For a year and a half, I have tried to attract birds to my garden. I put up a birdbath, and grieved when no bird came to drink.  I put up a bird feeder, and watched the squirrels hang upside down, feeding at leisure on what had promised to be a squirrel-repelling mechanism .  And then this spring, a single crow swooped onto my bird bath.  

   I was thrilled. I love crows. They are smart, social, observant, cunning.  And black.  They warn other birds and animals of peril. They caw at any illicit movement in the forest; they attack or deflect a hawk. But what my crow was doing baffled me.  Sometimes it drank the cool, clean water, but without tilting its head to swallow, as most birds do.   Apparently, it could swallow without tossing the water back into its throat. Sometimes, it bounced around the edge of the bath, dunking its beak and head. What in the world was it doing?  When I cleaned the water, I found a tiny bone and a tuft of gray fur swirling in the water.  

    The crow had come to wash its food!  I watched in admiration. They rarely kill for meat. But they’ll scavenge carrion, and now my crow appeared several times a day to shake and wash the dirt off her food. Sometimes, afterwards, she washed her gleaming black feathers in a spray of glistening waterdrops.

    A few days later a second crow appeared.  Evidently, my crow had brought her mate.  And a few days after that, a whole murder of crows settled noisily on my birdbath, four, five, six, flapping, cawing, scolding, socializing and raising holy hell on the birdbath edge or running along the fence.

   It was hilarious—a parody. I had expected my garden to attract a St. Francis image of pretty little bluebirds flitting about the feeder. These were rascally, raucous, rebellious juvenile delinquents, taking over the local swimming pool, terrifying the little kids. 

   And then something extraordinary happened. 

   One morning, no crows came.

   Instead a cardinal appeared, a swallow, some nuthatches, two American goldfinches, and woodpeckers. Birds were flitting and flying at the feeder, dipping to the birdbath, disappearing into the woods, skimming smoothly away.  But no crows. No cawing, noisy marauders , no gunslingers, strutting on the fence.

    I miss my crows.  

    But I wonder about them, too.  Why did they come?   Where did they go? They were like angels, leading the little wood birds to the clean water in the birdbath and to a feeder that had attracted only squirrels for a year. You’ll think I’m nuts, but I see angels everywhere. Angels come in many forms. They play hide and seek with us poor humans. Now you see them, now you don’t.  Sometimes they even appear as black birds, dark forces, posing as disaster, yet bringing with them, joy, hope, beauty, change.  

    So, my masked-bandit daughter came over to visit and we started talking about how  the pandemic has thrown all our values into question (not to mention 6 planets then retrograde), because what can else you do while social distancing and washing obsessively except move toward the deep, inner reflection and introspection that this pandemic has inspired?  

      She said, “We’re taught all sorts of values, but what if they’re wrong? There’s aesthetics, for example, being beautiful (hair, clothing, lips, eyes, body). And then there’s the value of how to enter a room, or make an entrance. You were taught to make an entrance,” she added. “That was a value for you.”  And I had to admit that entering a room was taught to my generation the way we were taught waltz or tango steps in dancing school. We were taught which fork to use at a dinner party, and how to make the hostess feel comfortable when her party goes off the road.

    “Not to mention,” my daughter continued, speaking as much to herself now as to me, “the value of accomplishments and achievements—and all that stuff we’re judged on, like keeping up with the New York Times, knowing about politics, and art, or theater, and the latest rage:  that’s another value.  

    “And what,” she mused, “if all you had to do was be yourself?”

    “What?”

    She lost me there.  No accomplishments? No doing?  Just being?  My whole life has been a search for approval. ( If I write a book, will my father love and notice me? If I’m more tactful, will I belong?)

    She said, “Look, you don’t have to do anything to be noticed.” At which I began to preen myself, until she added to my astonishment that she’d be happy just to go away with me for a weekend, where we wouldn’t have to do anything.  “Just being with you is enough,” she said. “Why do we have to do something all the time?”

    I was stunned. Is that true?    

    Now I keep wondering—What would it be like just to Be? Certainly, it releases all obligation of accomplishing anything (like vacuuming the living room right now, which it sorely needs). 

    It had never occurred to me that someone might want to be with me, except perhaps for my quick mind, and the quirky way I see the world. But when I think of those I love, I realize I don’t really care about their achievements or what high-wire act they perform, if they will simply let me bask in their presence. I’m happy watching them (and also my grandchildren, I might add, who are infinitely fascinating, like watching a lovely waterfall, without their having to say or do or perform in any way). 

     Is that what love is about? Just being? Mindfully. Observing without judgment. Or, put another way, just allowing, accepting, admiring, in the same way that I attend to a tree or to that bird that stopped at the birdbath to dip its beak and drink at my offering.  

     Can I allow myself to Be?

When I was in college I remember making a “Great Discovery.”  I was so pleased with myself! I don’t remember what it was anymore, but I remember being thrilled by  my own wisdom, and proud of myself— until I found that Plato had said it first.  Such a letdown. I remember a few years later during my Junior Year Abroad in Italy, going skiing with my cousin over Christmas break at a place he’d found called Cervinia.  I arrived in dead of night and the next morning, when I looked out the window the mountain, so majestic with its high crags and peaks, took my breath away.  “Why has no one ever talked about Cervinia? This place ought to be famous! “ I was all set to report on it.  Then I discovered that on the far side, in Switzerland, the mountain was called the Matterhorn!

    Everything I’ve ever learnt or seen in my long and interesting life, has already been discovered, usually millennia before I was born. And nothing that I know is unusual.  Do you know what I mean?  Do you remember the first time you fell in love?  Do you remember thinking, “No one has ever felt like this before!”  And of course it is true; no one had felt it before because no one had been you before, and therefore the experience you were feeling was the first for you, for the first time ever. We are all like Eve in Eden opening her marvelling eyes on the first day of her life. Again and again in our lives we get to experience what others have discovered before, and in no way is the experience diminished by use: each time new, each time fresh. Each time Eve, stepping out on the dew-shining grass, marvelling, in awe.

     Today, instead of some illusion of insight, I point to other people’s sayings and lovely thoughts. Thank God for the rest of you! Thank god for the beauty and bounty of this earth, and the wisdom dropping generation after generation.  

As in this Inuit song:

I think over again my small adventures,

… My fears,

Those small ones that seemed so big.

For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.

And yet there is only one great thing,

The only thing.

To live to see … the great day that dawns

And the light that fills the world.

Or this, from the beautiful spiritual teacher Ticht Naht Hahn:  “We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the Earth.  Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.”

   Listen to the media and it’s dog-eat-dog out there, and we’d best cower under the covers and never get out of bed.  While all the time, the planet is revolving round our sun and all over the globe mothers are cooing to their babies, and fathers are helping their neighbors or protecting and playing with their families.  Goodness surrounds us all the long day, if we can only recognize it.  Thousands of spiritual essays and personal posts sweep the internet, encouraging us.    

    Earlier I mentioned the spoken-word “Blabs” of Margaret Dulaney’s Listenwell.com.   Look also for the postings of the author and Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr from Albuquerque, who was called by PBS,  “one of the most popular spirituality authors and speakers in the world.” Look for his daily meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation. 

       “Once we know that the entire physical world around us,[he writes] all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look 

deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.”

Or check out FaithShapes, in Alabama, at ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Faithshapes.com/new/category/words-of-wisdom,                  which is the site of a lovely spiritual woman just wanting to send out encouragement and love. Or Zencrunch by Christina. Or one of my favorite organizations, Silent Unity, based in Unity Village Missouri, whose sole purpose for 150 years has been to teach, heal, comfort and pray. Anyone can call (800-Now-PRAY) and ask for prayers, some which are answered before I have even put down the phone.  Or simply go on the internet and type in “wisdom.” You find such quotes: “Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom” by Francis Bacon.  

    I’m amazed at the numbers of inspiriting and inspiring videos on U-Tube. It is good to remember that the Universe is pouring blessings onto us, anointing us with goodness, even  in the midst of sorrow and fear and grief.  It is good to recognize that gratitude and humility bring serenity beyond our wildest dreams; that angels surround us, with nourishment, warmth, comfort, caring; and that love springs up like the grass in springtime, even in our old age, and nothing we can do can keep out love.  We are loved, loved, loved.  At the very core of our being, the cells of our body, we are made of love, and we love, love, therefore, throbbing and radiating out of us even when we don’t feel it, even in the midst of fear and grief.

The poets are there to tell us, like this by Adrienne Rich:

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”

Or this much beloved piece by Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

….

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

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. 

As for myself, in the face of such wisdom, generation after generation, what can I do but move into silence, hoping as Francis Bacon promises, that “Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.”  Read, pray, watch.

Every month, as I sit down to write my blog, I think, “This will be my last post. It’s time to stop. Too many people are creating, publishing, and screaming for recognition, for me to add one more word.” (As if anyone is actually reading my posts, itself perhaps an illusion.)   “I’ll just stop. Give everyone a break.” But then some uplifting or fascinating story grabs my attention, and I want to pass it on. It happened this time, too:  a Christmas present from the Universe, as I call the majestic, expansive, divine, unknowable energy we call God, a gift from Spirit, or spirits plural, from that pulsating mystery that we catch occasional glimpses of before the windows slam shut.

    This story concerns my work, but it’s not interesting for that. It’s intriguing for what it says about fate, kismet, predestination, about life after death, and the importance of the most insignificant of actions, events that we dismiss as imagination, or “fun,” but certainly not necessarily “real.”

All Creatures Great and Small

Today I saw a fox pattering along the edge of the forest, nose down, intent on its journey to catch mice in the horse pasture a quarter mile up the road.  The birds are twittering, a single crow cawing, and, high above, a vulture sways on the wind looking for voles and other small dead carrion in the fresh mown hayfield. As the pandemic  slows and shutters human activity, the hidden animals are coming boldly out.

    This spring I found a huge hole in my flower bed, so deep I could put my entire arm in up to the shoulder.  “Groundhog,” I thought, though I’d never stuck my arm in a groundhog hole in my life.  I rocked back on my heels wondering to do about these stubborn creatures who were surely eating the roots of my peonies.

     I couldn’t imagine killing it even if I owned a gun.  I would have to trap it.  I bought a Have-a-Hart trap, a cage big enough to hold a smallish dog. I baited it with cantaloupe, which I’m told is groundhog ambrosia, and some carrots and lettuce leaves, and I set it carefully that night.

   The next day to my dismay I discovered something crouched in terror in the cage, surrounded by dirt that it had scraped and thrown into the cage in its frenzied efforts to escape.  It was a skunk.  A small and beautiful black-and-white skunk, no bigger than a cat.  Her little paws must have been bleeding from the heavy wire bottom of the cage, where she’d tried to dig her way out. Now, exhausted, defeated, she lay there, unable to move for the dirt that held her in place on all sides. The hole she’d dug was so steep that the cage had settled half into it weight.

     Carefully I lifted the cage to level ground, heart twisting and opened the door. I would never have hurt her, given pain.  She stared up at me with huge sad eyes. I backed away to give her space to run, and after a few moments in which I could see her gauging the situation, wondering that escape had miraculously opened before her or if it was another trap; she put one tentative foot before another, then shot out of the cage and down the hillside away from the house to disappear into the woods

    She was never seen again. I could imagine her later describing what had happened to the other animals:  “Don’t go up the hill to that garden.” I imagined the groundhog taking it seriously.  

    I put the trap in the garage. 

    So, all summer we fought, the stubborn groundhog and I, about who owned the petunia blossoms on my deck.  Once, when I was reading there, the groundhog came right up onto the deck to eat petunias before seeing me. I screamed at him, which made him twitch his whiskers and waddle clumsily (and quickly – they are FAST!) away.  In the end, you see, I surrendered.  I don’t have petunias or even bitter marigolds in my pots anymore.  Just little green stubs, gnawed down. But it pleases me to know that down there, somewhere in the woods, a wild groundhog snuffles and lurches in its search for food — as do the bear that came into my yard last winter, the deer, the rabbits; and I rejoice at how fecund is nature, how rich, how inexorable, how bursting with reproduction, all the things that crawl, walk, skip, skulk, fly, hop, skitter, all of them stubbornly alive.

    Bears, groundhogs, squirrels, chipmunks, foxes, owls, bats, mice, birds, butterflies, hummingbirds, coyotes, deer:  my woods, even here in the middle of a town, are overflowing with life, not to mention the ticks, spiders, ants, beetles, worms, maggots, flies, wasps and god knows how many billions of insects that dwell in the hidden darkness underground, feeding, chewing, laying eggs, spawning young.  Why?  Because of plants. All this vegetation. Because of the abundance of plant-life for some to feed upon and of flesh for the others, and of decaying, rotting matter for the hidden creatures in the dark earth. It’s because the pandemic skies shine clear and clean; and because the moonlit nights seem silent now, except for the scurrying of the whispered hunt.

    Now, the animals trudge up the wooded hillside to partake of my flower garden, and I think – Yes, Come. Eat. This is Eden, where God walks in the evening to view his garden. This beauty is what our great, great, great, great grandparents knew, and what we moderns have hardly known since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  Come into the garden of Eden. 

    I find myself singing praise.  Praise to the beauty.  Praise to the groundhog and the skunk and the beetles chewing in the dark; praise to life, to death, to the eternal cycles of seasons, and to the trees and plants of this Eden that sustain us. Praise to the sorrows that draw us together, and the longing that shows we, too, are still alive.

This is a story of how our needs are met. It’s also about an angel, but mostly about how Spirit, the Guiding Principle, the Universe, God, whatever you choose to call this incomprehensible Mystery, works invisibly to heal our pain. The solutions are not what we’d impose if we were in charge, but the quiet, almost unnoticeable outcomes work miraculously not only for ourselves but for people we never even thought involved.

I felt I was managing the pandemic pretty well. I have it easy: a cottage, a garden, a car, the internet, TV, radio, a phone with which to call a friend. How could I complain?

But one morning, after 12 or 13 weeks, I woke up exhausted—at end of my rope.  I was undone by loneliness. I felt I couldn’t go another day without a hug, a hand on my shoulder, just human touch. My two daughters live nearby with their families, but they have carefully avoided coming close. Intellectually, I knew they’d withdrawn to protect me. But, unconsciously, the interpretation that pounced that morning – like a lion— was distaste.  If I were loved, said the primitive brain, I would be touched, hugged, kissed.  I knew it wasn’t true, but I pitched into a hole of despair.

A recent article in the New York Times confirms our need for touch.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/well/family/coronavirus-pandemic-hug-mask.html

It’s so powerful that babies left untouched, uncuddled, don’t develop properly, and surely we adults, left alone for too long, fall back into mire of “not good enough,” “unloved,” “useless,” “undesireable.” Indeed, scientists now find the stress and isolation of the pandemic has created a historic wave of mental-health problems.

Looking back, I felt I’d been infected.  Continue reading →

If there is one benefit to this coronavirus isolation, it’s in offering the luxury of time.  But when, like me, you live alone, the days are sometimes long, especially on dark, rainy, soggy, sad days like today— which gives me time to watch what I’m thinking about.

Here’s what I’ve found:   90% of what’s in my mind is none of my business. It involves things I can’t do anything about:  gossip, daydreams, politics, ecology, past disasters or future ones to fear. But the other 10% is my business, and this is where it’s interesting. I wouldn’t talk to a dog the way I talk to myself. When I meet a dog, I burst into happy smiles:  “Oh, look at YOU,” I say, bending down to stroke his ears and face.  “Aren’t you beautiful!”

I never talk like that to myself. I say, “What nonsense!” and, “Well, that was stupid.”

I read recently about a little girl, maybe four years old, perched fearfully on the top of  the BIG sliding board. Finally she took the dare and SLID. As she hit the bottom, she raised her fist in the air and shouted, “YAH, ME!”

I never do that.  I never say, “Yah, Me!”  I say, “Ok, you’ve done the dishes. Now for the laundry. ”

Yesterday I decided to say, “Yah Me!” all day long.  Continue reading →