1000 mouthfuls of mud

Or, a thermodynamics of love

cliff swallow mud gathering marks on a riverbank.

In the late spring I took my 10-month-old child, Tegan Wilder, to a place where I knew there would be cliff swallows. They seem to love highway bridges, where the telltale sight of colonies with hundreds to thousands of mud nests can be seen hanging from the concrete. This particular bridge is over a river which runs year-round in the otherwise quite dry Los Padres, so the bridge offers architectural support and the wet bank provides a good source of reliable mud with which to build with tiny beaks. 

I wanted to do some tracking, so I brought Tegan to this place where the soil is a loose and perfect substrate for capturing animal tracks. The water brings many animals to this location, and their movements imprint in the muddy bank and the dusty landscape. 

After parking on the side of the highway, I put Tegan in a side sling, and ventured down a path through aromatic scrubby sagebrush down from the raised road toward the stream. A sudden hiss and rattle. I stopped, and to my right coiling under a sagebrush was a medium sized rattlesnake with its large spade shaped head. Heart pounding, I walked quickly back up the trail thankful that Tegan was high on my hip out of reach, though I knew that rattlesnakes prefer to avoid encounters, hence both the hiss and the rattle, signs to avoid a more direct confrontation. I hugged Tegan tightly to my side, and found another trail, this time with paying a bit more attention to the edges of the trail where snakes might be waiting for a meal. 

A short walk and a few sideways steps down a steep section, and we got to the bottom of the trail which opened up into a brush plain, with a river passing under the highway bridge and meandering across the relatively flat plain through a valley running west between a tall mountain ridge to the south and a range of lower sandy hills to the north. 

We looked up and–swallows! A group of what seemed like a few hundred were diving and flying back and forth above the river, alighting on their clay houses, and then flying off. I watched for a few minutes, and occasionally saw tiny beaks protruding from the opening of a nest, loudly exclaiming their hunger. After a few minutes, Tegan became a bit bored, and so I began to walk around the area more. 

I spent an hour walking about, neck either craned downward looking at animal tracks in the silty soil, or skull tilted back watching swallows lilt through the air gathering insects. Occasionally, I would stop at an aromatic sagebrush and let Tegan smell it, or stop at a manzanita bush and let him touch the leaves. 

For a moment, I set Tegan down under the bridge–he crawls, but cannot go far. I took the opportunity without him attached to my side to stoop down and inspect bobcat tracks at the river bank.  Soon enough, though, I looked over and Tegan was shoveling handfuls of mud into his mouth, eager as always to experience his surroundings though his tastebuds. I quickly walked to him, helped him spit out the wet loam and gave him a drink of water to wash down the residue.  All the while, the swallows swarmed above us.

Cliff swallows move so fast it is often difficult to see their features. But watch a nest for a while, and you’ll see one eventually. Fire-brick red face, with a blue cap heralded by a forehead blaze of white. A blue back melts into gray at the wings and tail, though the tail also has a tangerine tint at the rump. The angular shape of their wings allows them to swiftly change direction, so that they can zig with the zag of insects attempting to escape the threat of their short beaks in the air.¹ 

After washing Tegan’s face, I put him back in the side sling, and we walk downstream along the bank, with Tegan leaning over interested in the new sights as I scour the sand for animal tracks. We walked for about one hundred yards downstream from the bridge, with a pine covered north side of a mountain ridge ahead of us. Soon, the steep bank gave way to a gentle slope into the stream, and in the shallow wet soil, I started to see the telltale markings.  Shallow grooves excoriated the top layer of mud. I knew this indicates the place where a swallow had dropped to the ground, opened its beak, and scraped a pellet of the sticky substrate into this mouth. From there, it would fly back a few hundred yards to the site of the nest and spit the mud into place. 

I love seeing this sign on the landscape, because to me it represents such diligence and protracted work of swallows on behalf of their young. Researchers have calculated that cliff swallows use between 900-1200 mouthfuls of mud to build their adobe nests. Imagine, one thousand flights to and fro with mud in your mouth, pasting it onto rock or cement to create a gourd-shaped home for your chicks to grow safely until they too can fly. 

There are of course many ways in which this kind of labor relates to the work of our own human lives. Certainly writing can feel like this kind of drudgery, finding one word and the next, foraged from the silty riverbank of our inherited languages and pieced together a thousand times until a coherent house is built. I suspect this is true of most creative work, at least some of the time. 

But what I reckoned with that day with my infant child on my hip, is that those thousand or so claggy mouthfuls surely represent the kind of energy it takes to really love another body. M. Scott Peck defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Love is thus more verb than noun, an action rather than a state of being. 

If love is a verb, it necessarily requires energy. We might even speak of a physics of love: it has a vector and a force, it acts on bodies. 

Here, at the intersection of love and physics, is where I think the deeper meanings of life lie. After all, our bodies, whether feathered or furred, or chitin covered, or jellylike, all contain bundles of matter and energy dedicated to the work of keeping that body boundaried, that is, able to withstand the constant pull of entropy toward decay. If we think about the opposite of life–death–we realize death is a state in which various things act upon a body to which the body is unable to respond. For instance, while the body of the deer mouse in the river preserve by my house swarms with bacteria, a host with which the mouse lives in careful balance, the dead mouse in the garage is unable to stave off the bacteria wanting to eat its body, and the smell of bacteria supping on its body indicates its death. 

This is why autotrophs mine sunlight and minerals for energy, and why heterotrophs like all of us animals have to constantly eat–so that we have the energy it takes to respond to the dangers of life. With that energy, homegrown or acquired, we fight the internal breakdown of the various biochemical molecules and cells that keep us alive, as well as to have the stamina to withstand external forces like cold or heat or potential threats that might jeopardize the integrity of our body boundaries or metabolic requirements. So to give of that precious energy, not for one's own life, but for the life of another, is a significant deed, one that we rightly call love. 

So I want to propose a fourth law of thermodynamics, which is the thermodynamics of love: 

{To love is to give one’s energy} 

{shored up in a body boundary}

{vigilant against decay}

{willingly, for the life of another}

And, in right relationships, love flows and circulates between us, like water. Andreas Weber, who is a biologist and a philosopher, understands this when he defines love as a practice that makes others alive, and in so doing, enlivens oneself.²  

How then, can we speak of the thermodynamics of love? To understand, we might look to how it is practiced in the wider ecology of life: 

The mother bear gives 

milk to her cub, and her body 

withers. 

The Douglas fir shares 

sugar with her underlings 

and keeps no debt record. 

. 

In the mountains above my home 

lives the snow plant, a red tower of stem

which sprouts from the pine duff. It needs no 

green chlorophyll, and no splash of dappled light, 

because fungus feeds it. And what 

does it offer in return? 

–Merely a flash 

of red hue

in an otherwise 

earth-toned scene.

If love is defined, like Weber suggests, partly by enlivenment, we might consider swallows quintessential lovers.  Their aerial dynamics flitting to and from the nests with clay or insects between their beaks makes the air dance with their flight. Dirt too, becomes animate as the swallow takes clay and shapes it into a vessel for fledgling forms. Earth and sky quicken as a result of the work of wing and beak in service to their mate, their offspring. 

You’ll notice, of course, that this talk of love and enlivenment hinges on the agency of nonhuman beings to choose how and when to act. It does us no good to suggest, as popular science has seemed to portray, that all this behavior is simply the programming of genes. Volumes could be written about this subject, and I will likely write more about this, but for now, let me be clear that I land squarely on the side of the agency of all creatures, despite how complex or simple that may be. 

Let us return to a trust in the agency of all creatures so that we might learn from them, as co-agents, as co-conspirators in the labor of life and love.  If these winged lovers have capacity to choose a good nesting site, or a good mate, or a stream edge with just the right admixture of water and soil, they certainly must choose to give their energy to the proliferation of their offspring, which also happens to be the burgeoning of enlivenment for themselves. 

So I identify with swallows in their labor toward love. My partner and I experience this enlivening aspect of love on a daily basis. We work hard, and spend a lot of energy, in service to the nourishment and growth of our little one. Our mouths are muddied. And at the same time, we experience an unending well of joy and delight in doing so, despite the long nights and early mornings. 

There are many ways to apprentice oneself to love, but they all require a giving of one's energy to more or less degrees. And the degree to which one gives energy is often the degree to which love is experienced by another. I experience love from my partner daily, in the ways she extends herself emotionally in support of me, or in the physical labor of co-creating and tending our home. She harnesses emotional energy to cultivate patience when I speak unkindly, and similarly enacts the work of forgiveness. A mature notion of love yields to this understanding: love does not consist simply of deep feelings, but mundane actions, like the addition of mud pellets one at a time. We pile on love, day by day, and after a while, find it has become a structure to sustain our relationships. 

And I have similarly known the love of friends who have spent time and resources to share in my joy or my grief. They too, extend their bodies, and thoughts in service of supporting my growth. 

Both you, dear reader,  and I, we practice love, day upon day, action by action. We take food to our friends who are sick, or who sit in the wake of the death of a loved one, or who have a new baby. We help a friend move, we care for our niece or nephew to give our sibling a much needed rest. 

Dear reader, be like the swallow and labor for love, and find that, though this love places demand on your body, you are at once renewed and enlivened by giving your energy to others. 

You travel under the morning sun. The air is so cold it is almost hard–your movement cuts through it. It is too early for insects to be out, so the sky is clean, free. Luckily yesterday's heat thawed the edge of the riverbank, and you spot a shallow area of silty mud. Satisfied there are no predators nearby, you drop to the ground, plopping on two spindly feet. Your toes make the faintest impression in the wet substrate. Quickly, you bow your head down, as if to make morning ablutions, but instead of prostrating, you open your mouth and tilt your head downward to scoop mud into your beak. Off you go, darting with cursive flight back to the cliff edge. 

You alight on a circle of hardened mud, and press your face into it, simultaneously spitting out the mud and pressing inward, shaking your head back and forth as the mud extrudes from your beak. You perch for a moment, and, satisfied at the addition to the adobe shape forming on the cliff edge, you take flight again. You repeat this again, and again. A thousand times over between the two of you, you and your partner make this flight. 

Soon, there will be the sound of chirping coming from the nest, which looks like a clay jar, tipped on its side and stuck on to the cliff edge. There will be the occasional tiny feathered head poking out of the mouth of the jar, and eventually, juvenile swallows will risk their first dive into flight from the clay lip. 

But first, you must go and collect another mouthful of mud. 

1. Check out https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Cliff_Swallow/ for more on these incredible birds!

2.  https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2022/11/14/andreas-weber-love