The land of the ice, snow & stars

I do not know what words to speak, even silently, on a still day like this. 

White sky, white roofs, like a held breath, a waiting, a sleeping. 

The snow is soft and silent over the earth. If only it were a healing blanket on the planet. What if, beneath it, the earth's bones, flesh and blood reknit every winter, mending what we have harmed? 

How peacefully we could then rest in winter, imagining the lands and waters being slowly restored to health. 

Until learning about global warming, I had no thought at all that the glaciers at the poles were necessary for life on earth, that they hold within the depths of their ice-blue hearts the great powers of winter to cool the temperature of our entire planet. 

We often see snow and cold as harmful, even deadly—antithetical to life. Not as a life-giving shield of protection to our planet and all living things. But now we see how lacking in understanding we have been, and that it is at least as much Protector as Destroyer.   

If only the realm of the Snow Queen could be revived in the far north and the far south once again, and the healing could begin.  

If only healing could ever happen as quickly and easily as harming. 

Once, a lovely person confided to me a one-line poem she had made: "I'm lonely for when the earth was okay." 

I am lonely for that time, too. Even while realizing that I may have never even lived in such a time. 

The stars, if my eyes could see them, might ease this loneliness, for a little while. They, thankfully, are too far away for us to have harmed, at least thus far.



The Nature 365 video journal above was filmed in far northern Minnesota by wildlife photographer and filmmaker Jim Brandenburg, and directed by Laurent Joffrion. Subscribe to view these glorious short earth films every day of 2017.

The lantern of soul

"Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good."

"What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale."

"One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity."

"Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do."

We Were Made for These Times, Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When we stand together

Black wings of crows against a dimensionless gray sky. Long chains of Canada geese flying wing to wing, navigating south now in earnest by sun, stars and internal compass.

Making we wonder: what and where is home? Do we think of home as our city, our nation or our planet? How much of our sense of home is rooted in the people around us, and our shared humanity?

Do we think of our fellow citizens as only the people like us—the same ethnic make-up, beliefs and politics? Or do we think of all humans as our fellow citizens of this one planet?

Now as the darkness of November has descended, courage has been at its ebb in my heart. In the dark hours it feels absolutely crushing—after a spring so full of hope, promise and progressive energy for real reform to address the huge economic and social injustices in America—that this is the winter of our reality:

A society systematically reshaped over decades to benefit the ultra-wealthy and to disenfranchise 99 percent of the people.

Militarized police forces who kill our black and brown brothers and sisters, and who do the bidding of corporations in attacking peaceful protestors as criminals.

An authoritarian demagogue and his kleptocracy, wrong-headedly elected by people fed up with a government that is not working, who are soon to be dismantling protections and selling off our beloved land for parts while enriching themselves and their cronies.

These represent the blindest segment of humanity—the one bent on racing as quickly as possible toward the destruction of planet and our species. For gain.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Humanity's shadow is on full display right now in America, and it is frightening. It seems about to swallow us whole.

It has always been there, but we do have to look at it and see it now, in all its wounded-ness and brokenness. I do not know what our chance of healing humanity's brokenness is. But without seeing it, we surely cannot heal it. So we have been given a clear choice, a chance to do something other than despise it, repress it and turn our eyes away.

We have an opportunity at this moment, all people of goodwill and open heart, of compassion and kindness, to stand together. To speak loudly for and protect what is right. To organize and mobilize and to spread peace and beauty in every way we can.

It is clear that pushing back against humanity's shadow with compassion is the only hope we have to survive as a species, and that NOW is the time we need to act.

This has been a year of great highs and sickening lows, a year of revelations. A year of stripping bare the illusions we've harbored, peeling back our comforting surface narratives to reveal that which is bleeding, wounded, neglected and ugliest about humanity. A year of challenge to ourselves to become more than we may have thought we needed to become.

It is a time when all feels upended, a time when I especially envy those with strong extended families, and close networks of friends to sustain them. Because in spring, summer and fall I am mostly content to wander in community with no one other than the trees, birds, grasses and sky.

But in winter, all ease and illusions are gone, along with nature's reassuring sense of becoming that I can pretend is my own. Winter strips it all away, and exposes how frail and important for our well-being are the human connections that hold us together.

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All is far from lost. We (I) must take heart and take action. Here is what is encouraging: The progressives are mobilizing all across our country, galvanized by the stark challenges before us. What Bernie Sanders said before the primaries is as true now as it was then:

Our job is not to divide, our job is to bring people together. If we do not allow them to divide us up by race, by sexual orientation, by gender...by not allowing them to divide us up by whether or not we were born in America or whether we're immigrants...when we stand together, as white and black and hispanic and gay and straight, woman and man...when we stand together, and demand that this country work for all of us, rather than the few...we will transform America.

The challenge for a quiet, introverted homebody is to make a conscious and sustained effort (and it is a real effort) to reach out and connect with others, instead of retreating even further into books. Books are important for reaffirming what is best about humanity, for reminding us of what is wise, beautiful and true. Books are even community, of a kind. But even books (and I speak as a lifelong bookworm) cannot always take the place of connecting with real live humans.

Those of us who usually choose to go our own way—often disappointed idealists masquerading as misanthropes—do actually need a community made up of people...especially during times when despair threatens to sap our energy and spirits. Let's draw heart from each other.

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.

A tale of redemption

Nothing makes me happier and more filled with hope than a redemption story: the mended-wing owl released into the wild, the neglected weedlot patiently transformed into a bee-humming garden, the painting dimmed by time that's restored to its original glory.

I am coming face-to-face with these stories lately, in the way that our brains seek and find that to which we give our energy and thought.

Spending one long afternoon exploring a reconstructed native tallgrass prairie and oak savanna, I found myself in the midst of one.

Before the Europeans came to North America, tallgrass prairie and oak savanna (a transitional landscape between woodland and prairie) covered much of this area. The fertile soil called "prairyerth" once supported millions of animals, birds, insects, reptiles and plants. Now, only a tiny fraction of a fraction remains.

That is a profound loss and a great sadness. How many oak trees, I wonder, were felled in this square mile, to convert the savanna to farmland, in the years before this house we live in was built in 1922?

But this is where the hope comes in. Many, many people are mending. Restoring what was. Healing the land in all sorts of inspiring ways.

And the blessing of sadness is that it makes you more open to everything that is sad, and also everything that transcends sadness, or that has been made whole; like the subtle magic of a wide-sky, wind-tossed prairie reclaimed from farmland.

"She who tells the prairie mystery must hear the prairie in her heart." --William A. Quayle

"I would be converted to a religion of grass," writes novelist Louise Erdrich, then goes on to describe what the prairie tells us: "Bow beneath the arm of fire...Be lovely and do no harm."

Coming around this curve, my eye was caught by the sunlight glowing through two large ears, belonging to a white-tailed fawn across the grass-scape, resting as her mother grazed a few feet away.

We watched each other in stillness, each in our own species-sphere. Long enough for me to take a photo. Then the doe caught my scent and together they bounded off into the brush, flashing their tails. I heard them circling back around in the distance, heading into the woodland over the hill. So I waited for them to get away so that they wouldn't feel pursued.

It was like walking in a neverending present, in a place that felt intensely itself.

Red Admiral

Flowering Spurge

Of this particular redemption story, Al Johnson, who undertook the reconstruction in 1965, said, "Although the process is slow and painstaking, we feel the results are well worth the effort...The flash of blazingstar and sunflower in the summer, the waving of bluestem and Indian grass are sights that as they grow rarer, become more precious to us and our children."

Rough Blazingstar 

Tall Blazingstar

Boneset

Echinacea

"To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its multiplicity and endless variety, come in." --Gretel Ehrlich


My next mending project: Dig out the daylilies behind my garage and put back a bit of prairie.




Prairie quotes from the Bennett/Johnson Prairie Field Guide.