the end is the beginning

This is the new year, and the beginning starts with loss. A talk with a mediator who specializes in helping communities transition through loss and embrace new identities has me awestruck at seasonal coincidence.[1]

All around there is the subtle change in palette, now, a bronzing, the russet of an apple, but all over our woods. Here and there a young red maple has decided to dive deep and early, and is crimson from crown to trunk. The aspens are golden.

I was cold sitting outside today, feeling more distinctly the exact location of my furnace, decidedly not in my extremities. And a birthday poem by Mary Oliver spoke about the trees turning themselves to torches. The wind doesn’t set the trees to roaring, yet, like they will in October, when they will actually gesticulate by sending their own leaves falling. But they more than rustle, now – is there a word? It has sibilance to it, with an ‘x’ in there, too. It’s not raucous, yet.

But this is the beginning, this is my new year. Technically, too – seed is set, buds are born, and dormancy is merely growth, inside-out. We all know the wisdom of cycling, by now, but I’ve just begun to understand the importance of the order of it all. Now is when we plant our bulbs. Spring is resurgence: “re.”

The maple who decides to go for it, to burn up, to set its buds and immolate, has it right. It’s right there in the word: decide. Cidere, to cut. De, away from, out of, of, etc. To cut away. From the misty infinity of potential, choosing means loss. Beginning means loss. First the leaves let go, then comes the buds’ dormancy, then the leafing.

It is still taboo to grieve at the beginning, because, I think, grief gets mistaken for a lack of gratitude. Just like when we’re scolded for feeling angry – how ungrateful. But the loss is right there, and often it’s first, and when it’s holding us, begging to be seen, our energy can’t go into what’s been chosen.

Like how we prune our apple trees, cutting the water sprouts, those endless, perfectly vertical spikes you can see on a neglected old tree. And corn suckers, and calendula blossoms, like lilac sprays. Prune them, direct the energy, and multiply the fruit. Deciding to bear fruit, and bear it well, means choosing, and that means cutting. Which always, always needs to heal.

What if weddings, those ultimate cultural beginnings, recognized the necessary end and accompanying grief that comes with something new? When you choose your person, you cut away all other potential. What if this were acceptable to acknowledge, and made the choice wiser, sweeter?

My dear friend Cella described to me looking into the face of her newborn, and the depth and purity of the sadness, and the love, that welled up- it was magnificent and overwhelming. I wonder, and it’s just wondering, that even at the very beginning, that extraordinary, finite specificity of a new being brings the understanding of loss. I have no idea what this means. I just marvel at the maple trees.

---

[1] See Ken Downes Consulting, www.kendownes.com

the fifth season

The sounds this time of year sure are funny. It’s no wonder traditional Chinese medicine, with similar seasonal cycling, calls late summer the fifth season, when growth comes to a plateau, fruit sets, and all is still for just a bit. The outward, upward yang meets inward, reflective yin who will bring rest and let us fallow, and for a bit they overlap. What an auditory overlap!

The raucous celebration of summer visitors has mostly disappeared – the warblers are all gone, though I still see flycatchers and swallows. The cedar waxwings are flocking, now – along with the turkeys – and their unmistakable high-pitched ‘tseee’ is greatly amplified. They’ll be descending on anything with fruit (they are entirely fruititarians) pretty soon, leaving a laden honeysuckle bare.

It’s the mornings that are most different, with no more robins querying at dawn. The general uproar has quieted and old friends, here all along, have come back to the fore. Most notably the jays and the crows, who seem to have the reigns again. It’s a funny thing, a jay scolding over a slow and lazy ka-tee-did. A chickadee calling, not singing, while picking ripe tomatoes. And yesterday of all things I heard my personal bell of winter, the nuthatch’s puttering ‘yank!’ All while watering beds still full of flowering Echinacea, black-eyed susan, and daisy. The cardinals sing all summer, but now they have no competition in the thrushes and wrens for virtuoso status.

I think it’s just me – my ears are ready to hear the full-time residents again. I’ve luxuriated in the fancy and exotic and now I’m happy for jays and crows – the trees will take the lead in sensation, now.  A hillside of golden aspen and firey sugar maple – what punctuates that better than a jay? A thrush would be audacious, a gilded lily.

Before that happens, though, we have a plateau – we can watch the squash plump up and relax, a bit. Feel the last push of growth and sniff the oncoming chill, but slowly. Revel in the overlap, the fifth season. 

follow your word-path

Just a few disjointed ideas, but they feel as though they might, before too long, Become Something Interesting. For now they are utterly unrefined and potentially incomprehensible (sometimes the most entertaining things are).

Yes the way out is through, and words can be boots.

The grasp of pen or striking of keys become footsteps. They’re tethered in the smallest visible ways to that well within, and we are surveyors in the deepest spaces.

When you walk through the woods to monitor a plot, there is a tool that fastens to your belt, and drops a string that marks your path. So words, these ink blots (or virtual footpaths) are these traceable lines, and we drop them because we cannot see the whole from the start.

They trace our mire and make a path, they are the guide, the walking stick, the breadcrumb story. “A poem begins with delight and ends with wisdom,” says Mr. Frost. So it is, there is a spark, that conceptual butterfly. Or, rather, it is the actual butterfly who brings us into a heretofore unknown conceptual clearing.

But we have to follow it, we have to pick up our feet and go, through. But our hands can take us there, words can take us there. To the well within that thoughts fly in circles above but writing can penetrate, can skip us out of thought-ruts… and perhaps if we’ve slogged well enough we find that our own well hits a common aquifer.

That aquifer that waters us all, and the words of one can be a map that enables others a momentary deep, replenishing drink. A short cut, a word-path!

But you have to follow, and go through. Write with abandon. Wander. 

Just remember to bring a snack.

we need rain

We need rain. There have been a couple of passing showers, enough to soften the cracking grass a bit and to plump the leaves just slightly, but not nearly enough to satisfy or invigorate. The neighbor’s flowering dogwood has all but folded in on itself, pointed leaves with deep parallel veins now rolled together like little papery cones, all silver underside. The lilac that bakes in full sun beside the raspberries is limp and rattling – its velvet triangle leaves have little protection, with no thick cuticle like the oaks. The jewelweed, some of which already have their mottled orange flowers that look like gnome caps, is tired and far from its vigorous, succulent self. Our corn, too, is stunted – two feet tall and already tassled out. The peppers seem to hold up alright, and the maples.

But there are those hearty ones too who are showing their stress. Roadside sumac, their peaked fruit still ripening, are starting to burn scarlet, and an oak sapling in our yard has ruddy tips. What is a showy and blazing and beautiful decline in September and October seems like an SOS now (we see neon everywhere, now, but it seems to me without chemicals sumac and sunset must be the brightest colors anywhere). But interesting, to me, is how this early, spotted shift allows me to try on the next season. A month ago it would have seemed unthinkable, exhausting even, to think about lush green maples wearing their crimsons and golds. But now I’ve progressed enough, perhaps, to settle into it – to see scarlet and let my mind wander to spice, to squash, to crunching leaves. I stoke my figurative beard and think, ‘yes, interesting.’

It is at these times of dry weather especially that I think about the underneath of trees. That they have a mirror image, or nearly, anchoring them in their vast swaying greatness. I wonder where the water table is, and whose toes are still wet, whose roots have enough energy to reach a bit further, whose roots hairs are clinging by toes to their roots, reaching and sipping. It is the old ones, usually, who reach the greatest depths. The ones with great height have big ropey taproots, and I wonder what it must be like for ones whole enormous, old body to live in such extremes. Imagine, your hands one hundred feet in the sky, parallel to hawks, fingers catching hot sun, great stormy wind. And your toes in topsoil, mineral soil, and down down to cold bedrock, sweet pure groundwater. All manner of creatures burrowing, laying, digging, digesting, transforming. When I sip cold water it starts at my tongue and cools my chest; the enormous elm would feel just the opposite.

It reassures me, the big old ones who’ve tapped so firmly in the ground beneath them. I root for the saplings, too, though they will have to earn their stripes. At least when they are stressed, and thirsty, and tired, their blushing is brilliant and beautiful. But we do need rain.

remembering summers

Two years ago yellow warblers built a nest in the roses outside of the ranger cabin at North Hero State Park in Lake Champlain. Two years ago we were a nest, the five of us, woven and resting and thriving. The scene I wrote down two years ago could be titled ‘nighttime in a cabin,’ or ‘Living in Community,’ but also ‘blow up your TV.’ There is magic in a summer night, the only sounds breathing, turning pages, crickets outside and a moth against a screen.

The haunting cry of calling loons,

A cabin in the woods.

Pages turn in yellow light,

Stillness here imbued.

Friends with eyes held fast in books

Have bodies calmly cast

In different patterns, folded deep,

A presence formed in past.

Nighttime beckons, darkness calls,

As words bind friends in pulsing thrall.

or

Their bodies are shadows,

The lines and patterned limbs

Cast by thrall and rapture.

Substance lying in stories, bodies

are echoes, afterthoughts,

They are

Formed inside pages.

siren thrushes

All things that grow are, this time of year, sending their energy upwards, outwards – to grow, to fruit, to leaf, to disperse… This includes myself, and I find the majority of my time is spent in simple absorption and observation, rather than reflection and synthesis. That, and my there is so much to do! The tomato plants are in, albeit a few days before the ordained date of May twenty-first, the official ‘post-frost’ day in New England. Today we sow kale and more lettuce, along with peas, as the first crop has been thoroughly nibbled. Needless to say, we also have to build a fence.

But I still have the early mornings, and they are for birds. This morning, specifically, was for thrushes. They are the sirens of the woods, and I have been drawn in to no avail countless times. They dwell in the woods, and are for the most part dull and rusty colored, and as such evade viewing nine times out of ten. Ten out of ten for me – I’ve never seen a hermit thrush, a wood thrush, or even a veery. They might be like an avian Echo, for all I know, made up entirely of haunting, ethereal sound. Their voices are so extraordinary they don’t need anything else of note – one might think with voices as enchanting they’d have to be dressed to the nines, with foot-long plumes and scarlet eggs or some such thing. But that would be altogether too much. Leave the colors to the warbler who sounds like a squeaky wheel.

Sometimes you’ll hear the thrushes without having to venture off your path – wood thrushes can be heard along roadsides, and I’ve heard veeries in more open wet places. Apparently hermit thrushes will come to trails in the woods, but I’ve never seen one there. You can hear them a long ways off, but I’ve found I have to get deeper into the woods to be really surrounded by their song.

This morning I was the luckiest I’ve been listening to thrushes. I sat on an old stump in a typical New England forest, beeches wrapped around old barbed wire, clearings here and there from logged white pines, low blueberries growing up in the openings… One can’t just go searching for the thrushes – they’re sirens, recall. You don’t need to strap yourself to a mast, or stump, but you do have to sit, and simply let them sing. As I settled down the thrushes started up, first the veery to my left, all fluted waterfall. The two words you’ll hear in any description of thrush song are ‘flute-like’ and ‘ethereal.’ Both are true, but they’re a bit vague. The veery is four downward spiraling trills, the first two starting higher than the last two. All thrushes sound like wind chimes, multi-toned and metallic, but the veery adds a lovely courseness, and almost an urgency. Imagine those carved wood frog instruments – when you rake their back it sounds like a frog’s trill. Add that to a wind chime, and you’ve got the veery.

Then I heard the wood thrush, or three, coming from a bit deeper in the woods. They sound like a wind chime giggling, though I’m told you can listen for the definitive ‘ee-o-lay!” pattern within their rather tripping call. Finally came the hermit thrush, the first I’ve heard this year. I’m surprised – I thought I’d have to go a bit farther north to hear her in the summer (they winter in the Carolinas). I’m thrilled, too, because their call is undoubtedly my favorite. How do you possibly describe it? It might as well be the eternal voice of the Woods herself. It is not urgent, or hurried, or really even playful. It is better described as plaintive, though melancholy is more apt.  A long introductory note, the flute, and then trace the chimes with your hand, but slowly. Mournful? Not quite, it’s not the loon or the mourning dove. It’s more restful than that, and it doesn’t ask a question. It is expressive, not seeking. And the magic therein is that when you really, really listen to a hermit thrush’s song, she has induced that very spirit in you.

It’s hard to hold on to that expressive stillness, with peas to be planted and errands to be run. But the thrushes will hold it for us, and we can return to the woods again another morning.

on robins

 The mere sight of an American robin isn’t the first sign of spring, although the Audubon here in Massachusetts gets calls all winter reporting errant and harbinger robins. Many individuals do over-winter, changing to a diet of berries instead of worms and moving deeper into the forest. But all the particulars change in the spring, and they become my backdrop – something so simple and clear and honest it’s always already happening before I realize it. I have moved into spring, already, and I stop in my tracks and realize the evening robins have brought me there.

Their plumage changes in the spring, like many birds. But it’s a bit subtler than the noticeable brightening and blackening of the goldfinch: the bill brightens to sunflower yellow and the red breast gets deeper and ruddier. They get a bit of flash, especially when combined with the two outer white patches visible on their tails as they streak away from lawns with their woodpecker-esque trumpeting. They wear white-ringed monocles, and their dapper gray backs and long thrush tails make them appear as though they’ve put on their morning suits, all three pieces with a cheeky red vest.

We see them now on lawns, pulling worms from wet earth. They seem to me always clumsily avoiding some kind of amusing mishap, because yes, they hop like most birds, but they also kind of run. They actually scamper about. I haven’t been able to find much research or basic information on songbirds who seem to run around, but it seems to me it makes sense for a larger songbird who spends a good deal of time on the ground. Hopping takes a heck of a lot more energy than speed-walking. Try it.

So T. migratorius is a sight for the eyes, but more profoundly he is a wake-up call for our inner ears. Their song is a somewhat clumsy, liquid four-part question, to me. You’ll see it written as ‘cheerio, cheerily, cheerio, cheerily.’ It is most definitely thrush – there is a depth and clarity to it, though nothing like its cousins the hermit or veery. It’s not long and impressive, like the operatic song sparrow, or multi-toned like the boreal thrushes. It’s not absolutely unmistakable like, say, the towhee (‘drink your tea!’), as the gray catbird can sound like a robin, perhaps after a bit of champagne. But nobody sings you into twilight like the robin. They are quintessentially crepuscular, singing loudest before dawn and after dusk. They’ll sing when almost all the light is gone from the sky, and it’s the cheeriest sound I know. It’s the activity gentle but bright enough to offer allowance that our own can stop. Someone has taken the reigns for the day, and off we can drift. 

Their evening song is taps, for me, but not the sort that brings tears. It’s the taps we sang at camp – “day is done, gone the sun…” Reverence with the corners of one’s lips turned up, no great heartbreak, just rest. And a bit of a chuckle, because they are pretty silly.