Swallowing the sun

Stealing from the chickadees and catbirds, I swallow a handful of velvet-blue June berries. I eat tiny, ripe rubies of strawberries, where they hang in clusters amid leaves curling up under the rays of the mighty midsummer sun. A star god fully visible in the northern sky.

As I eat this warm fruit I imagine swallowing the sun, and the rain, and the seeds of life shaped to grow more June berries, more strawberries. 

In the midsummer, finches and robins, sparrows and cowbirds unite in scolding roaming cats, and cicadas buzz in chorus for the first time under the sun. 

A marauding, spotted cat with a pink collar has chewed down the catnip I grow for Juniper and Murphy.  A judicious application of chicken wire later, we'll see who wins this battle. 

Blooming in my native plant garden: blanket flower, purple prairie clover, hoary vervain, swamp milkweed. Butterfly weed, harebells, anise hyssop, pale purple coneflower. Purple poppy mallow, New Jersey Tea, wild petunia, and Canada anemone. 

Purple coneflower and summertime are just beginning to unfurl their tossing petals. 

I dispense water to their roots, tend to their drooping and injuries. 

I pluck out roaming seedlings, murmur greetings to the plants in their happy, green growth and flowering in the cool of the mornings.

I took a weeklong naturalist course on the ecoregion where I live, which is called the Big Woods, or alternately, Eastern Broadleaf Forest. 

How would you define a naturalist, I wonder? I think of this as someone who habitually pays attention to the natural world. My textbook on natural history says a naturalist "studies" the natural world, which is more rigorous. 

I like learning my share of "facts." But even more interesting are the facts-as-metaphors. 

For example. Did you know that it is the nature of rock to be cyclic? Not fixed? Rock forms are dynamic, always in process and transition; similar to every other being and landform — but with their own ways of being, of course.  

They are never done changing, as long as the Earth itself is alive. Like us. 

Learning this sort of "fact as truth" makes me feel a kinship with rocks. It is another strand in the web of meaning and mystery that connects us all. It gets at truth in a rather meandering, sideways process; one that creates meaning from the perspective of the whole. 

This is different from one philosophy of science that I hope does not exist anymore — one that destroys or pulls something apart in order to understand how it works. 

One of the instructors in our course joked that their students tend to be either "plant people" or "bird people." I know more about plants than birds, but refuse to be sorted into one category. Birds and other animals, oceans, mountains, deserts, volcanoes, glaciers, stars...all fascinating (though difficult to experience in my own backyard, unlike plants). 

Though an elder woman, I am yet a young naturalist.* 

With new binoculars and the help of the Merlin birding app, I now have a (admittedly slim) chance of seeing woodland or grassland birds when I hear them singing their songs. 

Spotting an Eastern meadowlark or an Ovenbird makes me feel like part of a rarified club, somehow. Though humans have lived with these species for thousands of years, a relatively small percentage of people go out seeking bird sightings. 

It takes patience. With my untrained eye I need to search a while before I find the bird that I hear, so the bird needs to stay in one area so I can zero in. When I do find a bird, I am enchanted to see how they sing with their whole bodies — throats vibrating, beaks open wide. It is somehow relaxing, as if I relax into their wildness, their vibrant, singing presence.

Today, on the solstice, it is still early summer here. Yet it feels like July. There is an air quality alert due to ozone and wildfire smoke. We are feeling moderate drought once again. 90-degree temperatures again, with more to follow. Is this summer from now on? Earth is "quite sick" now, reports say.

They also say it is not too late to heal her. We know what to do. Now, "we" just need the will to do what needs to be done. 

Anyway, as I look at the burgeoning green beings around me on midsummer day, how I wish I could shoot up as they do in the strong sunlight, and make the most of my growing in the short season of sun, blossoming and fruiting. 

This short season we are given on Earth.

For better or worse, I am a spring-blooming flower. I wither, and always have, in hot weather. How sad though, to only feel I can flourish in the coolness of spring and autumn—two brief seasons. 

I remember too when it was different — not very long ago at all — in this climatescape where I have lived for all my life, and which I struggle to recognize anymore. 

In May, and well into June, the days here were cooler, rainier — so that when midsummer burst upon us, in a dazzle of sun and warm greenness, it felt like the dancing times, the singing times at last were here. 

I miss that time.

Once, someone told me her one-line poem that she had never told anyone else, and it was, "I feel lonely for when the Earth was okay." 

Then we felt lonely together, and that made it a little less lonely.

Sadness silences me. Anger silences me. Grief and loss silence me. Loneliness silences me. Fear of sounding ungrateful, whiny, privileged, sorry for myself, negative — all combine into the perfect silencing potion. 

I am writing anyway. I need to do things anyway. Because it is always the right time to be here, and to be who you are, even when it doesn't conform to societal expectations. 

In my effort to acknowledge the positive...yes, it is hot, but not humid. 

There is a breeze. 

It is "date night." 

I am getting together with friends on Friday. 

There is pudding in the refrigerator. 

And, despite all of my laments, it is green and flourishing still, on the summer solstice, here in this tiny, blooming patch of former oak savanna, in the Mississippi River watershed, of the land called Where the Waters Reflect the Clouds.

*"Though an old man, I am but a young gardener." —Thomas Jefferson

Spring reveal

Sign of Spring: Finding what was lost. 

The snow that fell ten days ago was wet and heavy, and I worked up a sweat as I shoveled it. Each shovelful had to be lifted to the very top of our four-foot snowbanks — high enough that the shoveled snow would not slide back down onto the sidewalk. 

The temperature hovered around freezing and I was becoming uncomfortably warm. I took off my hat to cool down. Five minutes later, off came my knit mittens. I unzipped my coat and kept shoveling. 

Still too hot, so I peeled off the jacket, and threw that on our front steps with everything else.

After shoveling, I gathered up my sweaty outwear and took it inside. 

Only, I was a kitten missing a mitten, as I found out the next morning.

I went outside and scanned the sidewalk and snowbanks. Hmm, a fine job of shoveling, but not a mitten did I glimpse. 

I looked the next day, and the next day, too. How frustrating. I liked those mittens. They are blue-gray and match my jacket. 

I admit, I like certain things to match.

"Where is it? Who would take one mitten?" I complained to my husband. "One mitten is no use." 

Was it someone who had also lost a right-hand mitten, and had been just waiting to find one to replace it? 

Maybe some Golden Retriever had picked it up, and merrily carried it away as a prize? (You know how they are.) 

Why hadn't I checked that I had everything before I went inside? How could I lose a mitten in my own front yard? I was filled with self-recriminations. Yes, over a mitten. 

After a week of this, I gave up on my dreams of recovering my lost mitten, and ordered a new pair.

I should have known. Today, Spring pulled back the edges of Winter's icy pantaloons to reveal a very sodden and icy mitten, on the front steps. Where it had sunk into the snowy edges. 

Surprise! Winter trickster strikes again.

It is only March 21. Winter is not yet done with his surprises. 

People often talk about "balance" on the equinox because for one day, we have equal times of light and dark. Then somehow that all gets mixed up with spring, which is not a balance at all but a transitioning between the season of not-growing and the season of growing. When it comes to seasonal transitions, or life transitions, there is no balance; more of a balancing.

By no means does spring (or any other season) "begin" at any specific time, much less one day. This is important to note; because if your region is not springlike on the first day of spring, you know it is best not to be literal about these things.

And also there are clearly more than four seasons. Let's look at the meme lore regarding springtime. The seasons following upon winter that we call "spring" actually progress something like this: "Late first winter." "Fool's spring." "Second winter." "Spring of deception." "Third winter." "Mud season." "Actual spring." 

Fool's spring, the time I suspect we are in right now, is also known as early spring. Plenty of snow on the ground, melting around the edges. See-sawing between fresh, blue days and cold, gray ones.  

The robins, cardinals and red-winged blackbirds, however, are convinced that it is a good-enough spring for them. 

The birds do not wait for a better, springier spring to come along, they get on with it. As always, they know there is no time to waste. Sing now! Mate now! Live now! 

CHERT! CHERT! proclaims the red-winged blackbird beside the marsh. We are alive, and the time is now. 

Needless to say (but I will say it anyway), animals don't have time for bewailing what can't be helped. Instead, they get on with living, regardless of snow, gray skies or less than ideal circumstances. 

What if you thought of any circumstance as ideal? All the circumstances in which you are alive. 

Now, for instance.

That feels like a winged thought, a way of living fit for birds and humans. Even now, hundreds of miles away, the warblers and monarch butterflies are taking wing, migrating north over this vast continent. 

They're coming, it's happening, just hold on.  

 

The wishes of birds

I follow the wishes of birds.

I hear them calling to me in the morning, to bring out seeds, cracked corn, suet, when the low sun spills its amber across the blue-shadowed snow.

Giving to them is a gift to me. Always, they touch my heart with their joyful presence. I watch their thrilling flights from branch to feeder. Recognize the life in them—their bright eyes, quick flutters, down fluffed against the cold, foraging to survive as does every living thing on this earth.

When you look at any being with eyes of love, you witness its divinity, its personhood.

You recognize the animating sacred spark of life you share. You feel akin. Then you want to help.

So you bring seeds.

It helps each of us to survive winter.

Before dawn, in spring, the lone voice of the cardinal singing out in darkness means everything to me.

How can this one song pierce my heart so with joy and sorrow? I lie awake and listen.

While he sings, the whole of my life feels held within that song, beginning with the most precious gift we are given: the sweetness of being, of life throbbing through us, in oneness with the cardinal and every other being. Because this loneliness, this sense of separation is an illusion, say spiritual masters, philosophers, quantum physicists.

Coming out of my dreams, wakened by by this heartbreaking beauty, every sadness floods through me, every happiness, what feels like the deepest measure of my existence as a living being in this world.

My heart then whispers its own kind of song in return, reminding me how brief is the life of a songbird and a woman, but how beauty remains despite grief and death. The feeling of the beauty and the grief together, its poignance, the sense of timelessness and eternity and oneness: I cannot put that into words at all, only tears.

Sorrow sweeps out your house so that new joy can find space to enter, said Rumi. As they beguile open our sleeping hearts and call forth joy and sorrow, singing to us of how ephemeral yet eternal life is, the birds bring us even more gifts: To weep is a gift. To love, a gift. To sorrow, a gift.

Seeds. Also a gift. But perhaps a small one, considering what wonder has been received.

Feeding what is hungry

I fed some baby birds today. Can't stop smiling.

During my first day as a volunteer in the Avian Nursery at Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, I also laundered and folded piles of towels, pillowcases and cage liners. At any given time, WRC has about 600 volunteers, as well as vets, vet techs and interns. So the walls and doors are covered with signs and instructions. "Take blue washcloths and gloves with rubber dots on to the Bat room." "Put small squares of fleece in a clean basket and take them to the mammal nursery." "No entry without rabies vaccination."   
                         
An intern with a gift for teaching showed me how to read the charts at each cage. How to angle the feeding syringe so the food goes down the right side. How to catch a bird who escapes. And the way to hold a small bird who has not been gaping in one hand, and ever-so-gently-and-patiently coax open its tiny beak with a finger, to make sure it gets some nourishment.

I fed bright-eyed House Sparrows, Cedar Waxwings, Barn Swallows and one young Jay whose feathers are just blueing-up (he got mealworms). These were amidst cagefuls of American Robins, doves and Bluebirds who were self-feeding and were getting ready to move into the flight area.

When some of them were hungry (mostly the brash sparrows), they flew right up to the bars and thrust their beaks through, jostling each other out of the way. Other species, like the barn swallows, stayed on their perches until fed, and once they'd had enough they hopped back into the corners of their cages, far from the scary hand with the syringe.

The trio of Chipping Sparrows were especially precious...tiny, soft-colored and exquisite, cuddled close to one another on their perch. We use a fine tip on the syringe to feed them. Here is a photo of one Chipping Sparrow fledgling who's a bit older (not taken at WRC):

I am beaming, really. Given this godawful heat wave, it was uncomfortably warm in the nurseries and laundry room...and the smell issuing from the waterfowl room gave the hallway quite a pungent aroma...and you don't know from dirty laundry until you've gone through a load of soiled cage liners.

But what a fine way to spend four hours. 

Strange how you define yourself. Over the years, I've expanded into an identity as an animal and nature person, a creative person, a person who writes, a reading person. I never saw myself as a "medical" or "technical" or an "applied sciences" kind of person. I've fallen into the dichotomy trap, I see. We are much more complex than that. What I do is not who I am. Who am I, who are any of us, to be summed up so easily, hemmed in by fear, clinging to our egos for identity?

Maybe we are all more like prairies. “True prairies and meadows contain plants that are far more densely packed than any designed border. This density gives them a resilience that designed borders lack…. True prairie is a dynamic plant community, with its own rules and trajectory, very poorly understood even by ecologists,” writes Noel Kingsbury in a book on natural-style gardening I’m reading right now.

I feel freer, letting go of even the least part of these limits with which I seem to have been holding myself back. Small ones now...perhaps larger ones to come. I hope so. The truth is that I am changing to become more myself all the time. The paradox of that? The more we become ourselves, the more we seem to lose need of our carefully constructed identities, a thought that rings a gong inside of me every time I encounter it. Rob Brezsny was today’s guru, posting this to his Facebook page:

“There is only One Being: the Living Intelligent Consciousness That Pervades Every Cubic Inch of the Universe. Every seemingly separate thing, from earthworm to human being to star, is a cell in the body of this One and Only Great One.

“All of us cells feel pain as long as we have forgotten we are part of the One. But the forgetting was an essential rule that the One set up to begin the master game. Because of our illusion that each of us is alone and separate, we are under the impression that we must become distinctive and unique. As we work to create ourselves, adding intricate modifications to what we started out as, we give joy to The One, expanding and deepening the meaning of the master game.

“At the point when the sense of isolation is greatest in each cell -- which is also the point when each cell experiences its uniqueness with maximum acuity -- the pain of separation triggers the longing to remember where we came from.”

And when I got home from feeding the little bright-eyed ones, I found that the first of my monarch butterflies had emerged from her chrysalis, and hung suspended between one stage of her journey and the next, breathing.

Prairie restoration photos: Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, Coldwater Spring.

P.S.

Over the days, I've uncovered the identity of a few of my unknown singers. That is only a small part of being claimed by them, I know, but it is a beginning. Listen to their songs.

...In the evenings, from the flowering tree: Blackbird. Willow warbler.

...In the morning, darting from branch to branch in the undergrowth, curious about two-legged kind and just out of fingertip reach: Blue Tit.

For those moments of rushing beauty when I have been blessed by your songs, I thank you, Manitous, little mysteries.

Photos taken in March in Regent's Park.

Where it began

"The bird put his tiny head on one side and looked up at him with his soft bright eye, which was like a black dewdrop. He seemed quite familiar and not the least afraid. He hopped about and pecked the earth briskly, looking for seeds and insects. It actually gave Mary a queer feeling in her heart, because he was so pretty and cheerful and seemed so like a person. He had a tiny plump body and a delicate beak, and slender delicate legs."

Evensong

Every evening at dusk, I hear a bird singing.

There is a small huddle of garden and trees the next building down. In their midst sings the bird that I cannot see.

This is my favorite moment of each day. I open my window to the night and listen.

Can you hear him?

I can't tell you why a bird singing at dusk brings tears to my eyes. Something about joy, something about sorrow, something about the world and how beautiful it is...how exquisitely, heart-piercingly beautiful. 

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world, said E.B. White.

The bright living of birds is one of so many, many reasons to love the world. 

The songbird lightly carries the weight of so many of our hopes and dreams on its small wings, thrumming with life and the promise of spring, even in this untimely cold. Ever and always, spring after spring, since the dawn of the world. 

How do we spend so much of our time each day ignoring how incredible this is? This repeating cycle of joy and hope reaching back for millennia? The entwined and interdependent lives of winged ones and crawling ones and swimming ones, two-footers and four-footers? It is a bird singing in that tree, and it is I singing.

Inside myself I say, thank you for letting me hear this and say this and feel this, World. Let your singing be always in my heart.

Love, Sol

Woke up to snow again on a Maxfield Parrish painting of a morning, with a delicate sky of apricot and whisper-blue, and the sun a softly shining pearl through candy-tuft clouds.

Parrish painting

Then my trusty shovel and I got to work clearing away the snow from the sidewalks. Of course, I took a few photos during rest periods.

 

Right now, the late afternoon sun is shining strongly through my west windows, and snow is dripping from the eaves. I've been feeling quiet and low-energy after days of clouds, so it is good to see my cats lying in the sunspots gilding the floor and to feel the rays warming the northern world today. A special valentine just for us.

On Saturday morning, I stuck my head out the door to sniff the air and was rewarded with a certain damp freshness that said spring, even though to all appearances winter still rules. And then Sunday, I woke to the sounds of freezing rain and the clear, sweet song of a Northern Cardinal, a beauty I haven't heard for months and months. I lay in bed and smiled in the dawn darkness, knowing that however many inches of snow fall now, winter is on the wane.