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I've finally decided to put my newly learned Fireworks skills to use, and have created my first custom banner! (Hard-refresh if it doesn't appear by doing shift or control+refresh.)
I have vague plans to change it so as to reflect the seasons, but we'll see. I've just started a new job and I'm not sure how much it will affect my time and energy; it's part-time, so I'm hoping that it won't do so unduly.
Enjoy the geese!
The birds have been mobbing the feeder these past few days. I'm not sure why; the weather has been mild and the feed is the same was what I was giving them a week or so ago. All I know is that the usual neighborhood flock -- two chickadees, innumerable house sparrows, a female cardinal (and occasional visits by two males and another female) -- has been visited by a larger array of additional birds.
There is the trio of mourning doves, pinkish-brown-grey with little pink feet and tiny heads, that bob and nod in the gravel of the driveway. A sextet of starlings, all long pointy beaks and sleek glittering feathers, raucously jostle each other over food and mates on the lawn. Two Carolina wrens bounce proudly along the porch rail, arching their eye stripes and cocking their heads at me, looking through the front window glass. A northern flicker pecked holes in the budding silver maple, and this morning a downy woodpecker jumped from porch railing to porch railing on the way to the suet, looking like a spy darting from cover to shadowed cover. There's a squirrel, too, a large fat healthy one, who stares longingly up at the feeder it cannot reach before settling for a meal of fallen seeds.
The sparrows are the most ordinary of the flock, individual personalities submerged within their numbers, brown bodies fluttering up and flying down, rising and falling like a swirl of windblown leaves. They say that God notes everything, even the fall of a sparrow, and I have lived my whole life believing that the message there was centered on the death of a small brown bird, on the idea that you do not have to be great to be mourned.
Yet now I wonder, watching the birds ascending and descending in this feathery, circular waterfall, a kind of avian Jacob's ladder, whether there is another way to understand that passage. What if the falling sparrow was not a dying one, what if the fall was not a plummeting out of the sky and into death, but the falling of a bird descending to feed, the dive of a small feathered body in play, falling down in order to fly up again. What if what God notices is not the deaths of these small beings, but their lives? Not their last fall, but the falling and rising of all of their living days?
The sparrows are falling and rising like leaves, whirling in the winds like we do in the currents of our lives, and surely a deity that notices and appreciates the joy of a small bird playing with lightness and air is one that will also mourn, but at the same time await eagerly the return of that small bright spirit home.
I want not a grieving god, but a laughing one. The god of the windblown sparrow holds out that hope, that my small joys and gladnesses are just as worthy of notice as the pain, grief and death that come at the end of all of our lives, sparrows, humans, all. Watching the birds swarm around the feeder, I feel that hope glowing inside like a soft morning sunrise, warm and glorious and betiding another wonderful day.
The buds have opened
Mid-January, birds bounce
Unseasonal warmth
The squirrel in his coat
Scavenging seeds from the birds
Will he moult too soon?
The geese flying south
Honks querulous as they pass
Should they reverse course?
They say, on the news
February is bad, cold
Will it be this year?
I do not know the seasons here.
I do not know the changes.
I do not know
About what to worry
Or how much.
I'm sending off an application to this writing workshop. I hope I get accepted!
I just got around to printing out Chris Clarke's e-book The Irascible Gardener. Wow. I found myself actually wishing the printer printed more slowly, because it requires you to clear the pile of printed pages when it gets too tall, and each time I did I found myself starting to read the top sheet, getting caught up in the story, and having to put it down unfinished in order to clear the next pile. This happened every. single. time. I had to clear the pile. It's that good.
It looks nice, too.
Along with a lot of other deserving folks. There's a list for all you time-wasters out there!
We're getting all flavors of cold here this week!
If yesterday's air was still, cold and heavy, today's was thin, sharp and bone-chilling. The ground was covered with frost -- leaves, grasses, rocks. If snow obscures, and soaking rains homogenize, frost isolates and focuses. Each leaf was outlined with a rim of spiky ice crystals, each rib picked out in frozen white; each blade of grass stood out from the others; the ground was a dark background that threw the brilliance of the crystals into sharp relief in the dawning light.
The wind was strong, causing flags to billow and leaves to hop and whirl like small brown birds. It made me gasp aloud and mutter "Oh-brr-oh-brr-oh-brr" over and over to myself as I lowered my head like half a brace of oxen and leaned into the work of enduring the lancing cold. A small gap revealing my bare neck was like a wound from which warmth bled, the fingers of the wind stabbing right at it and around the edges of my sunglasses, reaching for the tender and the sensitive flesh. Passing briefly into still leeward patches, bits of still air like zones of dead water behind boulders in the churning of a rapid, I'd gasp anew at the cessation of effort and struggle, then dive back into the scraping wind. Clouds blew by overhead, causing the sunlight on the ground before my racing, fighting feet to flare and subside, flare and subside, like a promise of warmth offered and snatched away, over and over again.
"Wind chill" doesn't even begin to describe it.
How crazy is it that I looked outside at the cold and the wind this morning, and thought to myself, "I have to walk to class so I can have something to post on the blog!
Yaaaaaaaaahoooooooooooo!
(I still have to do a write-up for it, but still! Yee-haw!)
One good thing about this winter course I'm teaching is that it requires me to get up at about the same time that the sun rises. The lightening of the sky slowly wakes me up, and when I'm eating breakfast there's a shining glow to the east, a brightening of color that turns the wings of the feeding cardinals into incandescent glory. The birds outside were many and lively; the usual sparrow-cardinal-chickadee flock was augmented by visitations by a trio of mourning doves, a sextet of hormonal starlings, and a single yellow-shafted Northern flicker (which hung upside-down from the budding silver maple, pecking holes into the thin new branches).
Walking to campus was cold, but not in a miserable way, the way it can be when the "cold" is entirely due to the blasting of chilly winds. This was more in the nature of sink-into-your-bones cold, a kind of cold that is thick and quiet and still. The cold air pressed against the fronts of my thighs through my jeans, turning them and the skin on my face into cool waxiness, a strange stiff chilliness that is nothing like the knife-like pain of freezing winds scraping at my earlobes and corners of my eyes. The sky was grey and likewise still, a sort of brooding dimness that somehow did not speak of rain, or sleet, or even snow -- just an overhanging weight of thermally compressed air.
The sky was chill and still, the light pellucid -- all the energy and warmth of the day was contained in that initial burst of red-gold light, the chattering feeding birds, and the liveliness of my students on the next-to-last day of class.
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