Category: Birds

To Stay at Home is Best

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Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest;
Home-keeping hearts are happiest,
For those that wander they know not where
Are full of trouble and full of care;
       To stay at home is best.

Weary and homesick and distressed,
They wander east, they wander west,
And are baffled and beaten and blown about
By the winds of the wilderness of doubt;
       To stay at home is best.

Then stay at home, my heart, and rest;
The bird is safest in its nest;
O’er all that flutter their wings and fly
A hawk is hovering in the sky;
       To stay at home is best.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Cambridge Edition

Thank you to Harry Rodenberger for the hummingbird nest videos!

hawk in pursuit

We have been a disconsolate people, uneasy and restless, particularly during the past year of being told to stay at home is best. Safety and protection became the priority despite our longing for freedom of movement.

Now with pandemic restrictions lifting, many of us are impatient to fly and travel, even when the hawks in our lives remain in close pursuit. Though baffled, beaten and blown by the ever-buffeting winds of doubt and threat, we want our liberty.

It is easy to forget:
this earthly home isn’t our “safe” place and
true freedom isn’t going where we please when we please.

This life is merely vapor and our ultimate longing is for something far more eternal than we will find here.

We’re almost home – together on this journey through the darkness to forever.

photos of kestrel falcons by Kate Steensma
photo by Kate Steensma
photo by Kate Steensma
photo by Kate Steensma
photo by Kate Steensma

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Spin Until I’m Dizzy

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Tomorrow
there will be sun, scalloped by clouds,
ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.
It will be a temperate seventy-five, low
humidity. For twenty-four hours,
all politicians will be silent. Reality
programs will vanish from TV, replaced
by the “snow” that used to decorate
our screens when reception wasn’t
working. Soldiers will toss their weapons
in the grass. The oceans will stop
their inexorable rise. No one
will have to sit on a committee.
When twilight falls, the aurora borealis
will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet.
We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,
decorate our hair with fireflies, spin
until we’re dizzy, collapse
on the dew-decked lawn and look up,
perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines
of cold code written in the stars….
~Barbara Crooker “Tomorrow” from Some Glad Morning.

Might I hope for a better tomorrow?

Awash in this world of technological and political complexity, I forget the simple pleasure of lying in the grass, looking up and staring at the stars spinning above me.

I become dizzy with the possibilities.

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O, for a Horse with Wings!

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O! for a horse with wings! 
~William Shakespeare from Cymbeline

(thank you to Bette Vander Haak for all her photos here of our Haflingers and their cow bird friends)

Be winged. Be the father of all flying horses.
~C.S. Lewis from The Magician’s Nephew

One reason why birds and horses are happy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses. 
~Dale Carnegie

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk:
he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it;
~William Shakespeare from Henry V

We all should have a buddy who is along for the ride and blesses us with their company.

There is always a need for a precious friend who has our back – helping to keep the biting flies away by gobbling them.

It is symbiosis at its best: a relationship built on mutual trust and helpfulness. In exchange for relief from annoying insects that a tail can’t flick off, a Haflinger serves up bugs on a smorgasbord landing platform located safely above farm cats and marauding coyotes.

Thanks to their perpetual full meal deals, these birds do leave “deposits” behind that need to be brushed off at the end of the day. Like any good friendship, having to clean up the little messes left behind is a small price to pay for the bliss of companionable comradeship.

We’re buds after all – best forever friends.

And this is exactly what friends are for: one provides the feast and the other provides the wings.

We’re fully fed and we’re fully free – together.


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All That From a Feather

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Once again a child asks me suddenly What is a poem?,
And once again I find myself riffing freely and happily
Without the slightest scholarly expertise or knowledge;
But I am entranced by how poems can hint and suggest
And point toward things deeper than words. A poem is
An owl feather, I say. It’s not the owl—but it intimates
Owlness, see what I mean? You imagine the owl, owls,
Silent flight, razors for fingers, a wriggle of mouse tail
Slurped up right quick like the last strand of angel hair,
A startle of moonlight, a fox watching from the thicket,
All that from a feather. It’s like an owl is in the feather.
A poem is a small thing with all manner of bigger in it.
Poor poems only have a writer in them, but better ones
Have way more in them than the writer knew or knows
About. This poem, for example, amazingly has owls in
It—who knew we’d see a flurry of owls this afternoon?
~Brian Doyle, “A Flurry of Owls”

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
~Billy Collins “Introduction to Poetry” from from The Apple that Astonished Paris.

I walked into our big hay barn this week,
finding scattered atop the few remaining bales from last summer
these few owl feathers…

they were waiting for a poem to hide within,
just as the barn owls are tucked invisibly in the rafters
until the cool air of dusk and hunger lures them to the hunt,
swooping outside to capture both moonlight and mice
to be coughed up in pellets of fur and bones.

These feathers, dropped like so many random snowflakes,
carry within them the glint and glow of the moon, a reminder
what we leave behind matters,
whether it be feather or fur
or a wee dry skeleton,
a shell of who we once were
yet are no longer.


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Dwelling On What Has Been

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The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm:
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
 ~Robert Frost “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”

The field of my childhood farm (1954-59) with the red barn visible on the right. The house was destroyed by fire in the mid-60s but the barn was spared

photo by Harry Rodenberger

My family sold our first farm in East Stanwood when my father took a job working for the state in Olympia, moving to supervising high school agriculture teachers rather than being a teacher himself. It was a difficult transition for us all: we moved to a smaller home and a few acres, leaving behind a large two story house, a huge hay barn and chicken coop as well as large fields and a woods where our dairy cows had grazed.

Only a few years later, the old farmhouse burned down but the rest of the buildings were spared. It passed through a few hands and when we had occasion to drive by, we were dismayed to see how nature was taking over the place. The barn still stood but unused it was weathering and withering. The windows were broken, birds flew in and out, the former flower garden had grown wild and unruly.

This was the place I was conceived and learned to walk and talk, where I developed my love for wandering in the fields and respecting the farm animals we depended upon. I remember as a child of four sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window at the sunrise coming rising over the woods and making the misty fields turn golden.

Yet now this land has returned to its essence before the ground was ever plowed or buildings were constructed. It no longer belongs to our family (as if it ever did) but it forever belongs to our memories.

I am overly prone to nostalgia, dwelling more on what has been than what is now or what I hope is to come. It is easy to weep over the losses when time and circumstances reap circumstances that become unrecognizable.

I may weep, but nature does not. The sun continues to rise over the fields, the birds continue to build nests, the lilacs grow taller with outrageous blooms, and each day ends with a promise of another to come.

So I must dwell on what lies ahead, not what perished in the ashes.

photo by Harry Rodenberger

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As If All Time Were Theirs

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The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud nightingales
In bushes
Pipe, as they can when April wears,
As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand-new birds of twelve months’ growing,
Which a year ago, or less than twain,
No finches were, nor nightingales,
Nor thrushes,
But only particles of grain,
And earth, and air, and rain.
~Thomas Hardy “Proud Songsters”

Each year I watch the new hatchlings fledge and fly and feed, and marvel at how they know so young how to sing and survive. Last year they were mere elements and now they bring the world beauty and Grace.

They live as if all Time were theirs.

Now in my seventh decade, do I know how to sing and survive? Did I become more than the elements from which I arose?

Only thanks to the Maker of heaven and earth was I born to recognize Beauty and Grace when I see and hear it. And so I bring it here, now to share with all of you.

I live as if all Time is so precious, so fleeting.

A new book available from Barnstorming — more information and order here

Starved for Hope

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I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me
to love the world, making it impossible
to turn away completely, to shut it out completely ever again –
it is everywhere; when I close my eyes,
birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses:
you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth –
why would you wound me, why would you want me
desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope
I would refuse to see that finally
nothing was left to me, and would believe instead
in the end you were left to me.
~Louise Glück “Vespers” (one of ten Vespers poems)

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
    and in his word I hope;
~Psalm 130:5

Mid-spring days like this:
bright, so promising with potential, birdsong constantly in the air, scent of orchard blossoms, lilacs, early roses and a flush of color everywhere…

how can I not love the world so much I never want to leave it?

Yet I must hold this loosely. It is but a tiny show of the glories to come, of what You have waiting for me next.

I am wounded with the realization that I must eventually let this go.

I hold onto the hope that won’t be found in all this beauty and lushness, the fulfilling hope that can only be found in my relationship with You as my Father and Creator.

You provide only a taste here so that I know what I starve for, starved with hope for what You have in store.

I will wait for you
I will wait for you
in the end You were left for me.

Amen and Amen.

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More information on ordering here

Alive and Ticking

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Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it

It came and went too unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Hurtling like an animal at the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
Afterwards. And not now.
~Seamus Heaney  “Had I Not Been Awake”

It is very still in the world now –
Thronged only with Music
like the Decks of Birds
and the Seasons take their hushed places
like figures in a Dream –
~Emily Dickinson from an envelope poem fragment

My dreams have been exceptionally vivid recently, not scary but seemingly real. I’ll awake suddenly, surfacing out of deepest sleep to take a breath of reality and remind my brain that I’m still in bed, in a dark hushed room, my husband solid and warm beside me. All is well. I lie awake, reorienting myself from dream world to my world and ponder the hazy neuro-pathways in-between.

If I had not been awake after my dreams, I would have missed the night sounds of coyotes howling in the fields around the farmhouse, the chorus of peepers in the wetlands, the trickling waterfall in our koi pond, the clicking of the owls flying overhead, the sudden gust of wind that shakes the windows, the pelting of heavy rain.

So much still happens when I am asleep to the world, numb and inattentive. Even so, when dreams wake me, I find myself alive and listening, electrified by the awareness of everything around me.

Suddenly, nothing is ordinary because everything is. I am the most unordinary ordinary of all.

Forevermore.

Waiting in Wilderness: Already Not Yet

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For in this hope we were saved.
But hope that is seen is no hope at all.
Who hopes for what they already have?
But if we hope for what we do not yet have,
we wait for it patiently.
Romans 8:24-25

Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.

Out the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch—
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured; not-yet-

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.
~Jane Hirshfield “Not Yet” from The Lives of the Heart.

To wait for the “not yet” is a hard sweet tension.

There is tension in knowing that something profound is happening–a vanishing sunset, a vernal equinox, a life change or transition, but the transformation is not yet complete, and I’m not sure when it will be.

I am still unfinished business.

In two weeks I will be reminded of what is yet to come. I will know the shock of the empty tomb. My heart will burn within me as more is revealed, through the simple act of bread breaking.

It is hard not yet having what I know will be coming.
But it is sweet to have certainty it is coming
because of what we have already been given.
Like the labor of childbirth,
I groan knowing what it will take to get there,
and I am full to brimming already.

The waiting won’t be easy;
it will often be painful to be patient,
staying alert to possibility and hope when I am exhausted,
barely able to function.
Others won’t understand why I wait,
nor do they comprehend what I could possibly be waiting for.

Yet we persevere together, with patience, watching and hoping –
a community groaning together in expectation of what is to come in the morning.

It has been finished on our behalf, while we wait, while we wait.

It is up to me to be all-ready.

Waiting in Wilderness: The Known and the Unknown

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Though I have never caught the word
Of God from any calling bird,
I hear all that the ancients heard. 
Though I have seen no deity
Enter or leave a twilit tree,
I see all that the seers see. 

A common stone can still reveal
Something not stone, not seen, yet real.
What may a common stone conceal? 

Nothing is far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here. 

Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.
Here in the sun I sit alone
Between the known and the unknown.
~Robert Francis, “Nothing Is Far” from Collected Poems, 1936-1976

We live out our lives between heaven and earth, sometimes in an uneasy tug-of-war between the two. We feel not quite ready for heaven as our roots go deep here, yet the challenges of daily life on this soil can seem overwhelmingly difficult and we often seek relief, begging for mercy.

We are living “in between” where we are now and where we soon will be, between the “known” of the birds and trees and stones of this world and the “unknown” of what comes next.

Christ, incarnate as the Son on earth and still King in heaven, maintains an eternal connection to above and below. Nothing was God that is not still here on earth. In His hands and under His protection, we are safe no matter where we are and where He takes us.

We, His children, have stony hearts no more. We are known to Him.

Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria

This child through David’s city
   Shall ride in triumph by;
      The palm shall strew its branches,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry,
      Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
         And lie within the roadway
   To pave his kingdom come.

 Yet he shall be forsaken,
   And yielded up to die;
      The sky shall groan and darken,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry
      For stony hearts of men:
         God’s blood upon the spearhead,
   God’s love refused again.
~Richard Wilbur from “A Christmas Hymn”