un-knowing, and putting the guidebooks down

Last night I mistook buttercups for fireflies, in the gray twilight in the meadow. Bright despite approaching dark, my mind drew an unexpected map. This error was error not in being, but only in light and unmattering category. Mistaken sight is sight, and often illuminating (this is the work of metaphor, to complicate or cross the assumptions of regularly worn pathways, to undo habit and inspire seeing).  In early May I took up my field guides and binoculars again, and for a week or so I did not go anywhere without them. There is so much to find and file, to seek and name. Quickly, though, I started to leave them behind.

The paradox of knowing and understanding is cloudy. This past year I’ve read and written less than I have in a very long time. Perhaps it’s simple dormancy, but there’s something inside that wishes to shed instead of add. The arc of learning is long, and the stages are hard to see except from a distance.

Some of the best birding advice I’ve read was, interestingly, to put down the books and just keep looking. There are times on walks that I wish I knew less, despite the relative little I know. To sink into presence, to still the wheeling of mental classification, which requires distance from the current phenomenon in order to plumb my memory stores.

Like the Christmas tree. Glasses on, the details of the ornaments and individual lights are clear, each readily identifiable. Glasses off, it becomes a radiating whole, boundaries are let go and the whole merry thing sings to you at once.

Besides the bliss ignorance of, say, invasive species would bring, I often wish I could blur the scenes I walk through in order to see more clearly. To stand like the cottonwood, who cannot name a warbler, its toes in the riverbank and arms in the sun. To have the wind empty me of what is inconsequential. Leaving space, becoming the reed who sings not of beauty but is sung through, without name.

going to parties in spring with birds

This morning is the first gray, stormy morning of the year – humid wind turning new kelly leaves upside-down, tiny songbirds with ruffled feathers surfing on wild branches. It’s an electric exhilaration I didn’t know I missed so much.

There are a whole host of things – words, experiences, memories, feelings – I haven’t realized I’ve missed while in the depths of winter’s dormancy. The months of this long, cold winter and late spring have left both the internal and external sap slow to rise. There are, of course, lessons to be learned in the wait of winter, including the understanding that to a tree or hibernating woodchuck the very experience of waiting depends upon a conception of future itself (what would it be like to live entirely in the present? To unfold daily, to simply respond accordingly to one’s surroundings?).

But now everything is springing, and soon will all have sprung. I wrote before that fall is a verb, and so is spring. The action is fast, cascading, accelerating every single day. The world changes before our eyes. We are on the inhale of the year. In a week we went from bud to leaf (days in the high seventies were a help), in two days the purple dame’s rocket took over the trailsides. The fruit trees blossomed and went to leaf, the nettles are up, and succulent little jewelweed cotyledons are out just this morning. And the birds!

All these somersaulting changes lead me to understand that the only way one could possibly witness this rapid unfolding is by looking. In the same place. Every day. The past decade or so has been mind-bogglingly peripatetic for me, as it is for many people in their twenties, especially people engaged in seasonal work.  There is value to breadth of experience, but more and more I’m appreciating depth, the clearer understanding that comes with staying. We’ve been in the same place now for a whopping seventeen months, the longest I’ve lived anywhere. But you can learn a lot in that time, especially if you happen to have a dog.

Daily, repeated walks are a gift and a tutor. Every day, at the same time, we walk the trail by the brook that runs into the Winooski, bordered by boxelder, dogwood, and willow (as well as the invasive goutweed and knotweed). While somewhat suburban, it’s also thriving bird habitat. Here is where I get to experience the rush of spring at its height. For the past month, every two days or so I get to welcome a new resident. First the robins, then the grackles and blackbirds, next the ever-present song sparrow, with its song that sounds like dial-up internet. Next came the flycatchers, the phoebe and the peewee, timed, of course, to the explosion of flying insects. A week and a half ago I started hearing the ‘tsee-tsee-TSEE-o!’ of the American redstart (a showy bird I can almost never see). Finally, four days ago, the yellow warbler showed up (sweet sweet sweet little more sweet), and, yesterday, the common yellowthroat, with its smashing black mask and witchity-witchity song. It feels like a crescendo - one I would not be able to experience if I hadn't been present throughout the entirety of the song so far. I feel like a hostess as some great gathering, whose doorbell keeps ringing with new arrivals. It’s a lovely feeling, and one that brings celebration and great relief. 

Because, I mean, after that winter, I think we do deserve a party. And birds are very entertaining guests.

along the reservoir in winter

Sometimes you can only walk alone.

Even when, at the point of the path that in the winter meets the frozen water, the ravens croak, as if to you. And the way is so clear, and the sun is obliging, making the whole set sparkle (the dry goldenrod are of course encased in ice), and when you stop there is no sound. Not even your breath.

Even then, you cannot turn to anyone else to say ‘look, look at this! Look at this place I have come, look how the world has swelled around me.’ No one can stand behind your eyes. (Please do not take a picture; where is your heartbeat? The groaning ice? The stillness?)

And because, also, this would not happen. Footsteps in the crusty snow are so loud, they are a wild racket, and when you stop the other who has come with you generally won’t stop exactly then, the ravens' croaks will be off, muffled by another’s crunching walk. (Someone with four paws can come, perhaps, who senses before even you when you will stop, who in fact lives in sense and so cannot interrupt it).

And there is a world between people, especially the ones you love the most, and it cannot be set aside. Ribbons of life infused with care and history and hope circle between you, color the space surrounding you, divide your loving attention (this is nothing terrible, but lovely and its own Thing). A living, breathing inter-life comes with you, and in the still strung winter it is as raucous as an orchestra. Here you can marvel, only differently.

Sometimes you can only walk alone, and you must sharply, sweetly understand that no one else can stand behind your eyes. 

fall is a verb

The height of a season has passed, and there was no stand still. The fall, the season that is also a verb, like spring, seems to have more constant movement than summer or winter. The year’s made of fullness and stillness, respectively, with movement in between. At the end of August things seem to be holding at crescendo, a great earthly fermata.

Fall then, is a glissade, the most joyful and active letting go I know. You can watch it happening, watch a tree go bare, in the right wind, in an hour. The daylight changes palpably – it’s getting dark at four and the stars are twinkling by six.

I try not to play favorites, but it seems fall suits my constitution best. For that reason, my first instinct is to put my hands up, for everything to stand still, for just a moment. It’s all gone so quickly. Now we have snow and frost. But then, it’s a relief. It is a beautiful thing indeed that it is all out of our hands. It’s not my timeline. The green that turns gold and then mahogany on a beech has nothing to do with me. The squirrels get fatter on their own accord, I do not have to tell the geese to fly south (or to stay, for that matter), and the crows and jays know their own cues.

I am not unlike the leaf of a streamside alder, who lets go, or is let go, depending on how you anthropomorphize things, and tumbles down and floats along the river’s back. The river, too, millions of droplets, who flow according to their friends, and gravity, who yield to obstacles. Who seek their final outlet without effort. 

early september

The world is speaking loudly now, raucous and sibilant and joyful. It isn’t shouting and roaring, like it will in October, when exclamations bring showers of red and gold, but it is somewhere above a stage whisper. When I walk past the drying grasses their rustling makes me look twice – I imagine only a clumsy, scuffling woodchuck could make such a racket. But there’s no waddling round body, just the shushing grasses declaring fall.

The trees, too, are speaking – the maples are becoming stiff and dry, while the willows are lightening with age, almost silver in the sun. Corn husks are beginning to whisper in the fields, and even the sumacs have a voice.

This is the special time of year, too, when late summer layers on early fall, and all things happen at once. The grasses whisper while the cartbirds mew and the waxwings squeak in the tree tops. The crickets are noisy, and the bumblebees hum about the goldenrod. The jays are squawking with the crows, and the river continues to babble. Now leaves, too, are crunching underfoot.

It’s more than the sounds, too. The greatest variety of texture and color, I think, happens now. Because of all the rain we are still lush, the soft grass underfoot and the beeches and apples and birch keep their deep green. But the Virginia creeper has started to burn red, with the sumac, and the maples are beginning to become sere and gold and orange. The still-green apples have yellow and pink baubles on their branches. The goldenrod is still is powdery yellow, while the very first of it has begun to petrify in crispy browns. The sun is warm where it hits, but the breeze is chilly and bare fingers search for pockets on a walk.

There is abundance everywhere, and warmth, which brings a slow relaxation. But there is also the morning and evening chill that suggests a happy urgency, and a coziness. September is the most luxurious month of the year, here in Vermont, anyway.

summer morning in the cemetery

At twenty after eight the sun is already strong. Walking up the gravel path, eighteen twenty through eighteen eighty-nine, eighteen seventy-three through nineteen oh-one, the shadows are still long enough and forgiving. Junipers stand straight, whose roots do not up-end the stones. The light old flat ones are cool, the new dark shiny ones are already taking on the day’s heat. Summer comes, too, to the cemetery.

     (Q: Can I forgive these narrow thoughts?

            A: Does the world forgive the sunset?)

The crow scolds. I want to be him, inky feathers folded, head cocked, at home on a tombstone. Here in the heat autumn auditions, at once I see the corner oak turning copper, the maples scarlet and blowing. Without invitation snow settles and the sun arcs low. Something in me stays, with the crow, while the seasons swiftly ebb. Thank goodness for the prism, the sight that sees two sides. Small things fall away.  And we are (gladly) left like living stones.

spring, suddenly

I don’t know how it happened. I must have been thinking too much, navel-gazing as it were, or maybe just eating a delicious snack, but somehow, suddenly, everything is green and we are halfway to summer. It happens every year – every year! The quiet wonder and reverence of winter fades come February, and I start wondering what leaves look like, and who the heck warblers are, and why do I have to wear so many coats, anyway? And then I’m walking at night, and look up to the miraculous sight of a moon shining through, get this, leaves. And the firsts come streaming, with hardly any time to gape: the first phoebe insistent by the river; the grape in leaf, with all its tiny fruits already in miniature, pinky-red; the first breeze which is turned sibilant by new leaves, instead of its wintry, creaking whistle; the dandelions, turning pastures sun-fuzzy; the roadside coltsfoot already gone to fluffy seed.

I consider myself average-to-slightly-above in my level of awareness of the seasons, and yet I’m humbled every year. Spring is in process in February, and well on its way in March, but with snow and sleet and harsh winds I always grapple with my faith. Its an invisible turning, for a while there, and the long-lasting chill numbs my senses a bit. The upside, though, is an awakening so fast and opulent that it nearly blows me away. Walking on one of the first warm days quite literally raises my pulse, quickens my step, and I’m sure increases all kinds of good brain juice. I feel dual urges to thank the world and apologize for my doubt.

But here we are, whether we doubted or not, and there is new ease around us. I forget the way we brace in the cold, and the loveliness of letting go, letting out, breathing easy. Life comes quickly now, it seems to rush in streams of red admirals and oven birds and Johnny-jump-ups. I must remember not to forget.