5:05 a.m. 64 degrees, wind ESE 2 mph. Sky: fog socked and opaque; off and on drizzle; pitter-patter of dripping leaves; Coyote Hollow reveals itself incrementally like a Polaroid snapshot. Permanent streams: refreshed (a bit) and gurgling. Wetlands: visible but slowly expanding. Pond: mobile quilling; a hypnotic run of ever-swelling concentric circles. Ferns and coltsfoot upright and revived.
Morning chorus. Lead singer: robins, everywhere resounding. Background vocals: scarlet tanager; ovenbird (one); chickadees, white-breasted nuthatch (two chicks chase a parent); veery (calling not singing); red-eyed vireos (hard to believe that they're self-effacing); woodcock (flushed from the road; wings whirring); crows; blue jays; yellow-billed cuckoo (once again); white-throated sparrow (definitely the truncated song); song sparrows; pileated (most percussive); barred owls (called all night and past dawn); house wren; goldfinches (an avian version of Darlene Love, just Twenty Feet From Stardom).
One deer runs across the road less than fifty feet in front of us; dogs tighten their leaches. Another deer bounds across the wetlands, shoulder high in reeds, tail immaculate and erect, a beacon in the mist. When Ken Kesey was asked how he felt about the Apollo Moon Landing, he replied that we don't deserve to be in space until we learn how to live on Earth. My boys grew up watching and listening to the kaleidoscopic assemblage of creatures that lived in or passed through our valley. I wanted them to bond with their home ground, a landscape engorged with detail, to track the seasons across the wetlands. I wanted them to feel the muck rise between their toes; to awaken their curiosity to the sounds of the night. I wanted them to contemplate the stars, to feel the freedom of uncluttered time when hours passed like minutes as the magic of the world opened like a flower.
The other night, when Casey called and said I had to stay up to see the fuzz-ball comet, we had come full circle, the child had become the father of the man . . . the father leaning on the hood of his car, childlike . . . peered out into the night sky.
Love this one especially Ted. I sent out this poem this morning: Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I
got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under
the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even
nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.
This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them — I swear it! —
would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like
the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,
I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.
~ Mary Oliver ~
(House of Light)
Between the posts you and Stephanie send, I have the gift of peace everyday. Thank you.