6:53 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 3 degrees, wind ENE 0 mph. Sky: disheveled, gray-pink in the west, nacreous luster in the east, mostly silver-white with a dash of peach; grades to a windrow of clouds that drift northeast. Permanent streams: upper, ice begins to close off oblong rents; lower, if you substitute the word flow for children, then the tributary becomes the polar opposite of my parent's 1950s dinner parties—water heard but not seen. Wetlands: this morning, a landscape defined by birds, everything else a visual stagnation. Well hidden in the evergreens, pileated releases one salvo, tattooing a resonant limb or trunk. Red-breasted nuthatch vocally energetic, nonstop tooting. (A friend told that this winter red-breasted nuthatches reached Florida, wandered up and down cypress and pop ash trunks, stared down at alligators that cut trails through duckweed, heads flecked with living, green dots.) Overhead, an unaccompanied raven preceded by a croak. Pond: coyote and deer walked around the plowed skating surface, very likely not together.
I prospect for birds. For an early spring arrival, maybe redwing or cowbird. Or a valley full of northbound redpolls or nuthatches. I'm not too fussy. I seek another feathered sign that reflects the canting Earth. The quickening of spring. Yes, chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches have started to sing, sporadically. Hairy and pileated woodpeckers have started to drum, also sporadically. The other day, a titmouse cut loose, made a mockery of February . . . and spring became a phantom limb I kept feeling.
I keep prospecting to no avail. What do I have to do more important than to witness the world turn? Then, clumps of snow pass through the sieve of fir boughs, spilling columns of cold, white smoke. Snow strikes the paper-thin leaves of beech, which rattle like the tails of so many snakes—and I retreat into the solace of memory.
"What do I have to do more important than to witness the world turn?" Nothing. Mary Oliver would agree:
"Mindful"
by Mary Oliver
Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for -
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
Indeed. What do any of us have to do more important than witness the earth turn? The 'world' includes people in my mind and we have witnessed people too much for my liking.