A beehive here inside my heart

I sat outside late one morning and saw a billion birds, now it's everyone's problem. Plus some advice for the shifting season, and a poem Molly sent me.

An operating note: The Animal Eats is now, in this instant and several that came before it, a catalogue of living things I seen, mostly birds. It may not always be this way, but now, in this instant, it is. It is this author’s prerogative that talking and writing about the living things you see is cool and good. Also, writing this operating note is how I found out that the word prerogative has an r there, near the beginning. We are always learning here at The Animal Eats, and looking at birds.

Say I sit outside on the back portal late into morning on a Wednesday and watch the world go wild.

Say I see there and then, right in front of my face, on a Wednesday morning, a magnificence of living things, so many I try counting: two adolescent orioles in the birdbath, a trio of pygmy nuthatches small as small apricots at the seed feeder, a northern flicker at the suet, a thick squirrel scheming, bluebirds rustling the juniper and a pair of ravens rattling in the pine, to say nothing of the ongoing hummingbird conflict or the sole spotted towhee fledgling to have survived its first week outside the nest—the only one of three or four hatchlings—whose hunger is unending and mother unceasing in her efforts to address it, scratching the mulch from every shrub root hunting insects I can’t see, until I do, often dead and dangling from her beak.

Say I say, only half-joking, my mental health is now utterly dependent on a small animal surviving the next few weeks.

Say I see the Cooper’s hawk haunting the cottonwoods across the way.

Say I think there and then, that Wednesday morning, this is possibly the most different wild things I seen at once in my life. I check the time and the time, 11:11, tells me something about who I am—a person who believes in things I cannot see, that science can’t explain. I trust them all the same.

Say I think there is in mass existence a logic only sometimes sensed and mostly vaguely, that the world works a certain way and it’s my job to understand it.

Say the next day I situate myself, just before 11, in the same seat, under the same sky, expecting the same extraordinary display.

You’d think I was an idiot too.
Nothing stays the same.

I’d thought maybe there’s a time of day that kicks up so much living and I had by chance found it—the sun overhead just so, the morning’s dew gone, the afternoon coming and with it the heat of the day. It made sense to me that late morning might be a good time to flit, flutter, bathe and fill up. I’d thought I’d found the most living hour, the best time of day—down to the minute—for seeing seven to seventeen different backyard species all at once from a single vantage point on the back portal, doing what they do to stay alive. It felt pretty promising, from a daily astonishment perspective. If I could see seven to seventeen different wild animals, all at once, in one space, every day, staying alive, without risk to my person or those that I love, I think that would fix me.

I am often hopeful and often wrong. This does not stop me from trying.

So let’s say there’s not a magic hour, just after 11 every morning, that every day will bring bathing orioles and impossibly small songbirds to feed among fledglings and woodpeckers, with a pair of ravens keeping the raptor at bay.

Let’s say I did not crack the code. Fine. I rarely do. But I did find it’s best for my spiritual health and wealth to make mornings outside a priority. I’ll be 41 in seventeen days. Look at what I’ve learned.

Molly writes to me:

“I'm trying to find a new way to think about the coming winter before it gets here. Any advice?”

Sit outside and look at everything.
Look at everything changing.
No day is the same way twice.

Watch birds molting, feeding, recovering strength before the fall migration. Laugh quietly at crows—their brief and hideous transformation—before their autumn blues come in. Do not—this is important—laugh in their face. Learn to recognize four types of native grass. Read about rhizomes and quake at aspens. Make a plan about mountains. Think about water. See how it’s always collecting itself? Pooling, evaporating, gathering into giant, amorphous energetic masses that can hurl fire down from the sky. Think: how do I be like that?

Think of all the water you’ve ever had in your life. Where did it come from? How did it get to you? How once it was maybe frozen, and now it’s inside you, or beyond you, and it kept you alive a while before cycling into some other form. How in spring and summer water maybe moves quickly, how in winter it slows down, stays still. Think: how do I be like that?

Write it in a postcard and let me know.
I’m sitting outside for a while longer, listening.

Here’s a poem Molly sent me. Maybe you need it right now too.

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Last Night As I Was Sleeping

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

Antonio Machado
translated by Robert Bly

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