On Saturday, I arose early. The sun was rising - a soft yellow with tinges of orange. As I was making my coffee, I saw my first Black-capped Chickadee of the season eating in my window feeder. I felt joyful upon seeing this little fellow. It was a wonderful way to begin my day.
Going into the den, I set my coffee down, turn on a small soft lamp to read my morning poem. This morning’s is one by Mary Oliver entitled “From The Book of Time.” I read these words:
And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening is the real work.
It truly is.
To be fully present is a form of prayer. Each day, I strive to give this glorious poem of a world pockets of my full attention and it never fails to reward me. So why was I just sitting here inside?
Leaving the cosiness of my couch, I step outside. I walk barefoot on the chilly, dewy morning grass to remind myself why I am alive, to not be separate from nature. I breathe in deeply. In the chilliness of the morning air, I feel the warmth of the coffee cup in my hands. The trees are filled with birdsong. What finer concert is there than this? Like Hildegard of Bingen, I grasp that, “There is the music of heaven in all things.”
Seven Carolina wrens are hopping about, pecking at seeds on the ground.
Squirrels chase each other around the old oak.
Two Robins fly past me. Their nest is next to the kitchen windows, which means I will get to see another season of eggs hatch into chicks. I think about how a group of Robins is called a blush, a bobbin, a carol, and a gift. They feel like gifts each Spring.
A group of wrens is called a chime.
The Dutch have a concept called “Niksen.” It is a focus on the art of doing nothing. The only purpose is relaxation and enjoyment. In our productivity obsessed culture, this is an act of revolution to set aside time to enjoy the moment.
Mary Oliver writes, “Eternity is not later…”
Emily Dickinson writes, “Forever - is composed of Nows -”
They are both reminding us to not rush past life. To remain present and to let the world reignite the soft flame of one’s heart towards its grace and beauty.
How critical to allow oneself to be well and weather-worn by the wildness of this world instead of simply being worn-down by its tragedies and terrors. Whenever I spend time in the natural world, I no longer ask, “Why am I here?” Instead, I am only grateful that I am.
Later that morning, I get dressed, pull on my boots and go back outside to work in my garden. I am still clearing out the back bed so that I can sew wildflowers there. A bold Robin approaches me as I do. It’s the same Robin that visits me each time I am working here. I stop digging and move aside so he can find his morning meal in the newly turned soil. It does not take him long to pull out a juicy, fat, wriggling worm. Then another. Still another.
The Robin cocks his head to the side to appraise me. I tip my hat to him.
We trade places. Literally. I go back to digging in the soil and he goes to sit on the arm of my garden bench where I was just sitting. We are becoming friends, I think. It makes me feel a little like Dickon Sowerby from The Secret Garden.
I notice some other birds while I work. A Cardinal and two Northern Mockingbirds.
At one point, I sit on the rock wall and watch the Robin eat just a few inches from me. I also reflect on my dear friend and neighbor who built this rock wall with me from the stones we gathered. I think about his life and how I didn’t get to see him before he died because of the pandemic. His life was one rooted in creating beauty, music and community. While I deeply miss him, I am grateful for what he brought to this world.
I dig and pull and take a pick-ax to the roots of the spindly, ugly bamboo I am trying to get rid of. It is hard on the back. Yet it feels rewarding because the physicality of it allows me to escape from being only inside my head. It is also a way to enter into creation, to bring beauty to my little corner of the world. To, hopefully, draw in more birds and butterflies and bees.
During a break, I call my Father to check on him. I know that even without his dementia, my Father is in what the poet Donald Hall describes, “Old age is a Ceremony of Losses.”
When my Father inquired what I’m doing, I reply, “Working in my garden.”
“Sounds awful,” he said.
I correct him with, “No, it’s glorious!” I tell him about all the birds I have encountered so far this morning. He is disinterested.
My Father complains that he is “bored.” I offer to come pick him up and he can sit in the garden with me.
“No,” he answered, “I’ll pass.”
“But there is sun and blue sky and clouds and birdsong,” I offer up the wonder-filled garden around me. I even mention some of the flowers already in bloom. None of this sways him.
I feel sorry for him. Not just for the dementia that has, in many ways, taken so much of his life from him, but also for the fact that he has always been so discontent. Gardening, for me, is a form of contentment. Of reconnecting again and again with the earth I came from and will, one day, return to. This makes me remember a passage from The Secret Garden:
One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun--which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes.
This was one of the books my Mother introduced me to when I was a child. It, along with Anne of Green Gables, shaped so much of how I see the natural world, appreciate it, and, in many ways, romanticize it. I think of how gardens are places that can heal us, both physically and mentally. How I never leave from being out in my garden feeling worse. Tending to my garden is an act of faith, of hope, of what doing what Wendell Berry calls, “Practice resurrection.”
I think of Homer’s The Odyssey and how Odysseus sees his old father in “solitude / Spading the earth around a young fruit tree.” He does this knowing he may never even see the fruit of his labors. This is an act of hope. Cultivation of the earth is born of the desire to make it more beautiful. It connects us to not only our ancestors that worked the soil but to the future with the hope that we are leaving this for them.
What a perfect essay to awake to on this Easter morning, when I'm bound to my bed because of a recent ankle surgery. I long to be outside in the wild air, and your words took me there.
My earthy sense of being was forged from childhood moments spent at my grandparent's farm in Northern Michigan.
I come alive when the breeze greets my face, the sun warms my shoulders, the clouds extend an invitation to lie on my back in the grass and gaze at them rolling by.
There's no better place to be.
Happy Easter.
It is the paragraph about feeling sadness at the discontent that touched me most.