7:08 a.m. 3 degrees, wind NW 2 mph. Sky: clear, pastel blue-white, a dash of pink, looks warm but does nothing for knotted fingers. Permanent streams: upper, muted below a mantle of ice and two-feet of fresh snow; lower, ice sheet, snow hillocks. The sound of rushing water, hollow, melodic, rhythmic. Rises out of paired oblong openings in the ice, an aqueous flute. Wetlands: along the far shoreline, snow-covered evergreens, branches sag and release . . . powdery puffs. Limbs rise behind the discharge. Two crows call in the void, high above the alpine glow that creeps down Robinson Hill, a momentary and welcome off-peach. Pond: wind-sculpted drifts. Snow offshore melts and refreezes, gray bar nearly circling pond like a contour line on a topographical map.
Predominant sound: squeaking snow under my boots, the swish of my sleeves against the side-seam of my coat. I have to stop to hear anything other than myself. Mostly a dislocated jay, alone in the hardwoods. Or foraging chickadees.
At home: eight jays, three chickadees, and two titmice on the feeders. A hairy woodpecker on the suet. Ernie the Patridge and a mourning dove on the ground vying for spilled seeds. In the backyard, in shallow snow under hemlock, three turkeys scratch for acorns. Two others roost in black walnut in the front yard, one in ash, two in apple. Three turkeys forage on the edge of the raspberry patch, two under the sunflower feeders. A mixed-species, front yard Helio-polis: all birds face the sun, feathers fluffed.
Yesterday, late afternoon, I trudged across the marsh. Dogs made me break trail. Citrus bloomed in the west—a show-stopping sunset—gliding every cloud that wasn't already orange. A crescent moon, the Dreamwork's Logo, minus Fishing Boy, leaned southwest. Jupiter and Saturn, near the moon, played peekaboo behind a mobile terrain of clouds, very close to each other. Sky like the flank of a fish, more brook trout than mackerel.
I looked for an owl. Found a rarity of circumstance. Once in eight-hundred-year conjunction. Two faraway planets. Seen from a third, a significantly smaller, significantly bluer . . . signpost in the universe.
Love how you sense the connection of the micro and macrocosmos. That last line instantly brought Carl Sagan's PALE BLUE DOT to my mind.
https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
And chickadees and turkeys and owls and otters--all of us.