TOADTalk: Studying the Weaverbird
Alice Meyer shares some experiences from her around-the-world sabbatical
As the months go by in a Thacher school year, students and faculty members learn about each other in a thousand different ways, times, and contexts: around the breakfast or formal dinner table, in a sunshiny moment on the Pergola or a sunset shared on a trail, at the whiteboard in a classroom, lab, studio or seminar circle, at practices and games and rehearsals, at coffeehouses and Open Houses, in dorm common rooms, and in Suburbans on highways or back roads on the way to community service projects, field trips, cultural excursions, or athletic events. Then there’s each faculty member’s TOADTalk. Monday morning’s all-School Assembly launches with whatever the Teacher On Active Duty wishes to share—a reflection, a story or song, a demonstration of some sort, or a simple poem. In this way, every week of the school year, the community gains a new window into the mind or heart or spirit of one of our own.
Alice Meyer, whose TOADTalk is featured below, is the Dorm Head to Lower School boys, Associate Director of College Counseling, and teacher of AP Psychology. She and her husband Kurt Meyer, Chair of the Mathematics Department and Director of Sustainability, have worked and lived at Thacher for 28 years and have raised two boys on campus, both Thacher graduates.
I became aware of this little yellow bird in our first week as teachers at African Leadership Academy. He was flitting around the tree next to the pathway to my classroom. I soon learned that he was a weaver, and he was staking out this tree to build his nest. Over the next four months, I checked in with this little guy nearly every day, and I watched him go through a complicated mating ritual that required vigilant attention and tremendous effort 24/7 over weeks and weeks.
Alice Meyer, whose TOADTalk is featured below, is the Dorm Head to Lower School boys, Associate Director of College Counseling, and teacher of AP Psychology. She and her husband Kurt Meyer, Chair of the Mathematics Department and Director of Sustainability, have worked and lived at Thacher for 28 years and have raised two boys on campus, both Thacher graduates.
I became aware of this little yellow bird in our first week as teachers at African Leadership Academy. He was flitting around the tree next to the pathway to my classroom. I soon learned that he was a weaver, and he was staking out this tree to build his nest. Over the next four months, I checked in with this little guy nearly every day, and I watched him go through a complicated mating ritual that required vigilant attention and tremendous effort 24/7 over weeks and weeks.
Using only slender blades of grass, the male weaverbird weaves an intricate nest that is strong enough to withstand regular bouts of wind and rain, and can hold a mate and a brood of chicks. The nest’s first job, however, is to attract a mate. Once the nest is done (I learned it takes about 2 days to make one), the female comes and checks it out. If she likes it, she moves in. If she doesn’t, she tries to destroy it… sometimes successfully, sometimes not because he’s fiercely protective of his work. But, in a never-ending wish to please, he builds another nest. His days are filled with nest building and fending off unfriendly female destruction, and then more nest building to make decoys from the “real” nest where his chosen female is doing her thing. Over the four months I watched him, I think he built over 15 nests.
Part of my fascination with this weaver’s travails was the opportunity to step into the life of this little bird… to try to see the world as he saw it. I learned that he was extremely predictable… he was always in or around his tree. I was the random event in his life, not the other way around. He was just going about business, doing his weaver thing.
And that’s the thing about travel. You step out of your own pattern, your own routines, and try to make sense of the patterns of others. You learn that there’s a lot of predictability to every existence… we all have certain routines, certain jobs, we all have purpose.
These are pictures from our 14-month sabbatical… as we began planning this trip, we had a fantasy list of places we’d like to go…. Sometime. Perhaps this was our moment. We discovered the most economical way to do such a long trip was to buy one of those around-the-world fares… so we did…
The most freeing aspect of a trip like this is the opportunity to live in the moment every day. When people ask “What was the favorite thing you saw?” or “What was your favorite place?” those are impossible questions to answer.
- Maybe it was trying to imagine the sophisticated court life at Ankor Wat many centuries ago.
- Or maybe it was enjoying the little children swarm around Kurt on the beach as he let them use his camera to take pictures of themselves.
- Or maybe it was watching a polar bear walk across a mile of ice to check out this new foreign thing (our boat) which had just intruded itself into her life.
- Or maybe it was coming upon a leopard guarding his kill that had unfortunately fallen into the pond as it died, making it unattainable for the hungry cat.
- Or maybe it was being swept away by the costumes and dances of students sharing their cultures with each other
- Or maybe it was watching a pack of wild dogs trying to take down a warthog or a pod of killer whales trying to snatch a sea lion pup from the beach.
- Or maybe it was trying to imagine the horror of the Spanish Inquisition on the tiny bands of Cathars on high mountain top fortresses.
- Or maybe it was getting up at 3 in the morning to hike through the fields to see a rare bird called Cock of the Rock who routinely came to the same tree every morning at dawn.
- Or maybe it was standing in an enormous tomb of a important leader and trying to imagine what life was like when he lived
- Or maybe it stepping out of our hotel in Hanoi every morning and seeing a young woman arrive balancing her entire restaurant on a pole between her shoulders… she carried the steaming pot of food, banana leaves to serve with, and plastic bathroom stools for her customers to sit on… all set up on the curb.
When we got home a year ago I realized that this trip changed me. Of course I had had many new and exciting experiences. But the real change was in the way I see. I’m much more appreciative of the spider in the corner of my house spinning his web, or the hawks that land in the same tree as I go on my walk. I’m aware that, like me, every creature has habits, has responsibilities, has routines… and is busy living his or her life.
Which brings me back to the weaver. I learned that my weaverbird has many cousins all over the world. They come in many colors… and each species has a particular style of building its nest. Some make messy nests, some make extremely complicated nests, some even make condominiums. But they all take very seriously the business of being a weaver… they all weave.
We humans are blessed with the ability to take very seriously our own purpose, and we go about it in a singular and focused way. But, at the same time, we are able to have these moments when we can step out of our own routines and appreciate the industriousness, the day-to-day business of others. We can imagine and appreciate the world’s history and its complicated present. And that’s a beautiful thing.
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