Tuesday, April 22, 2008

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.

The Torture of Sisyphus

Living life as a full-time student at 51 years old has been challenging. There is never enough time in the day to complete all my school work, finish all my grading, help my children with their homework, and still have time to make half-hearted attempts to bring some order to the chaos that my life and home have become.

Simone de Beauvoir said, “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day,” and I barely try any more. I helplessly hope that my daughters won’t need endless years of therapy for the dirty jeans worn to school two days running, or the dust bunnies accumulating above our ankles, or the pasta and pizza we’ve eaten for the fifth day in a row. The youngest one rather enjoys that I never seem to remember to remind her to take showers. She doesn’t care that her hair looks more like strands of limp seaweed than human locks; I have learned to let go of my ideals and accept her feelings on comfortable grooming.

There are times when the chaos becomes so blatantly beyond reason that my psyche begins to unravel. It is at those points, when I am grasping for sanity and feeling it slowly slip through my fingers, that the farm will send a small gentle reminder, a hint of the sublime unknowable wonder in life, and I can stop my world, step off for a few moments to be still in myself and at one with the world around me. The gentle reminder becomes a grounding and centering that fills my soul with a renewed sense of self, remembering my place in the world.

One of those moments came to me as I sat in the car, working up the energy for what had become the Herculean effort needed to open the car door and walk into the house. It had been raining for weeks, the house was swimming in a sea of mud, and the sump pump was barely keeping up with the cataracts of water streaming through my basement. As I sat wondering where I would find enough strength to finish the long day ahead of me, a sudden flash of color, almost unnoticed, gently tugged at my attention. It was a bluebird, rosy-bellied and gorgeous, with brilliant blue back and tail, feeding on the newly sun-warmed insects beginning to emerge from the long wet winter.

As I sat watching, the bluebird was joined by a merry fat robin. Plump brown wrens joined the feeding flock. A few minutes later, a brilliant blue jay appeared above the throng of birds feeding in front of my car. I sat mesmerized for many long minutes, until the birds had their fill and all finally fluttered away. It was a breathtaking moment of spring.

Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.” I think often about what that means – a child that knows poems. As a child, I never liked poetry; I found it difficult to understand, long-winded, lacking in personal meaning. I began to understand poetry when someone introduced me to Mary Oliver, whose visual imagery captured my imagination and sent it soaring with the wild geese I read about in my first Oliver poem. I found the world offering itself to my imagination, calling to me “like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,” and I began to devour poetry. Since then, I have had the privilege of introducing many children to exciting poetry that fires their imaginations and calls them to the wild places within themselves. I think there can be no greater gift than to hear a child read her first poems to you, full of rich imagery, pulling at your despair and showing you your place in the family of things.

And so, like the child that knows poems, I slid from the car, rejuvenated by the avian dance of spring, opening my heart to the possibilities, finding once again within myself the pure joy and hope that offer relief from chaos -- my psyche made whole again.

Spring has arrived, and with it, a renewal of hope.

Lessons Learned

Sometimes the lessons learned from nature are profound enough to take my breath away. I find I am often an unwilling participant in those lessons, which frequently happen at the most inopportune times. Maybe that’s the point? Those are the perfect moments to learn a lesson, when we think we have neither the time nor inclination to learn a life lesson, thank you very much.

A recent lesson was due to a flock of Common Grackles … a really large flock of grackles, that just happened to be crossing the farm lane that leads from our house to the road. I was driving my kids to school and me to work, already running late. The birds created a most unwelcome and unexpected delay.

Grackles, evidently, like to make short flights of a few yards while feeding on fields in a large flock. They peck the ground; they rise up in a small cloud, and move past the other small groups to the next clear spot. Then the next small group moves on a few more yards. I drove up to the grackles just as the earliest small groups started to cross our lane. For the first few moments, my daughters and I enjoyed watching the small groups rise up in waves and move to a clear spot to start feeding again. We were mesmerized until I looked out over the field and realized just how many thousands of birds still had to cross.

I was already late. I had an important meeting. I didn’t have time for this distraction right now. Maybe I could just drive through; they’d only just started crossing the lane…

It took only a few seconds of internal anguish to decide that we were stuck. I risked running over too many birds if I tried to drive through them. So I put my car in park, and watched, impatiently consulting my watch many times, half-hoping that clock-watching would make it all happen faster. You know the old adage that a watched pot never boils, right? Well, watched grackles don’t feed any faster, either.

The ballet of the waves of grackles, perfectly timed to avoid each other, was awesome in its majesty. My reaction was visceral, remembering the Hitchcock movie The Birds, wondering if that many birds could crack my windshield. But no birds hit my car windows, even though it was difficult at times to see past the waves of birds flying overhead. I remembered reading accounts of how North America looked before European settlers arrived; how thick the woods were, how the sky would darken with the flight of birds in migration. I started paying attention to the details of the grackles in their single-minded pursuit of food.

As if by magic, my stressed soul calmed, and the day became richer and more tranquil. I was able to slow down and enjoy the moment, relax and stop stressing about the endlessly long list of to-do’s that never seemed to get shorter, to cultivate the Zen moments we need in our lives. They are so rare and precious, the eternal moments of time when I can forget about everything except the immediate present.

If not for the enforced sitting because of the passage of birds, I would have missed these moments. A few minutes earlier, and I would have missed the entire grackle ballet and driven away stressed and untouched by the lesson of the grackles. A few minutes later, and I would have missed the ballet and been that much more pressed for time, more fully stressed and less able to cope with the myriad details of a frenetic fast-paced life. The timing was perfect, nature had spoken, and I had been ready to listen.

Living on the farm has been magical for our family. We never know what unexpected gift will fly up in front of us, slowing down our day, allowing us to surrender with grace to the slower rhythms of nature. Grackle ballets appear as if by enchantment, soothing our frazzled souls. Life is good on the farm.

Appearing for a breathe of air!

I haven't had time to blog in such a long time - carrying 12 credits plus teaching 12 credits makes it challenging to find time for anything! The next three blog entries are from my English class - a small portion of what one day might be my memoirs! My professor asked me to try to get them published; this is the next best thing!
Robin