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
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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. 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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