Wren

People talk about the circle of life. What we usually don’t say out loud is that the circle is a circle of life and death.

Yesterday evening as I was coming back from a trip to the compost pile, I heard the sounds of fluttering in the garage where two Carolina wrens had made a nest. Wrens are tiny, loud, soft rust-brown birds with their tail feathers cocked skyward. My wife and I had watched them flying in and out during the past few weeks. We had seen and heard them trilling from the wire leading out to the garage.

I looked into the shadows and saw a wren flapping frantically, spinning round and around upside down from one extended leg. As I got very close, I could see that the wren had gotten itself entangled in something from its nest. It must have been struggling for some time. The wren’s tail feathers had been beaten off.

I reached out my hand, closing it gently and firmly around the tiny body to try to calm it. I carefully snipped away the threads that had been wrapped tightly around the wren’s leg. The threads looked and felt like they might have come from some bits of plastic twine that the wrens must have used to line their nest.

I carried the wren out into the middle of our back yard and put it down in the grass. The leg that had been caught stuck straight out behind the wren. The wren flapped its wings, but it could not fly. The wren seemed as if it might be otherwise intact, but it could only bounce awkwardly over the grass. It was alive, but without its tail feathers and a severely dislocated leg it could not survive.

I placed the wren at the edge of the lawn on a bed of some dried surprise lily leaves near the peonies bushes and put down a small saucer of water near the wren. I set a five gallon bucket upside down over the helpless bird, still breathing and blinking its eyes. I weighted the bucket with a couple of bricks and I hoped, at least, that the wren could rest in relative safety and the dim light.

My wife was visiting family, so I rode my bicycle over to a friend’s house to ask him what he thought I should do. We talked of ways of putting the wren out of its suffering, but nothing seemed possible in the moment.

Night was falling when I returned home. I saw two mourning doves sitting on the wire near where the wren was resting. I didn’t raise the bucket to see how the wren was doing. I went inside and had a late supper. Eventually I went to bed.

In the morning, I went outside to check on the wren. The wren had passed away during the night. I buried the wren’s body in the earth near where its life had ended.

I must tell you that I felt more sorrow over the suffering of this one wren than I have felt about any other living being in a long time. It seemed all out of proportion, but perhaps not. It was life, however small. Yet if I felt about the suffering of each life in the world all together the way I felt about this wren, I could not live.

I set a bit of broken brick over the place where the wren’s body lay. I took some photos of the moonflowers by the garage.

And now I will not tell you more of my thoughts. I have told you what happened. You can try to find your own meaning if you want to.

As for me, I have some work to do and I’m glad for that. Sparrows are flying back and forth to a neighbor’s feeder. A robin was grooming its feathers earlier on the back fence. It looks as if it might rain again.

And this is just one small story in the circle of life and death.

Wishing you were here

I wanted to tell you something. Perhaps you might realize that because the moon is so far away from the earth and because light travels so fast, no matter the physical distance between two people on the earth, from the moon’s distant perspective you and I might simply be standing along a straight line merely a blink of an eye away from each other.

And so, when I woke up in the middle of the night and I saw moonlight streaming through the kitchen window, I leaned in slightly over the sink and looked up at the moon high above me. Suddenly, it seemed to me as if you might be standing right behind me. But when I turned around to look, the room was dark and you weren’t there. I could almost hear your voice whispering to me.

I turned back and leaned into moonlight once again. And then I found myself a thousand miles away, standing outside your bedroom window in the moonlight. I thought for a moment to peek into your window to see if you were asleep, but instead I just left some moonlight on your windowsill.

In the next instant I was standing once again in my own darkened kitchen. Turning, turning, I wanted merely to put my arms around you for just a few moments. Only for a moment and then I would let you go.

But even when we lived in the same town, it most mostly passing time that we spent together. We were close enough to hug, but we rarely did. We talked now and then. And when we looked into each other face’s and caught each other’s glance, we quickly looked away. We were close and not so close. I suppose that it was near enough for then, but we were also just passing each other by, going on with our separating lives into different distant worlds.

And still, tonight, I miss you.

I just wanted to tell you that when I see the moon shining so brightly, sometimes you come into my mind. I hold you so very lightly and then in time I go back to bed.

Wishing you were here - to put my arms around you, to hold you, and then, to let go once again.

I look at rocks

Sometimes, if I’ve got nothing better to do, I look at rocks.

I suppose that you might say that I’m just wasting my time by looking at rocks. But what else should I do? Watch the unhurriedly drifting clouds drifting unhurriedly across a sky blue sky? Or count the ripples rippling on the rippling river? Or be dazzled by the dazzling sun dappling and dazzling through the leafy green leaves? Or I suppose that I might simply recline myself lightly upon the earth and let the good old world turn at the world’s good old pace around and around and around me as I recline?

And then, eventually, as a matter of course, as day eventually turns to night, I might look up and out and far away and wait for the latest early distant starlight to twinkle into my blinking eyes at the dizzying speed of light. Or I could empty out the clutter from my rattled mind and simply gaze longingly into the face of a full moon rising. Or perhaps on some other day becoming night, might I again seek out a glowing new crescent of reflected sunlight in the descending indigo darkness?

I mean, after all has been said and done, just what, after all, in the world, would have been better for me to have done? And I am quite likely to have said too much already.

And yet, I confess, I am not finished with speaking. There are still so considerably many more barely notable opportunities for watching and wondering. Grass grows. Flowers bloom. Snowflakes fall in winter. And have you seen cottonwood fluff floating like dandelion seeds on a light breeze on a spring afternoon? And of course, one thing is hardly the same thing as another thing at all.

But I must still tell you even more. Have you noticed lately and yet again how so very many things just take their own sweet time doing whatever sweet thing it is that they do. And yet – and yet, I tell you this - if you blink, you might miss seeing some marvel altogether.

And yet I am not finished. I must also add still more uncountable things to what I must also recount.

There are all of those flying birds and those buzzing bees. And don’t get me started on those cottontail bunnies or those teeny tiny red spider mites scurrying around on limestone rocks on the levee by the river on a warm day in May.

It is indeed as Annie Dillard says so well in ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’:

There are many things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But - and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go on your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.   (p. 16)

And then I have finally come back to this. I had always meant to circle back around to the question of time. Let me be quite clear. My question is this:  just what is my time is good for? What I am talking about is the time when I am merely and simply looking for things for me to look at and see for what they are. That time is my own time. I don’t think of it as disposable time. It is my free time. Valuable time. Possible time. I am simply not about to carelessly throw away the gift of just-being-alive time.

And so, finally, here it is: If I have no other pressing obligations – no people to see, no places to go, no other things to do - that is, I mean, besides looking at rocks – I look at rocks.

Sometimes.

Consider the alternatives. Why, after all, would I waste my time on things I cannot do much about - like politics or the stock market and all of those other scurrying scurrilous current affairs?

Now, I know that you might say that I cannot do anything about the rocks, either. This is true.

But, at least, I find that rocks can be interesting. They are real things. I can stack them or throw them or just not be able budge them even one silly millimeter at all. I can look at them. Or, if I find just the right rock, I might skip it across the river. Of course the skipping rock probably wouldn’t even make it half the way across the Kaw River, even though that often lazy and quite brown river isn’t really all that broad. And then, at some point, that skipping rock would just sink like a stone. That’s life for you.

But in some bit of easy time in between the so-called hard times and hard places, I might just take a look at the very substantial rocks at hand and just wonder about rocks. You know: real, hard, old, unmoving rocks.

I mean, just how has paying attention to all of that virtual jibber jabber been working out for you lately? And have you actually spent any time looking at rocks in your own dear time?

But pardon me.  I meant only to talk about my own sweet time. Not yours.

And here’s just another bit of a conundrum about time that I would like to share with you. After all of my careful attention to the wonders of the natural world – and time - I have often discovered that just utterly wasting a little time, now and then, turns out to be the very best thing I could have done with my time. Who knew?

But, once again let me be clear. I don’t necessarily mean that the time I spend looking at rocks is wasted. Nevertheless, my reasoning finally comes tumbling down to this quite obvious absurdity: In the end, for me, looking at rocks often turns out to be neither a complete waste of time nor the best thing I could do. And so what else is new?

Therefore, if I have nothing better to do than to look at rocks, there seems to be nothing better for me to do than to look at rocks.

QED

And one postscript: Now your time, of course, is your own precious time and I do understand a little something about pressing obligations. But if you want my advice, spend a little time looking at rocks. And let’s face it, you could do worse.

Speaking a few words

The sidewalk ahead was uneven.

Rain had begun to fall.

I saw four bunnies in the clover.

Two were near the street

and two were farther up by the driveway.

Suddenly, one bunny hopped up and over the other one

and then they both hopped off through a hedge.

Then the two bunnies waiting by the driveway  

followed the first two bunnies away.

And then, so very quickly, I saw no bunnies at all.

I stood alone.

Rain had begun to fall.

The sidewalk ahead was uneven.

If I speak of questions of consequence

and inconsequence,

where should I begin

and where should I end?

I saw four bunnies in the clover

and suddenly there were none.

Magic

 

How is it that an ordinary day turns magical?

Most of us live ordinary lives most of the time. Ordinary is pretty good. Ordinary is when nothing really bad happens and lots of mostly small good and not particularly memorable things happen. Sometimes, from day to day, I barely notice that much of anything is really happening at all. I’m just living life. And then, what do you know? It’s spring or something. But I do have to say that it is my good fortune to live a pretty good ordinary life.

And then, suddenly, without warning, I find myself out of the ordinary.

Here’s a story to tell you what I mean. Magic itself is hard to describe, so this story is mostly about the moments before the magical moment and then after the magic has melted away.

** 

On one reasonably warm afternoon I was sitting on a low rock wall just off the north end of the Kaw River Bridge. I looked down at the river running though this patch of the planet that I have come to know well.  Across the way, the levee trail cut in a straight line across my view and then it bent, heading downstream and out of sight. The still bare trees hiding the horizon were beginning to show hints of green. I could almost smell spring, but not quite taste it. Spring was late in coming this year.

Below the trail, the limestone boulders on the face of the levee were essentially their normal color. Under today’s hazy sky, the rocks were a sort of reddish beige. The river rippled along between the levee and the far bank. The day was quite windy. The river reflected the sky as it always does. The interplay between sky and wind and river remains a continual fascination for me. Always changing and still very much the same.

I watched the turkey vultures circling high against the sky. They were soaring with hardly any apparent effort on the updrafts coming off the levee face. Everything was quite satisfactorily beautiful. It’s all just a piece of the simple beauty that I have come to expect to see in the various places where I wander up and down the river. Walkers and runners and bikers passed by me as I sat on the ledge. Presumably they were enjoying their day as I was. Most people would have agreed, at least, that it was a nice day.

I had tried making a few sketches of the scene in front of me with disappointing results, but I was not really disappointed. The drawings really were more a kind of exercise, another way to practice seeing what I was looking at. The river is my frequent subject. The river, really a wider area without clear boundaries, has become one of the places where I like to be. It is interesting to me. It is beautiful. It is a place that is not really about me at all and yet I belong here. The everyday river, an essentially ordinary wonder, is enough for me. But it is also in this place that I sometimes glimpse magic.

After thirty minutes or so of sitting and watching, I was ready to move along. I was on a bicycle that day and I rode off downstream along the levee trail. I rode along the line that I had been looking at just a few minutes earlier. Down below from where I was easily peddling I could see islands of rocks and sand dividing the slow current of the Kaw River. I remember seeing a woman holding onto two dogs on the trail. One of the dogs pulled towards me as I rode passed, and the woman pulled back. But it was only a small mark along my way that day. The world was as I expected it to be.

I hadn’t decided how far I would ride. I had no better place to be for the next few hours, so I simply rode along the top of the levee, both seeing and not seeing the world around me. Seeing everything is simply not possible. The natural world is much too rich for that. But without attention, much of the world becomes a kind of background. A blur. But I usually pay enough attention to see some of the beauty around me. It was a nice day.

And then I spotted a good-sized silver ball down among the levee rocks. Now, that silver ball was indeed out of the ordinary, but hardly magical. Still, I slowed to a stop and then I walked my bike down a nearby gravel path to a small grassy area between the levee and the Kaw. I laid my bicycle down and carefully made my way across a short stretch of limestone rocks. They were just large boulders, reddish beige in color in the hazy sunlight, haphazardly tumbled in front of me. I watched my steps and my balance.

The silver ball turned out to be larger than it appeared from the levee trail above, quite a bit bigger than a basketball. I picked it up. It appeared to be a thin-walled chrome ball, somewhat dulled from the weather and deeply dented in several places.

I had my device along with me so I set the ball back down on a rock and took a few selfies with me reflected in the ball, the trees growing along the river stood in the background of the photos. I made my way back over the rocks and began to amble. I had been in this place many times before. There was a slight trail to follow as I neared the river.

Through a tangle of mostly thin tree trunks and branches, I could see the broken pilings of a railroad bridge that crossed the Kaw about a hundred years ago. The river was low. Spring rains would be welcome

The river – this stretch of the Kaw River and the river bank – is as it is and always changing. That is also how human beings generally experience almost everything that is. Things are familiar. Things change. The world waits for any of us to see it as it is and as it is becoming. And once again, for me, this particular place held out its everyday beauty for me to see.

After watching the sunlight playing on the surface of the Kaw for a while, I turned to walk back to my bike and the levee. 

And now how else should I say it? I simply turned - and then the ordinary world disappeared.

It didn’t happen in an instant. But within a few gradual moments it was as if I entered a kind of enchanted tangled river bottom forest. I lack the words to describe the sensation. Nothing had apparently changed, but I felt as if I was no longer in the familiar place that I knew. I saw a majestic, rough-barked tree with downed limbs around it. The tree must have been growing there for a hundred years. Other trees stood around as sentinels. Large vines as thick as my arms were twining up the tree trunks. 

And beyond all of my transfixion was the pale reddish beige of a hazy sunlit levee. I had seen it all before. It was all entirely the same, except that now it had become wholly magical. I existed within a moment of timeless wonder.

Perhaps I broke the spell by then taking a few pictures. But the magic is not really like that. The magic is not about me at all. I think that I must simply pass through its spell. Or perhaps the magic passes through me. The enchantment is neither bidden nor unbidden. Perhaps I might miss experiencing the magic if I haven’t opened myself to the possibility, but I don’t make the magic. It appears.

I suspect – it is not much more than a hunch, really– that the magic – or whatever you want to call it - is always everywhere. And then sometimes, somehow, I become aware of its presence. I get just a glimpse 

of the magic and then I come back to my life.

And magic really isn’t the right word, either. I don’t think that there is a right word to describe this rare experience. And I so have told you what I can tell.

It was just this: I was tramping through a perfectly good ordinary day, and then I was somewhere else. And then, some moments later, I was back. But I am here to tell you that there was indeed something like magic in between one ordinary moment and the next.

I did take a few pictures, but really only to mark the day. And afterwards, I walked my bike up to the levee trail and rode back towards the bridge. Everything looked just as it had before. The rocks on the face of the levee were still a pale reddish beige. The hazy sun had settled closer towards the western horizon. The magic hadn’t changed anything. Perhaps my experience of magic changes me.

I write now from my recollection only. For only a moment or so it was as if I awoke within something quite extraordinary. And then I was just riding my bicycle back along the levee trail towards the bridge.

And I wish to add this. Looking carefully at life and opening yourself to the natural world might be a way of approaching the magic. Annie Dillard has been one of my guides in this exploration of the mystical within the natural world. I encourage you to read her accounts of similar experiences in ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.’

The sycamores of South Park

I walked among the sycamores in South Park,

their limbs so smooth, outreaching.

Then like Quixote, I saw what wasn’t:

bare shouldered ladies

stately waltzing across the green.

If grass were wood,

if wood were sky,

if rainclouds came down to earth –

we would turn and turn and turn again.

And so then I joined the dance.

And together we splashed through yellow daffodils.

Fine mists settled on flushed cheeks and curled eyelashes.

Pink-tinged crab apple petals sprinkled down into our hair.

Their majesties swayed and circled with abiding grace,

their satin-bark gowns swirling,

their grass-slippered feet lightly touching the earth.

And when the music had finally ended,

I bowed down low before my ladies

and I walked once again

among the sycamores in South Park.

Spirit seeking

I went forth upon the land to see if there be any spirits still free.

From the levee to North Lawrence, from the Kaw River to the school, I went forth on my bicycle riding.

On the levee, I had passed by a woman, jogging along, sun-colored ponytail bobbing.

On a sidewalk, I had passed by a man, gray curly hair tucked under a cloth cap, azure tennis shoes shuffling.

On the bridge, I had passed by a woman, wind-whipped florescent pink sweatshirt wrapped around  waist walking.

On 7^th Street, I had passed by a man, sweat-shiny black face carrying his forklift load high hand waving.

At NY Elementary School, children had passed me by, backpacks of every color as I had sat watching.

And then this scene, pictured here, I had passed it by on my quest. I will speak not now of signs and wonders. You can judge all for yourself.

Perhaps I might have found what I had sought, if I only had opened wider mine eyes. Perhaps there be spirits still free breathing among the strangers near meeting.