The Backyard Bird Chronicles

by Amy Tan

I consider drawing mostly a brain exercise. The hand that controls the pencil to make lines on paper is a small part of the whole process. You can learn how to draw, and then drawing anything becomes easier, but drawing is really a different way of seeing, converting something from three dimensions in the real world to lines on a two-dimensional sheet of paper.

Drawing requires you to absorb details and then to combine them into a simplified and unified whole.

It fulfills a deep and instinctive urge to plug into the rhythms of what is happening around us. It makes us part of something larger and gives us a sense of our place on earth.

“Thanks to the birds, I have never felt cooped up staying at home. So much remains new, so much can be discovered…when watching birds, I feel free.”

Questions that beget more questions are the fertile spores that can lead you deeper into the forest.

From the beginning, I practiced drawing every day, putting in what Jack calls “pencil miles.”

Would they mourn a crow they didn’t know? Humans do. I have, for the victims of 9/11, for children shot in schools, for fictional characters no less real than a fake crow.