What does it mean to be stardust?

On an unseasonably cold, cloudy, dreary, wet day, we got home from doing errands just in time to catch a ray of, not sunshine, but better -- a ray of hope! Wandering across the back yard, downhill from the pear tree were four turkey hens, and one tiny poult! Although it would have been nice to see a few more young'uns, seeing one, probably from a second nesting, helps me enjoy the  [prospect of a better future, because, as we all know, without youngsters, the future of any species is pretty grim. Humans seem to have an unfortunately difficult time grasping that this rule applies to us also. But then, we also seem to think that John Muir's observation that:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. 
- My First Summer in the Sierra  , 1911, page 110. 

either is untrue, inaccurate, or doesn't apply to humans. None of those assessments is correct. We truly are stardust.

2017: a better year for poults?

Photo by J. Harrington

Here's one example we're going to test that should give a glimmer of interrelationships. We've been feeding birds using black sunflower seeds for quite a few years. The mess the birds make with dropped seeds and shells has attracted an unreasonable number of moles, voles, shrews and whatnot, all of whom have made the ground under the bird feeders treacherous to walk on because it's so full of tunnels. Rather than simply ceasing to feed the birds, we've decided to try feeding with more expensive sunflower chips. If the birds make less of a mess, and the bag of chips lasts about twice as long as a bag of seeds, we should have fewer tunnels, just as many birds, and the cost breaks even, we hope. Getting a bag of chips was one of the errands we were running before we came home to see the poult with mom and "aunties." If our hypothesis is incorrect, it won't be because critters don't appreciate an easy meal, it probably means that birds are just slobs at meal time, no matter what. Relationships will continue to exist, just not the ones we thought they were.

Saying It

Philip Booth - 1925-2007

Saying it. Trying
to say it. Not
to answer to

logic, but leaving
our very lives open
to how we have

to hear ourselves
say what we mean.
Not merely to

know, all told,
our far neighbors;
or here, beside

us now, the stranger
we sleep next to.
Not to get it said

and be done, but to
say the feeling, its
present shape, to

let words lend it
dimension: to name
the pain to confirm

how it may be borne:
through what in
ourselves we dream

to give voice to,
to find some word for
how we bear our lives.

Daily, as we are daily
wed, we say the world
is a wedding for which,

as we are constantly
finding, the ceremony
has not yet been found.

What wine? What bread?
What language sung?
We wake, at night, to

imagine, and again wake
at dawn to begin: to let
the intervals speak

for themselves, to
listen to how they
feel, to give pause

to what we're about:
to relate ourselves,
over and over; in

time beyond time
to speak some measure
of how we hear the music:

today if ever to
say the joy of trying
to say the joy.

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