Born with a weak heart

I don't mind exploring along the same paths for the rest of my life though, of course, they never are the same. To walk along these mountain ridges, drift down beside the streams among the cedar, pine and fir, and out to the willows and sand of the larger shore around which they have all come to stand. With repetition, the steps layer over one another in memory, gathering with them all that was seen and coloring what came before.  Here the purple flowers next to the brittle husks, there the aimless damselflies and glistening needle ice, your sadness, fear and buoyant joy, the worn feathers caught in the brown grass, the perfect, short-lived blue of the crayfish shells turning to pinkish orange in the heat, and the wren singing without cease as the sky changes its colors too under the setting sun.

 To each of these places for which I have an affinity there is, without fail, a spiritual, if not physical, remoteness-- a kind of restless, communal loneliness.  It's there in the Swallows, weaving their arcs through the sky, vanishing into the blue and returning again just as fluidly as if they were the very spirit of the wind, as if their absence in the winter was no more than a longer ebb in their constant turning with its center somewhere even they may not understand.  And maybe it is strange then that one should still see freedom in tethering oneself to the same landscapes when others range so far but the world is always there no matter from where one chooses to watch it.  There are always the hailstorms or the gently falling snow, the cool relief of the lake on a Summer day as overhead the cumulus drifts or later the stratus lets through the shafts of morning light, the wet granite roar of the falls and the evening's glow lingering on the faint ripples at the edge of the water.




 There are things in this world for which I have no defense and others against which I refuse to defend myself.  With each step, they can reach me just as they need to-- in beauty, sadness, and joy.  I suppose that one only really wishes to defend what one loves and that my love has always turned itself outward.  So then what does one do with a Killdeer's fretful call from somewhere not seen, the searching tap of a nuthatch high above, nighthawks gliding over the sand unconcerned with our presence in the dimming light, the first and last Red Wings of the season bristling up in the same song, little shadows of birds shivering up out of the beach grass to disappear into the willows, a hen harrier skimming low and hungry over the reeds, and the tiny scattering of olive and gray feathers, loose and drifting in the dust of the mountain trail?  I don't know how to keep these things safe unless it's to keep them alive within, let them join together with the old, and build with each new outing.  So I try to remember to follow the course of things in faith as witness and to give myself over to the world and all of the ways to pass through it.  The paths are largely the same even if my steps and the life around them have changed and thankfully, more often than not, I tend to know my way home.

 

Perhaps that Great Egret sometimes falters too
for all his deliberate pressing of those long black toes into the mud.

Is it anger there in that hunting, yellow eye?
Do you see yourself in that second before you strike through the water's surface?

And the nightmares? Do they shoot through your sleep too?
That heavy knife-bill swinging wildly for a moment as you wake, confused.

I can see as you see me, crouched here by the riverside, and that neither of us understands
quite what drives the rowing retreat of your angelic, white wings.

A feather dropped as you lit into the air and you must have seen, as you half-circled the sky,
that little something lost and carried by the river, flowing by, just out of my reach.

Tahoe Mountain Trail

 

And what would people like us find on that evening mountainside, where the fire passed through some years before?  The trail leads out and up through all the broken white trunks, charred in streaks of softly iridescent black and stood ghostly over the undergrowth.  Our chosen path cuts into the dark, rolling green of the hillside where flickering wrens trill out their song and retreat into the dense labyrinths of chaparral which already look ancient though, here, they couldn't be anything but young.  Then the leaves start to give way, higher up, where the reddish dust spreads thinly over rock deeply scraped by glaciers long since passed into dusk and vanished out into the vast lake now visible beyond.

 




Here the last of the snags give way to the first of the trees not touched by the flames.  Here we see, by the dozens, the elegant thrust and curling away of the seeds fallen from the Incense-cedar still standing above us.  Here Fox Sparrows have fed on the joyous red star burst of Sierra Gooseberries and left the spiny husks at the foot of the bush.  Here among the natural rubble we can hold up the long, roughened, sun bleached cones in the dimming light and pick out, along the horizon behind them, the limbs of their sibling Sugar Pines, heavy with cones and silhouetted against the blush of sunset and icy blue of the lake now fairly glowing beyond.





The lights of three boats pass in different directions over that distant water, aligning together for a moment and then pulling away.  And who couldn't feel it, then?  The underlying spirit of that ridge-- its long held scarring, the traces of its more recent pain, and the mitigating grace of life both abiding and returning.  It's everywhere as we turn back down the trail towards the warm home-lights of the forest valley and the headlights winking here and there through the trees.  The bats are out now, their nimble shapes arcing and looping after unseen insects across the deepening blue of the sky as it drifts into night.  Eventually, back down among the lost trees glowing faintly white under the moon, we stop to pick out constellations we are still learning as the stars take their places above.  And, barely seen out the corner of the eye, there the gliding, faint outline of an owl as it lands on a faraway branch, black against the lighter dark of the lake now calming beyond.

Hawks sleep lightly.  They wake to the movement of a leaf in the breeze, to the swaying whisper of grass, to the lengthening and shutting-off of shadows. They are fugitives who have escaped from everything but fear.

                                                                                                    The Peregrine, J.A. Baker 

*         *          *

When the cool of evening finally comes
and with it the sweet breathing out of the pines...

You may rest.

You don't need an answer to that question or
to keep holding what's left of your failure.

You can let yourself rest.

Should there sleep in your heart a fear of morning,
with your thin body curled tight like a talon...

It's okay.  You must rest.

They are all out there still or moving softly
In the forest dark and half at peace with night.

Please, just rest.

I know a place

 

 

Just down-slope from a well-used trail near the creek there is a pool thickly covered in duckweed at the foot of an old tree trunk which has splintered at its waist and been wrenched over into a stoop.  Think of this as a signpost.  It will invariably be quiet there with a lonely and forgotten feel but maybe a chipmunk watching from atop those ruins will give away the true nature of the place and then the evening flame of a Northern Flicker startled out of the brush will confirm that you are in the right place.  Though it avoids you and makes itself silent, there is so much life in this small margin between trail and creek.  Life both like your own and not, life hidden within other, larger life or its remains, concentrically bound to each other but still intrinsically free and enduringly fugitive.

And, in the rich, retreating light just beyond that point, you will find the bone-white trunk of a fallen pine which juts out over the water at the creek's bend while, above it, an unusual pattern of carved clouds jags into the blue sky.  All around you will be wild Rose and Swamp Onion in the hip-deep grass, wavering in and out of the shadows cast by that sun-bleached wood.  There with you too, some Bigleaf Avens, Nude Buckwheat, a few noiseless birds passing too quickly and near the edge of vision to name, and many semi-hidden sinkholes giving way to the wet sand and large enough that you could curl yourself up into them-- a secret within a secret.

If you end up there, you will feel it.  How soft all the petals are, how coarse the blades of grass, how you want to be hidden there too, and how it all springs up where many others have fallen beside that creek which itself passes by so quietly that one has to take it on faith that it's still there, moving behind you with its own unnameably gentle insistence.

*       *       *

What a rare solitude to find in Summer along those quiet, evening shores.  With the mountain's cross of snow above still glistening in the twilight, there are only these hands dipping into that calm water to comb and pick through the little rocks left here long ago by the same glacier that carved this valley.  Somehow thinking about time without feeling its passing, here and there, the dripping fragments are held up to admire in the last light and let fall back in musical splashes.  Talking of teaching kids to find solace in the wilderness and of simple, ancient lives long passed under these trees at the foot of this same mountain.  There are only the bats around now, still darting silent overhead and skimming just above the surface of the smooth, darkening water.  You can just see the gentle ripple after letting a stone fly out and how the dim light catches the swells with such a sweet, subsiding glow.  And do you wonder how long that peaceful hush might follow alongside or inside through the dark woods on the trails towards home?

*       *       *

"Would that be a life to disregard?"

I have been turning this poem about in my head for something like a month now:

The Rabbit

Scatterghost,
it can’t float away.
And the rain, everybody’s brother,
won’t help. And the wind all these days
flying like ten crazy sisters everywhere
can’t seem to do a thing. No one but me,
and my hands like fire,
to lift him to a last burrow. I wait

days, while the body opens and begins
to boil. I remember

the leaping in the moonlight, and can’t touch it,
wanting it miraculously to heal
and spring up
joyful. But finally

I do. And the day after I’ve shoveled
the earth over, in a field nearby

I find a small bird’s nest lined pale
and silvery and the chicks—

are you listening, death?—warm in the rabbit’s fur.

~Mary Oliver

 ~       ~       ~

Last week at the library, we all watched a juvenile Robin perched outside the window, shivering and breathing heavily from the exertion of flight which must have been new to it.  With the glass in between, it didn't notice as one got so close as to see its delicately squinting eyes and the tiny feathers on its rapidly pulsing breast.  It stayed there awhile and someone said they saw a parent Robin fly down to feed to its young.  One could see the small glow of wonder on others' faces as they watched something new to them and realized that it was also something familiar.

The next day, I came home from the library to a rabbit in my driveway.  I sat and watched for a bit as it picked out dandelion stalks to eat, ears alert and eyes fixed.  It would start at the bottom, pulling the stalk in with its lips until it got to the top and let the flower husk drop to the sand.  I slowly and deliberately got out, walking around the back of my car away from the rabbit.  It froze but it did not leave.  I quietly went inside and sat by the window to take a few pictures before it hopped up the short woodpile and disappeared through the small, hidden gap in the fence.

Today at the library, I was called into the break-room by a coworker to look at little bits of down sticking to the window and, on the other side of the glass, a juvenile Robin lifeless on the ground.  She had seen it hit, fall, and convulse and I was sorry that she had.  She told me that a Steller's Jay had also watched and hopped down to the body afterwards.  She had needed to tell someone and assumed I would understand, drawn to birds as I am.  It looked unnaturally peaceful there in the afternoon light and I didn't know what to say.

Later, I forced myself to go outside and take care of the little bird.  A graceful companion came out to help me and brought with her a shovel painted gold, of all things, from a different ceremony.  She helped me to raise it up from the moss where it had fallen and let me carry it alone, that little dark weight resting on a plane of glittering metal, to a nearby bush at the foot of a pine.  There I laid it, as beautifully as I could manage in a patch of light among the pine needles and little white flowers I couldn't name.  I thought briefly of burying it but it felt a strange thing to give to something so recently belonging to the air.  Somewhere above, a Jay was still hopping from branch to branch in an anchored way, as if trying to see from every angle the scene laid out below and maybe to understand.  

It seems disordered somehow to hate death, a natural part of life and the world, as much as I sometimes do.  I suppose that I, as a living thing, am naturally in opposition to it and so it makes sense to feel that pull of defiance-- to know its weakness and to gently work against its uglier qualities.  If only one could always be able to answer that revulsion, anger, and pain inside with beauty and the knowledge that life will come back in all its forms, strong and clever and joyful enough that nothing could stop it even if it wanted to.

Though it's difficult, maybe it is good to look at it as one can look at the mountains.  There is beauty in the wind and rain, the snow and ice, even as they scrape and eat away at stone and soil, destructively balancing erosion against the steady rise of the earth.  And it is only together that they make the rivers and waterfalls, scattering life as they go and gathering up what isn't used into glittering beaches on the shores of the vast lake which they hold between them.  A taking away is a necessary part of that process.  It helps to remember, when there is suffering, that even a short life taken is still a part of that greater economy of life and connected to the sustaining cycle in which we are all held.  For me, today, there was a young Robin left still and the memory of a rabbit stealing safely away.  Earlier, for Mary Oliver, it was the other way around.  Though there was ugliness and sadness in both cases, there was also the mitigating grace of beauty.  Despite loss, there is always an enduring joy of life, safe under cover again among the flowers and smiling irrepressibly back at its old sparring partner.