Announcing your place in the family of things

…..Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~ Mary Oliver

I just finished my yearly ritual of hiding eggs. It's bitterly cold out there, ten degrees below freezing, and not one sprig of green on our farm even though the forced forsythia is blooming away in our kitchen.

This morning, I watched birds building a nest in the tree hole ten feet away from my bedroom window, far above the muddy brown spring lawn. When I wake up, I can see straight into that hole – where owls visit, squirrels search for storage, birds nest, and raccoons raid for anything they can find to make a meal. The raccoons are difficult to watch. When my daughters catch them in the act of climbing toward the nesting hole, the girls run flying out the front door with pots and pans and metal spoons, beating desperately to save the nestlings about to make a fine raccoon dinner. It hasn’t worked yet. The raccoons just blink down at them before finishing climbing up toward the tree hole. Even frantic thrusts with brooms don’t dislodge them from the tree; spring raccoons are hungry and more stubborn than the most passionately caring young girls.

We don't often have the vernal equinox and Easter on the same weekend, so it’s unusual to be hiding eggs in a sere landscape of unrelenting tan and brown. Normally, the yellow eggs hide in the forsythia, the blue eggs nestle among the first hyacinth, and the green eggs lie anywhere the spring onion grass is tall enough to hide them from casual observation. This year required some creativity – thankfully, the hemlocks had branches thick enough to hide the eggs up high where they were hard to find. Any trees with split trunks made good hiding places as well, especially if the splits were higher than eye-level for my youngest daughter.

I love this time of year, as the earth wakes up from her long hard freeze. Even though my sea of mud is frozen solid this morning, the sun streaming into my office is warm, and the air is alive with bird calls that we don't hear all winter. It was good to be alive this morning, even in the freezing cold.

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Twice a year, we have an annual reunion of migrating geese. We wake up to the welcome morning chorus of twilight cacophony in the spring; welcome because the returning geese mean that the weather is changing. The days are longer, the sun is warmer, and even with ice on the pond and temperatures still below freezing, we know that spring can’t be far behind.

The fall reunion is warmly greeted, too. The appearance of the geese heralds a welcome relief from the summer heat as we head into autumn. The wild cry of the annual migration south is an echo of the wild cry in all of us, demanding that we remember our place in the circle of life.
Until we moved to the farm, I didn’t know that geese never sleep. The first year we spent here, we were sleepless for a good portion of the spring. Like wild children at a slumber party, they never stop their chatter and fussing. On those noisy nights, as the geese pass through town on their way north again, I am grateful to have a bedroom on the far side of the house from the pond.

On the evenings when I can walk out into the dark, to gaze at the full moon reflecting in a long shining path across the pond, sipping my tea slowly and reflecting on the day or planning the next day’s relentless endless list of tasks that can never be fully accomplished, I am grateful for the ceaseless chatter of the geese. That wild cry pulls at my heart, draws my attention away from the never-ending lists, and returns me to that endless place of rest that knows no time. Perhaps that’s why nature allows the geese to party all night … it’s her last chance to capture our attention, in the still of the night when no other sounds echo through our world. We listen to their wild cries, our imagination is captured, and we once again find our place in the world, unencumbered by the weights of caring and lists.