For to come upon warblers in early May was to forget time and death.—Theodore Roethke
Every poem of death should start with my mother’s love for birds. Finches and waxwings her favorites, though she wasn’t one to quibble; an eagle dragging a carp across the sky would do.
There are worse things than being dead. You might be swallowed by the daily minutia of the great mundane, to be spit up years later wondering where your life has gone.
But loving something can save you: the way finches stack a feeder, meddle in each other’s business until a woodpecker crashes in, littering surrounding shrubs with wings.
Last summer my wife found a hummingbird on Mount Pisgah. Its emerald wings trembled as its feet tried to grasp her fingers. A ranger said that their lives are so short anyway. What a curious reply, I thought, but later reconsidered. Perhaps any time being a hummingbird is enough. ~Bill Brown “With the Help of Birds”
That long-ago morning at Ruth’s farm when I hid in the wisteria and watched hummingbirds. I thought the ruby or gold that gleamed on their throats was the honeyed blood of flowers. They would stick their piercing beaks into a crown of petals until their heads disappeared. The blossoms blurred into wings, and the breathing I heard was the thin, moving stems of wisteria. That night, my face pressed against the window, I looked out into the dark where the moon drowned in the willows by the pond. My heart, bloodstone, turned. That long night, the farm, those jeweled birds, all these gone years. The horses standing quiet and huge in the moon-crossing blackness. ~Joseph Stroud “First Song”
Birds are everywhere this time of year – I keep my phone handy with the Merlin App open from Cornell Lab, so I know who I’m hearing. From the robins and sparrows, to warblers and thrushes, along with the chittering bald eagles nesting by the pond across the road, it is quite a symphony to witness in the early morning and at sunset.
The app even tries to identify a woodpecker’s rapping and a hummingbird’s buzz.
There was a time not long ago when I was too busy with daily details to pay much attention to the awesome variety of creatures around me.
Once it hit me what I was missing, I started watching, listening and being part of all this life rather than wondering too late where life had gone.
How sobering one day to find a hummingbird dead in the dirt, once a dear little bird of motor and constant motion, lying stilled and silenced as if simply dropped from the sky, a wee bit of fluff and stardust.
Then a friend pointed out a hummingbird nest high in a tree. And so it is the way of things…
We are here and gone. Beauty hatched, grown and flown, then grounded. …but not forgotten.
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If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table, releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day. ~Billy Collins “Today”
The Truman Show was about someone stuck in a “perfect” world, safely contained, in a perpetual snow globe.
Today I want to release the caged and captive, to be immersed in what awaits outside.
Indeed, Someone sprung me loose to find my Spring, in one breath-taking and breath-giving moment.
Let’s open wide the windows…
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Four ducks on a pond, A grass-bank beyond, A blue sky of spring, White clouds on the wing; What a little thing To remember for years To remember with tears! ~William Allingham “A Memory”
Tell no one of the wonders of the Mallard duck’s green head, how it glistens in the sun against the gentle red of the Willow branches budding in the golden spring sun, as they paddle through the waters where the creek has come undone.
Tell no one of the beauty of the butterflies that flit through the flowers not yet budding on the little sandy spit, how their wings will keep them searching for the hope that blooms in Spring as they hover over what will be a very lovely thing.
Tell no one of the glory or the warmth of young spring’s sun, of the joy that comes from watching the smallest creatures run, of the life that is teeming in the wake of newborn day, of the power that hope holds over all we do and say.
Tell no one of the miracle that is this daily life, that cuts you to the quick as if with sharpest knife. Tell no one what you notice, into which your wonder delves. Tell no one of these things — let them know it for themselves. ~Elizabeth Wickland“Tell No One”
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
~William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939
so much depends upon me riding a red trike chased by my little brother
The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens. Be still. Now. There they are, the moon’s young, trying Their wings.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe Or move. I listen. The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, And I lean toward mine. ~James Wright from “Beginning”
photo by Bob Tjoelker
Wherever it was I was supposed to be this morning— whatever it was I said I would be doing— I was standing at the edge of the field— I was hurrying through my own soul, opening its dark doors— I was leaning out; I was listening. — Mary Oliver from “Mockingbirds” from New and Selected Poems, Volume 2
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all – ~Emily Dickinson
Some days warrant stillness. Today is one.
As I walked our farm driveway, I found this barn owl feather, dropped from a passing wing overnight –
The past months have echoed loudly with ruckus and noise — much too overwhelming and almost deafening.
Today I seek to be quiet as this feather, lying silently in place, not saying a word.
I might actually begin to listen and hear again.
A funny thing about feathers: alone, each one is mere fluff. Together — feathers create lift and power, the strength and will to soar beyond the tether of gravity and the pull of our inevitable mortality.
Joined and united, we can rise above and fly away as far as our life and breath can take us.
May peace be still.
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What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it…
For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day.
After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? ~Kazuo Ishiguro from The Remains of the Day
I am ashamed to admit how much time I spend looking back, yearning for a day that has long since passed, tossing off these present precious hours as somehow not measuring up to what came before.
There have been nearly forty years of such days on this farm, one flowing gently after another, and most were exactly what I hoped for.
Even when I believe things will never change, they will, and I will. What is left of the remains of the day may be the best yet.
I toss my heart ahead and set out after it.
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People have said, “Don’t cry” to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is, “I’m too uncomfortable when you show your feelings. Don’t cry.” I’d rather have them say, “Go ahead and cry. I’m here to be with you.”
I cry easily, always have. Certain songs and hymns will trigger tears, and of course, any rituals surrounding baptisms, funerals, weddings, and graduations.
Tears don’t bother me, whether they are my own or someone else’s. My medical office and exam rooms were always well- stocked with boxes of tissues as a safe place to cry it out.
One of my routine mental health history questions was “what will bring tears to your eyes – dicing onions doesn’t count?”
Some patients would look at me blankly, not sure they ever remember crying, and others will weep at the mere suggestion.
No matter what the reason for someone’s tears, it is a powerful outward expression of human feeling, like a laugh or a grimace of pain. I watch for those cues and sometimes feel their emotion as surely as if it were my own.
Even tears can bring peace – like a river.
I am with you. And always intend to be.
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A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron. At the top of ridge I caught sight of Devil’s Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun.
There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devil’s Tower is one of them. ~N.Scott Momaday in The Way to Rainy Mountain
We didn’t have a close encounter with Devil’s Tower on this particular trip yesterday through Wyoming. Over the years we have made many cross-country road trips like this one, passing by the turn-off to Devil’s Tower because there was urgency to get where we needed to go. Occasionally we would see it hazy in the far distance, so I could say I had “seen it” but I really had not seen it … according to my Stanford professor N. Scott Momaday.
Scott was from the Kiowa tribe. In his language, this rock formation is named Tso-i-e or “standing on a rock.” For him and his people, it is sacred ground. The Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota, Shoshone, and Arapahoe all revere this rock monolith, although most tribal members did not live near enough to see it themselves, but the legends traveled many miles through the generations through oral tradition.
I took Scott’s unforgettable class “Native American Mythology and Lore” in 1973, as a 19 year old sophomore. He had a commanding presence, a booming resonant voice for story telling, a predilection for the poetry of Emily Dickinson and a hankering since childhood to be a character in the stories of Billy the Kid. The first day of class, he introduced us to Tso-i-e first and foremost. He told us his grandmother’s story passed to her from her grandparents:
“Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified.; they ran and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were just beyond its reach. It reared against the tree and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.”
My family finally made time to see the Tower up close. For me, this “close encounter” was meant to connect the dots from my class and to understand more fully the spiritual background of the Plains people as our son, Ben, had lived and taught on the Pine Ridge Lakota Sioux Reservation in South Dakota for two years.
The Tower surely is awe-filled holy ground for us all – we are diminished in its presence. It disquiets the heart with its awful grandeur and sheer other-worldliness. In its own way, it is as resonant as Scott’s captivating stories about its origins, yet remains a reminder of the ever-changing impermanence of geologic formations.
We need more holy places in our lives even as they (and we) change with the sands and winds of time. We need to seek more “awful quiet” in our hearts, to continue to tell our sacred stories, generation to generation, never forgetting Who it is who set the world in motion.
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And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.
In the robin’s nest there were Eggs and the robin’s mate sat upon them keeping them warm with her feathery little breast and careful wings.
….in the garden there was nothing which was not quite like themselves, nothing which did not understand the wonderfulness of what was happening to them, the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs.
If there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end—
if there had been even one who did not feel it and act accordingly there could have been no happiness even in that golden springtime air.
But they all knew it and felt it and the robin and his mate knew they knew it. ~Frances Hodgson Burnett from The Secret Garden
Some say you’re lucky If nothing shatters it.
But then you wouldn’t Understand poems or songs. You’d never know Beauty comes from loss.
It’s deep inside every person: A tear tinier Than a pearl or thorn.
We all start out in the secret garden of a fallopian tube as an egg pierced to become so much more… – each tiny part of the least of us – – whether brain, heart, lungs or liver – wonderfully made, even if discarded or fallen from the nest.
The act of creation of something so sacred is immense, tender, terrible, beautiful, heart-breaking, and so very solemn and joyful.
The act of harming one tiny part of creation hurts the whole world; we risk whirling round and crashing through space and coming to an end.
If there is even one who does not feel it and act accordingly, there can be no happiness.
But they all knew it and felt it and they knew they knew it.
And what is born broken is beloved nevertheless.
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i was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows pull this stunt i asked him because it is the conventional thing for moths or why if that had been an uncovered candle instead of an electric light bulb you would now be a small unsightly cinder have you no sense
plenty of it he answered but at times we get tired of using it we get bored with the routine and crave beauty and excitement fire is beautiful and we know that if we get too close it will kill us but what does that matter it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while so we wad all our life up into one little roll and then we shoot the roll that is what life is for it is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than to exist forever and never be a part of beauty our attitude toward life is come easy go easy we are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself
One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all…
Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper…
And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out. ~Annie Dillard from “The Death of the Moth” from Holy the Firm
The struggle was over.
The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am. ~Virginia Woolf from “The Death of a Moth”
I too would take half the happiness and twice the longevity over one moment of ecstasy.
But I admire the blind passion of a tiny creature who will beat itself senseless on a light bulb, or fly into a flame to become cinders, or struggle so hard to live upright rather than upside down, that it dies in the struggle.
Why are famous poets and essayists fascinated by the tiny deaths they witness on their front porches, in their kitchens or at their writing desk?
Death is never tiny at all. Nevertheless, death is ceasing to be, after a unique and intentional creation, whether a moth, a mother, or ourselves.
We live today. Look for a moment of beauty to enjoy. Let’s be sensible about what we want so badly. As one tiny part of matter, we matter. And when we die, it is never a tiny death.
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Lyrics: A day may come that asks of us all we have to give: a day we never would have sought and yet we have to live. If it should be our destiny to live in such a day, let our faith and love be worthy of the ones who showed the way. The ones we now call heroes The ones we say their memory will not die – they were no different in their day than you or I. They were no different in their day. than you or I. ~Grahame Davies
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The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight—you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, “Soon it will hit my brain.” You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.
This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?
Less than two minutes later, when the sun emerged, the trailing edge of the shadow cone sped away. It coursed down our hill and raced eastward over the plain, faster than the eye could believe; it swept over the plain and dropped over the planet’s rim in a twinkling. It had clobbered us, and now it roared away. We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the Earth’s face.
When the sun appeared as a blinding bead on the ring’s side, the eclipse was over. The black lens cover appeared again, back-lighted, and slid away. At once the yellow light made the sky blue again; the black lid dissolved and vanished. The real world began there. I remember now: We all hurried away.
We never looked back. It was a general vamoose … but enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home. ~Annie Dillard from her essay “Total Eclipse” in The Atlantic about the February 1979 eclipse in Washington State
From my six week psychiatric inpatient rotation at a Veteran’s Hospital—late winter 1979
Sixty eight year old male catatonic with depression
He lies still, so very still under the sheet, eyes closed; the only clue that he is living is the slight rise and fall of his chest. His face is skull- like framing his sunken eyes, his facial bones standing out like shelves above the hollows of his cheeks, his hands lie skeletal next to an emaciated body. He looks as if he is dying of cancer but without the smell of decay. He rouses a little when touched, not at all when spoken to. His eyes open only when it is demanded of him, and he focuses with difficulty. His tongue is thick and dry, his whispered words mostly indecipherable, heard best by bending down low to the bed, holding an ear almost to his cracked lips.
He has stopped feeding himself, not caring about hunger pangs, not salivating at enticing aromas or enjoying the taste of beloved coffee. His meals are fed through a beige rubber tube running through a hole in his abdominal wall emptying into his stomach, dripping a yeasty smelling concoction of thick white fluid full of calories. He ‘eats’ without tasting and without caring. His sedating antidepressant pills are crushed, pushed through the tube, oozing into him, deepening his sleep, but are designed to eventually wake him from his deep debilitating melancholy.
After two weeks of treatment and nutrition, his cheeks start to fill in, and his eyes are closed less often. He watches people as they move around the room and he responds a little faster to questions and starts to look us in the eye. He asks for coffee, then pudding and eventually he asks for steak. By the third week he is sitting up in a chair, reading the paper.
After a month, he walks out of the hospital, 15 pounds heavier than when he was wheeled in. His lips, no longer dried and cracking, have begun to smile again.
Thirty two year old male rescued by the Coast Guard at 3 AM in the middle of the bay
As he shouts, his eyes dart, his voice breaks, his head tosses back and forth, his back arches and then collapses as he lies tethered to the gurney with leather restraints. He writhes constantly, his arm and leg muscles flexing against the wrist and ankle bracelets.
“The angels are waiting!! They’re calling me to come!! Can’t you hear them? What’s wrong with you? I’m Jesus Christ, King of Kings!! Lord of Lords!! If you don’t let me return to them, I can’t stop the destruction!”
He finally falls asleep by mid-morning after being given enough antipsychotic medication to kill a horse. He sleeps uninterrupted for nine hours. Then suddenly his eyes fly open, and he looks startled.
He glares at me. “Where am I? How did I get here?”
“You are hospitalized in the VA psych ward after being picked up by the Coast Guard after swimming out into the bay in the middle of the night. You said you were trying to reach the angels.”
He turns his head away, his fists relaxing in the restraints, and begins to weep uncontrollably, the tears streaming down his face.
“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
Twenty two year old male with auditory and visual hallucinations
He seems serene, much more comfortable in his own skin when compared to the others on the ward. Walking up and down the long hallways alone, he is always in deep conversation. He takes turns talking, but more often is listening, nodding, almost conspiratorial.
During a one-on-one session, he looks at me briefly, but his attention continues to be diverted, first watching an invisible something or someone enter the room, move from the door to the middle of the room, until finally, his eyes lock on an empty chair to my left. I ask him what he sees next to me.
“Jesus wants you to know He loves you.”
It takes all my will power not to turn and look at the empty chair.
Fifty four year old male with chronic paranoid schizophrenia
He has been disabled with psychiatric illness for thirty years, having his first psychotic break while serving in World War II. His only time living outside of institutions has been spent sharing a home with his mother who is now in her eighties. This hospitalization was precipitated by his increasing delusion that his mother is the devil and the voices in his head commanded that he kill her. He had become increasingly agitated and angry, had threatened her with a knife, so she called the police, pleading with them not to arrest him, but to bring him to the hospital for medication adjustment.
His eyes have taken on the glassy staring look of the overmedicated psychotic, and he sits in the day room much of the day sleeping in a chair, drool dripping off his lower lip. When awake he answers questions calmly and appropriately with no indication of the delusions or agitation that led to his hospitalization. His mother visits him almost daily, bringing him his favorite foods from home which he gratefully accepts and eats with enthusiasm. By the second week, he is able to take short passes to go home with her, spending a lunch time together and then returning to the ward for dinner and overnight. By the third week, he is ready for discharge, his mother gratefully thanking the doctors for the improvement she sees in her son. I watch them walk down the long hallway together to be let through the locked doors to freedom.
Two days later, a headline in the local paper:
“Veteran Beheads Elderly Mother”
Forty five year old male — bipolar disorder with psychotic features
He has been on the ward for almost a year, his unique high pitched laughter heard easily from behind closed doors, his eyes intense in his effort to conceal his struggles. Trying to follow his line of thinking is challenging, as he talks quickly, with frequent brilliant off topic tangents, and at times he lapses into a “word salad” of almost nonsensical sentences. Every day as I meet with him I become more confused about what is going on with him, and am unclear what is expected of me in my interactions with him. He senses my discomfort and tries to ease my concern.
“Listen, this is not your problem to fix but I’m bipolar and regularly hear command voices and have intrusive thoughts. My medication keeps me under good control. But just tell me if you think I’m not making sense because I don’t always recognize it in myself.”
During my rotation, his tenuous tether to sanity is close to breaking. He starts to listen more intently to the voices in his head, becoming frightened and anxious, often mumbling and murmuring under his breath as he goes about his day.
On a particular morning, all the patients are more anxious than usual, pacing and wringing their hands as the light outdoors slowly fades, with noon being transformed to an oddly shadowy dusk. The street lights turn on automatically and cars are driving with headlights shining. We stand at the windows in the hospital, watching the city become dark as night in the middle of the day. The unstable patients are sure the world is ending and extra doses of medication are dispensed as needed while the light slowly returns to the streets outside. Within an hour the sunlight is back, and all the patients are napping soundly.
The psychiatrist locks himself in his office and doesn’t respond to knocks on the door or calls on his desk phone.
Stressed by the recent homicide by one of his discharged patients, and identifying with his patients due to his own mental illness, he is overwhelmed by the eclipse. The nurses call the hospital administrator who comes to the ward with two security guards. They unlock the door and lead the psychiatrist off the ward. We watch him leave, knowing he won’t be back.
It is as if the light had left and only his shadow remains.
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Lyrics: Measure me, sky! Tell me I reach by a song Nearer the stars; I have been little so long.
Weigh me, high wind! What will your wild scales record? Profit of pain, Joy by the weight of a word.
Horizon, reach out! Catch at my hands, stretch me taut, Rim of the world: Widen my eyes by a thought.
Sky, be my depth, Wind, be my width and my height, World, my heart’s span; Loveliness, wings for my flight. ~Leonora Speyer
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