On a winter mindset

shrinking my attention to a smaller circle of life

It’s Saturday morning and my spouse Janyce is sitting beside me. We’re both looking out to the backyard as the sun is rising. I ran outside first thing this morning to fill the empty feeders. I was still in my pajamas as the sky was turning a faint pink above the tree line, and the chickadees, waiting on the bare branches above my head, immediately started calling to the others. I was lucky enough once to have a chickadee land on my outstretched hand. But not today. There’s literally frost on the pumpkins piled around the lamppost out front. Too cold for lingering.

Instead, I’m savoring my coffee and naming the varieties of birds in my mind as they dart back and forth from tree to feeder. Janyce is talking to me.

“I know why you love Mary Oliver so much,” she says.

titmouse, red-bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker, carolina wren

“Oh, have you been reading her?” I say.

“There’s this one part, let me find it,” she says. “I’ve been crying all morning.”

Janyce has been up since before sunrise, clanging pans in the sink, brewing the coffee, and reading from a paperback Mary Oliver book of poetry by herself at the kitchen table. She flips through the pages now while I try to catch the precise moment when the sun creeps up another inch on the oak tree trunks turning them blaze yellow.

“Here it is,” she says. She reads me the whole poem and her voice wavers as she reads.

“Oh that’s a good one,” I say.

“Yes, but it’s this part:”

I held my breath as we do sometimes/ to stop time when something wonderful has touched us/ as with a match which is lit, and bright but does not hurt in the common way/ but delightfully as if delight were the most serious thing you ever felt.

“It made me think of that time I found the praying mantis in the garage. That’s how I felt that day. I was amazed as we both just looked at each other,” she says.

“I remember,” I say. “Let’s look up Praying Mantis and see why we have them in the yard.”

bluebird, goldfinch, house finch, bluejay, dark-eyed junco

“They are not native to here,” she says, reading aloud from Audubon, and other sources on the internet, telling me little facts about them as predators. I want it to mean something special that we had one in the garage that day. A sign of sorts. I know why Janyce paused on that passage in the poem feeling the urge to cry, and exactly what Mary Oliver means when she compares feeling delight to feeling hurt. It does hurt to be moved by something alive and beautiful and mysterious right in your own back yard.

chickadee, flicker, mourning dove, white-breasted nuthatch, northern house wren

I pick up my binoculars and focus in on the bluebird house. Looks like the bluebirds lost it to the common house sparrow this season. The edges of the opening have been pecked a bit. The brown patched sparrow sticks its fat face out just far enough for the sun to warm it. Its black beady eyes are closed. For years now, to my absolute bird-watching delight, I have enjoyed the bluebirds raising chicks twice a year in that house…

red-breasted nuthatch, hairy woodpecker, cardinal, house sparrow.

and now with the wider opening, I bet they won’t chance it.

A friend of mine sent me a video this week from Doug Tallamy and I watched it rapt, and sent it to my father who also watched it. It left me feeling hopeful that there is something positive I can do, even in the smallest way, to transform my own yard into a thriving ecosystem and counter some of the massive climate-related changes rolling our way, my own little bit of conservation.

I’m tired of feeling alarm in my body. But I think it’s here now to stay and I had better make some peace with it. I had an energy healer friend recently tell me to “make my life smaller.” I have always railed against this sentiment. Give me depth and vastness and lofty goals and all of the world, all at once (how truly American of me). But I’m coming around to this particular way of being more and more. What does it mean to make your life smaller? Mary Oliver was an expert at this. She sometimes spent an entire afternoon watching a grasshopper eat a cube of sugar. Doug Tallamy has that same patience and respect for nature. Making your life smaller means shrinking your attention to what is right in front of you, your backyard ecosystem, your immediate community, the delight you feel when you encounter the bug-eyed Praying Mantis looking back at you with curiosity, “as if delight were the most serious thing you ever felt.”

Snow Geese by Mary Oliver

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was
a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun
so they were, in part at least, golden. I
held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us
as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,
but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.
The geese
flew on,
I have never seen them again.
Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won't.
It doesn't matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.