7:16 a.m. (sunrise a minute earlier than yesterday, two minutes earlier than Monday), another dusting. 19 degrees, wind S 0 mph. Sky: hopeful in the east, silver clouds embossed on morning blue—a rumor of pink. For the moment, a sunny and buoyant Inauguration Day. I'm thankful for both. Permanent streams: level stretches sealed and silent; sloped stretches, a composite of ice, snow, and gushing (not plunging) water. Brown creeper whispers in ash, barely audible above the purl. Wetlands: across the marsh, dark wall of evergreens trimmed in snow—hemlocks, spruces, firs, pines. Shrew trail zigzags back and forth, woods to the marsh. Employed face as a plow, legs too short to either jump or hop, like dragging a thumb through the snow, inside shrew-trench, itsy, bitsy footprints.
Yesterday late afternoon: short-tailed shrew mid-road, confused. Ran from one side to the other—insectivore indecision. I parked, got out of the car, and watched baffled mammal, twilight-gray, moving like animation from a Nintendo game. Start and stop. Change direction. Eats every three or four hours—heartbeat: eight hundred to a thousand times per minute. In comparison, a weasel's a couch potato. Eventually, disappears into a subnivian tunnel on the marsh side of the road.
In the gloaming yesterday, coyotes hurl their voices at the crescent moon. First serenade I've heard in months.
Female pileated in the roadside maple quietly chips away—flushes when I pass. On my way home, she's back at work, deep inside the tree. I hear tapping, see sprays of wood, the bird herself remains hidden, cocooned in wood. Woodpecker twenty feet up. Dogs and me, twenty feet away. She looks out. Flicks chips. Softly hammers. More chips. I think I see her tongue, an ant-seeking, a flesh-colored flash . . . out the tip of her beak, unspooling or reeling. Hard to tell the direction.
I watch the pileated until my neck aches. An unimpeachable emissary of the wild, disassembles a tree, on a bright, beautiful morning . . . full of hope.
Ah, hope--the one thing that DIDN'T escape Pandora's jar (it wasn't a box: "When the 16th-century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam translated Hesoid’s tale of Pandora into Latin, he mistook pythos with the other Greek word pyxis, meaning box. Hence, it was the story of “Pandora’s Box” that people came to know, instead of “Pandora’s Jar”." https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/16/pandoras-box-actually-pandoras-jar-translation-error-made-500-years-ago-persisted-day/
My hope for today lies in Wendell Berry's poem "Enemies"--the call to forgiveness, even if the "other" doesn't forgive. Our new president is calling for healing, which needs to echo Lincoln's words, "With malice toward none, with charity for all."
Enemies
If you are not to become a monster,
you must care what they think.
If you care what they think,
how will you not hate them,
and so become a monster
of the opposite kind? From where then
is love to come—love for your enemy
that is the way of liberty?
From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go
free of you, and you of them;
they are to you as sunlight
on a green branch. You must not
think of them again, except
as monsters like yourself,
pitiable because unforgiving.
Not to cliche to quote this today? - your prose again reminded me:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -