That year I discovered the virtues of plants as companions: they don’t argue, they don’t ask for much, they don’t stay out until 3:00 A.M., then lie to you about where they’ve been….
I can’t summon the ambition to repot this grape ivy, of this sad old cactus, or even to move them out onto the porch for the summer, where their lives would certainly improve. I give them a grudging dash of water – that’s all they get. I wonder if they suspect that like Hamlet I rehearse murder all hours of the day and night, considering the town dump and compost pile as possible graves….
The truth is that if I permit them to live, they will go on giving alms to the poor: sweet air, miraculous flowers, the example of persistence. ~Jane Kenyon “Killing the Plants”from The Boat of Quiet Hours
During my dorm-room years and city apartment dwelling days, this farm girl had to reconcile that no pets were allowed, so I surrounded myself with an indoor garden, every square inch of window sill occupied by a living thing whose survival depended only partially on me.
Those plants sustained me, cheered me, moved me, carried by me to new windows with better light and grander views.
Despite my occasional neglect, they usually persisted, often thrived, and gave back to my shriveled city spirit far beyond any water or repotting I offered.
A start from my grandmother’s old fern divided decades earlier from her cousin’s plant, originally a start from a long-passed auntie, this 100 year old fern traveled far and wide with me until it dried up, turned brown and gave up the ghost.
Having given a start to my sister years before, she divided it so the fern came back home staying happily green in my kitchen window.
Somehow these miracles in chlorophyll knew just what I needed when I needed it: they fed me when I was starving for something alive, something beautiful, something that knew exactly what to do and what to become when I had no clue what would happen next.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
October’s bellowing anger breaks and cleaves The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown Along the westering furnace flaring red. O martyred youth and manhood overthrown, The burden of your wrongs is on my head. ~Siegfried Sassoon “Autumn”(about his time in the trenches in WWI)
Over more than a century, we have learned little about how to resolve the bellows of outraged men.
The fruitless harvest of battle, counting up each violent death, as warships gather for unsanctioned war games.
Lament the tossing and blowing of lives like October leaves, in a show of force as transient and arbitrary as the wind, merely to make a fruitless point…
to what end are the feuds of angry men?
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; Tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know. Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away. Retard the sun with gentle mist; Enchant the land with amethyst. Slow, slow! ~Robert Frost from “October”
After yesterday’s travel through curtains of heavy rainfall, we abandoned plans to meet with family across state for today’s memorial service, so returned home, defeated, weary with sadness.
October is enough reminder of mortality, with winds stripping trees to bare bones, birds flocking and vacating, bright leaves reduced to rusting dust.
This morning, the rain suspended, its gray curtain pulled back briefly to view what awaits beyond the haze: this luminous brilliance, radiance, promise.
Slow down to look. Slow down to live. Slow.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Two old dogs out doing chores. One on two legs, one on four. Side by side, they water and feed. Caring for others daily need.
Two old dogs make their rounds Well worn paths on familiar ground. To greet the day or say goodnight Side by side, their friendship tight.
Two old dogs with dish and pail. Singing songs and wagging tail. Slower now, than in the past But that just makes the good time last.
Two old dogs, both muzzles grey. Aging joints sometimes curb play. Companionship a simple joy. His old dad; Dad’s old boy.
Two old dogs, and then one day One old dog has gone away. The other left to carry on Two legs to barn and field and pond.
One old dog, eyes full of tears Can still feel his old friend walking near A reminder in the morning dew. Just one path, instead of two.
When one old dog has no more chores And walks through heaven’s golden doors He’ll see that face he can’t forget. A kindred spirit, not just a pet.
So many old dogs, made whole; anew Reunion of a loyal crew. Never again to be apart. Many souls. But just one heart. ~Jeff Pillars “Two Old Dogs”
I knew this day was coming. Samwise Gamgee, approaching age 14, had been hinting that he was getting ready to leave for the past couple weeks. He was much slower following me for chores, his appetite wasn’t quite as robust as usual, and his hearing was fading.
Life had become an effort when it had been a lark for 13+ years.
But yesterday morning, he perked up enough to do his usual rounds on the farm, poke around the stalls in the barn, check the cat dishes for morsels, and bark when a strange car drove in the driveway. Then last night he ignored his supper, laid down and closed his eyes, having used up all his reserves.
This morning, he was gone, leaving only a furry shell with big ears behind.
He had joined us on the farm as company for our aged Cardigan Corgi Dylan Thomas, who died two years after Samwise arrived. Then Sam himself needed company, so another Cardigan corgi, Homer, arrived. They became a happy Corgi team on the farm.
Sam had a great dog life, with the exception of getting lost once and one overnight visit to the emergency vet hospital for treatment from poisoning from ivermectin, the horse worming medicine he somehow managed to lap up quickly off the barn floor when a horse dripped the paste from her mouth. After that he promised to never need a vet again.
His peaceful passing is a reminder of our temporary stay on his soil. He’s smelling the flowers and watching the sunrises and sunsets from the other side now.
I honor Samwise’s long life with the photos I have compiled over the years.
Till we meet again, old friend.
photo by Nate Gibson
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
The rain falls and falls cool, bottomless, and prehistoric falls like night — not an ablution not a baptism just a small reason to remember all we know of Heaven to remember we are still here with our love songs and our wars…
Here too in the wet grass half a shell of a robin’s egg shimmers blue as a newborn star fragile as a world. ~Maria Popova from “Spell Against Indifference”
…I had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through accident I was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.
The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.
The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment, and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern.
But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.
No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.
And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.
The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged.
For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence.
There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing.
They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death. ~Loren Eiseley from The Star Thrower
Each of us at times are as vulnerable as a nestling, just hatched. The world is full of those who would eat us for lunch and do.
The world is also full of those who grieve and lament the violence that surrounds us, the tragedy of lives lost, the unending wars, the bullies and the bullied.
But the bird of death does not have the final word. He will soon be forgotten, forever sidelined as we reject what he and others like him represent.
Our cries of lament, our protests of violence transform into a celebration of life – we do not abandon all we have lost, but no longer allow any more to be stolen from us.
Only then may grief’s shadow be overwhelmed by joy.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Every October it becomes important, no, necessary to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded by leaves turning; it’s not just the symbolism, to confront in the death of the year your death, one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony isn’t lost on you that nature is most seductive when it’s about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its incipient exit, an ending that at least so far the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain) have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception because of course nature is always renewing itself—
the trees don’t die, they just pretend, go out in style, and return in style: a new style.
3
You’ll be driving along depressed when suddenly a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably won’t last. But for a moment the whole world comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives— red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion, gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations of burning. You’re on fire. Your eyes are on fire. It won’t last, you don’t want it to last. You can’t stand any more. But you don’t want it to stop. It’s what you’ve come for. It’s what you’ll come back for. It won’t stay with you, but you’ll
remember that it felt like nothing else you’ve felt or something you’ve felt that also didn’t last. ~Lloyd Schwarz from “Leaves”
The world wakes up and comes to, with vivid, overwhelming color for a moment before it dies.
The landscape is simply acting out its part, perhaps just pretending. Nothing is really dying, just taking a nap under a brilliant blanket.
Rest well. See you next year.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Mid-October and the calendar of ladybugs directs them to move inside. Following some unwritten date, they form colonies of strange ideograms on the walls and ceilings, their orange-red lacquer dotted with different combinations of black spots roving in afternoon sunlight.
Each year they turn back memory’s clock— thirty years ago, my wife is in Chicago, I’m in Connecticut with our three children, just home from a soccer tournament. Our middle son, nine, flush with pride of his team’s championship, finds them that first time: hundreds and hundreds
of ladybugs crawling on windows, walls, ceilings. And then, my wife’s voice on the phone from Chicago—her father has died. For an hour the keening whine of the vacuum, the peppery smell of ladybugs still alive or dying inside the bulging bag. After, I tell our children: Their grandfather is dead.
It’s the first death for each of them, but the crash of sorrow into happiness overwhelms our middle son, a wave of joy and grief roiling inside him. And then, twenty-two years later, he too would die in mid-October with the ladybugs’ arrival, with fall’s gold
leaf light and candelabras of sumac. Don’t try to make sense of it, I told my son back then. I thought: all these things, inextricably but insensibly connected. That’s what I tell myself every October, the still unvacuumed ladybugs like trails of language leading nowhere, untranslatable and senseless. ~Robert Cording “Ladybugs”
The little fly you squashed and put into the ashtray —how it walked out later that same day, bold as you like across the carpet, cold-shouldering your
botched attempt at homicide with the aloofness of a hired gun to the extent you broke into guffaws then fell, stricken, to your knees and sobbed, forgiving
every one of your murderous intentions, forgiving yourself, letting the patch of sun claim its prize. ~Claudine Toutoungi“Lazarus”from Emotional Support Horse
Humans have a love-hate relationship with insects. Mostly hate.
But bugs don’t like us any better when we attempt to swat, step on, smoosh and poison them to oblivion.
I’ve tried to understand the Creator’s design plan, making a place on this earth for mosquitoes, hornets, and scorpions and few other nasty bugs.
There must be some sense to their existence, even if we fail to understand it. There must be some sense to our own existence, even if we fail to understand it. Perhaps we humans exist just to make life difficult for the bugs.
…all these things, inextricably but insensibly connected…
AI image of ladybug cluster
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
The sound of quiet. The sky indigo, steeping deeper from the top, like tea. In the absence of anything else, my own breathing became obscene. I heard the beating of bats’ wings before the air troubled above my head, turned to look and saw them gone. On the surface of the black lake, a swan and the moon stayed perfectly still. I knew this was a perfect moment. Which would only hurt me to remember and never live again. My God. How lucky to have lived a life I would die for. ~Leila Chatti “I Went Out to Hear” from Wildness Before Something Sublime
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars
of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,
the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders
of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is
nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned
in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. ~Mary Oliver “In Blackwater Woods” from Devotions
(thinking today of God’s gift to the world of Jane Goodall, whose life was about keeping promises)
When the earth and all that is in it glows indigo in the angled light of October; opening my eyes as witness to beauty takes my breath away.
I can’t imagine letting go this life, yet the other side of ashes and loss is salvation.
My God. I am so finite. I hold this close to my bones with miles to go before I sleep.
My life depends on realizing I’m living a life I would die for.
Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone: the golden and green Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.
What signal from the stars? What senses took it in? What in those wooden motives so decided To strike their leaves, to down their leaves, Rebellion or surrender? and if this Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? What use to learn the lessons taught by time, If a star at any time may tell us: Now. ~Howard Nemerov “The Consent”from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
So many reasons these days to awake in the night, eyes wide open, searching the dark seas of trouble for some sign of hope, for calm and peace in this stormy world.
When asleep again, I float among abundant golden gingko leaves, each waving like a sail in the breeze, before they tumble, swirling, to the ground, forming deeply cushioned and comforting pools of yellow.
Navigating these brutal times, I am meant to be anchored within some safer harbor – I treasure the old ginkgo as it reaches over each cherished child with its golden cloak of love and protection.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
photo of Jane Goodall in 2018, smiling as I came up to give her a hug, courtesy of WWU University Communications
I wasn’t prepared to hear yesterday that my professor, mentor, and friend Dr. Jane Goodall had passed away at age 91, while in the midst of her lecture tour in the United States.
I nearly believed Jane would be immortal; she lived as if she were. She had a message to deliver and as long as she could, she would. She truly “died in the harness” after decades and decades of traveling the world, recruiting people to her cause to save the world for the next generation of plants, animals and humans, and the next and the next…
She was a born observer and storyteller, able to reach and move us with her verbal and writing ability to help place us in her shoes in the wild as she witnessed what no one else had. This was, of course, aided by Hugo van Lawick’s compelling wildlife photography and video every child of the 1950s and 60s grew up watching.
As a college student taking her class on non-human primate behavior, I was riveted by the content of her course lectures about the work she was doing at Gombe. I hoped I could somehow help in the long-term study there, and was ready to commit to a year of training preparation: recording captive chimpanzee behavior at Stanford, while learning Swahili.
On a spring day in May 1974:
Standing outside a non-descript door in a long dark windowless hallway of offices at the Stanford Medical Center, I took a deep breath and swallowed several times to clear my dry throat. I hoped I had found the correct office, as there was only a number– no nameplate to confirm who was inside.
I was about to meet my childhood hero, someone whose every book I’d read and every TV documentary I had watched. I knocked with what I hoped was the right combination of assertiveness (“I want to be here to talk with you and prove my interest”) and humility (“I hope this is a convenient time for you as I don’t want to intrude”).
I heard a soft voice on the other side say “Come in” so I slowly opened the door.
It was a bit like going through the wardrobe to enter Narnia.
Bright sunlight streamed into the dark hallway as I stepped over the threshold. Squinting, I stepped inside and quickly shut the door behind me as I realized there were at least four birds flying about the room. They were taking off and landing, hopping about feeding on bird seed on the office floor and on the window sill. The windows were flung wide open with a spring breeze rustling papers on the desk. The birds were very happy occupying the sparsely furnished room, which contained only one desk, two chairs and Dr. Jane Goodall.
She stood up and extended her hand to me, saying, quite unnecessarily, “Hello, I’m Jane” and offered me the other chair when I told her my name. She was slighter than she appeared when speaking up at a lectern, or on film. Sitting back down at her desk, she busied herself reading and marking her papers, seemingly occupied for a bit and not to be disturbed.
It was as if I was not there at all.
It was disorienting. In the middle of a bustling urban office complex containing nothing resembling plants or a natural environment, I had unexpectedly stepped into a bird sanctuary instead of sitting down for a job interview. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or say. Jane didn’t really ever look directly at me, yet I was clearly being observed.
So I waited, watching the birds making themselves at home in her office, and slowly feeling more at home myself. I felt my tight muscles start to relax and I loosened my grip on the arms of the chair.
There was silence except for the twittering of the finches as they flew about our heads.
Then she spoke, her eyes still perusing papers: “It really is the only way I can tolerate being here for any length of time. They keep me company. But don’t tell anyone; the people here at the medical center would think this is rather unsanitary.”
I said the only thing I could think of: “I think it is magical. It reminds me of home.”
Only then did she look at me. “Now tell me why you’d like to come work at Gombe…”
The next day I received a note from her letting me know I was accepted for the research assistant-ship to begin a year later, once I had completed all aspects of the training.
I had proven I could sit silently and expectantly, waiting for something, or perhaps nothing at all, to happen. For a farm girl who had never before traveled outside the United States, I had stepped through the wardrobe into Jane’s amazing world, about to embark on an adventure far beyond the barnyard.
(This essay was published in The Jane Effect in 2015 in honor of Jane’s 80th birthday)
giving Jane a hug, courtesy of WWU Communications45 years since we met in her Stanford office full of wild birds
True to Jane’s tradition of impeccable graciousness, she sent me a hand-written note after her last visit in 2018 when she came to speak at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
I recommend the documentary “Jane” as the best review of Jane’s Gombe work. The Jane Goodall Institute will continue her legacy for decades to come.
