5:38 a.m. 45 degrees, wind N 11 mph. Clouds move across the valley, some trimmed in rose. Everything that is going to leaf out has leafed out; everything else prepares to fall. Streams whisper. The wind speaks in tongues, hijacking the voice of warblers, which disperses like pollen grains, thinning, spreading, lost to everything but the intended audience. Tree-crowns in perpetual motion; a rough ride for a little bird.
A pileated exits a wall of spruce and undulates over the wetland; a roller coaster flight from west to east. Wings flash white and black; red-crest extends like a pterodactyl, an accent above a sea of green-brown. Below the woodpecker, sunlight spreads across the reeds, a flood of rich light turns a seemingly mundane world into unabridged wonder. Chestnut-side warbler, again, in cherry, feeds, sings, clings to twigs; bold amid clusters of white flowers. Ravens play with the wind.
Many years ago, I remember having read an interview with Edward Abbey, in which he said he was willing to rail about our abuses of nature half the time if he could be lost in the desert, alone, the other half. Mary Oliver, poet laureate of wrens and owls also rejoiced in the great family of things. If you pay attention, she said, you see more. Unlike Abbey, she never scolded humanity about environmental missteps. Instead, she wrote of the beauty and mystery of nature trimmed in language so gorgeous her poems urge me outside. A pandemic might have confined me to my home ground but a poet and curmudgeon have released me, reaffirming that my valley, a valley within a valley within the most spacious valley in New England, holds all the drama of Earth.
The last morning in May: cool and without mosquitos, and beyond beautiful, reminding me that both Abbey and Oliver understood to help the Earth you need to love the Earth. And to love the Earth you need to know it intimately and to listen to its language, that early and provocative chorus of animate and inanimate beings, and then to be open to scenes that move you for reasons you cannot fathom.
A robin, schmutz on its face, scolds me, an ordinary bird in extraordinary light. My emotions, hitched to wind and sunlight, ride the waving reeds. I'm in morning light admiring a bird I took for granted; a bird I thought I knew well. An annoyed robin with a dirty bill bestows her blessings.
Two days in and I'm soaking up and loving your keenly poetic and philosophic observations. Thank you.