingly, to describe something bodily palpable about the arrival of this sort of arresting experience. Body-bounded intimacies:  \n• “the [possibility . . . to](possibility . . . to) see everything with fresh eyes, so that what is long familiar fuses with the new into a many levelled unity”(Gadamer, 1989, p. 16) .  \n• “the readiness of the person who is receiving and assimilating [des Aufnehmenden] the text [or the bird sighted] to be‘all ears’ [ganz Ohr zu sein],[without which] no . . . text will speak.”(Gadamer, 2007, p. 189)  \nEyes. Ears. And both of these framed at the moment in which presumptions“break open”(Gadamer, 1989, p. 360),“break forth”(p. 458) and “reciprocity”  \nCanadian Journal of Environmental Education, 23 (3), 2020 7  \n(Gadamer, 1984, p. 323) is won by losing myself in order to save myself from myself.  \nThis possibility, this readiness, are things I am still learning about. Here is the ecopedagogical point—this learning is done in an intimate concert with these birds and their kin who ask this of me and who, in responding, have shaped my own readiness for that concert:  \nHow could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions—gravity and a liveable temperature range—have given us fluids and flesh.  \nThe trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes.  \nThe “place”(from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. (Snyder, 2003, p. 29)  \nThus the lovely paradox of learning that demonstrates that all learning is ecopedagogical: I cannot heed those feeder arrivals if I am not all ears and fresh eyes, ready for what arrives “beyond my wanting and doing”(Gadamer, 1989, p. xxviii) . And it is precisely as a result of my repeated, often-failing attention to them that such ears become properly curved and shapely and useful.  \n“All ears” is somehow both cause and effect. It is a practice that is both my own and the locale of being saved from myself.  \nThis is a phenomenological fact that as those ears shape, the sounds of the world shape in near-perfect parallel.  \nConspiracy.  \nII  \nIt would not deserve the interest w","cbCain3X4MVOj295","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCain3X4MVOj295","pdf",439814,"English","# Encountering birds and breaking presumptions\n## Breath, death, and awakened awareness\n# Embodied intimacy: eyes and ears\n## “All ears” as practice and reciprocity\n# Conspiracy and learning beyond familiarity\n## Recognition as illuminated knowing","[{\"question\":\"What role does breath play in the author’s argument?\",\"answer\":\"Breath is used to focus on the fragility of life, showing that if breath stops recurring, life ends, which then changes the mind and makes one more aware.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the author emphasize “all ears” and “fresh eyes”?\",\"answer\":\"“All ears” is portrayed as both cause and effect in learning: receiving what arrives requires readiness, and repeated attention shapes the person’s ears and eyes so the experience becomes meaningful.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the essay define learning in an ecopedagogical way?\",\"answer\":\"Learning is described as ecopedagogical because it depends on the planet and its conditions, and the author learns through intimate concert with birds and their kin as their presence shapes readiness.\"}]","“It Will Startle You”: Thoughts on a Pedagogical Conspiracy of Birds | PDF",1792083886,13]