Tag: nature

2020, a decade, and a new bird

It’s that time of year again, time for the first bird of the year. It’s a tradition among birders, bird watchers that the first bird you see on New Year’s day will be a theme for the year to come. It can be the first animal you see if you’ve been up for hours and seen no birds, which happened to me two years in a row with squirrels. The moment I owned squirrel as my power animal for the year, birds appeared. It was like magic. Those two years were about trying to balance work and play. The last two years it’s been dove, and I was really hoping, praying that it wouldn’t be a third year in a row. Why, you might ask, because dove is about matters of the heart and coming to terms with Goddess energy, feminine energy for me. Learning lessons of the heart is never easy, always worthwhile, but never easy. I was ready to get a message from the universe that I’d done my heart and love work to a point where I could move on. My husband, Jonathon, and I are closer than ever and have hit that deep abiding, contentment where the fire burns low and high, but never goes out, and we know how to throw more wood on our fire and get sparks. Eighteen years of marriage and we’ve never been happier as a couple and as individuals; yay, working your shit!

I’ll mention it here before someone else asks, our other halves, Genevieve and Spike, requested to not be part of my public persona a couple of years ago. They found the “fame” part of things uncomfortable. They are private people and deserve to have their personal life be as private as they wish, yes it was a bone of contention for awhile, but if you love someone you honor their wishes, so I have. It has been difficult, because I blog from my heart, and write from heart in many ways, though I write fiction. It’s made blogging about my life very difficult and is one reason I almost stopped doing it. I don’t know how to edit my real life the way I edit my fiction. This has been some of the heart and love work of the last two years.

I’m happy to say that this year’s bird is, Dark-eyed Junco. It’s a type of sparrow, though you’d never know it to see the charcoal gray and white body, or the black upper body with a white stomach, or a mostly charcoal body, or – they are incredibly varied in their plumage. There are even different colors for different regions of the country that look nothing like the birds we see here. They are winter birds here, arriving between October to November, or even as early as late September. You know the term, snowbirds for people who travel to warmer climates for winter and then return in the spring that’s exactly what Juncos do here. We’re their winter vacation spot.

Jonathon and I saw a small flock of Juncos at the same time this morning as we made coffee and wrangled breakfast. He called out, “Junco!” I actually turned away as if he’d called it and so it couldn’t be my bird of the year. I even walked to another window and everything was hiding from me, just movements in the trees, until I realized that there was no rule, no calling dibs on a bird. Once I owned that we had the same bird of the year for 2020 then suddenly I saw the downy woodpecker and the white-breasted nuthatch on the trees and bird feeders. It’s been like that every year, until I own the first bird/animal the rest of the world is quiet, then boom – birds and other animals everywhere.

If you think that sounds too mystical, all I can tell you is that it works that way for me. Also, we’re Wiccan, as in yes modern day Witches, which is a nature based religion, so paying attention to birds and other wildlife is a part of our faith. God and Goddess speak through nature all the time if you know how to listen.

If squirrel’s lesson for me was balancing work and play, and dove was about love and the divine feminine, what does Junco mean? My husband and I aren’t entirely certain yet. We’ll be meditating and paying attention as time goes by, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with travel, maybe even moving. The Juncos were in a flock, so it could also be about group communications. Interpreting the lessons of nature isn’t always an exact science, but then most faith isn’t that simple, add magic and it can get a lot more complicated. So here’s to 2020, a new decade, and the year of the Junco!

What Feeds Your Muse?

People ask, what inspires me, well nature inspires me. My short story, “Geese”, came from me walking out my door years ago and seeing Canadian geese settling down for the night on the shores of a lake. I have a biology degree, as well as an English degree, and I have always found equal inspiration in nature and in words. Though I think that nature feeds my soul a little bit more than it feeds my writing. What follows is my early morning. It didn’t translate into many pages for the day, but it was a mood recharging beginning, and sometimes as a writer you need that more than pages.

My first animal of the morning, besides our three dogs, was a chipmunk. How can anyone look at a chipmunk and not smile? Then worms were fleeing across the walkway, well, as fast as worms can flee. I looked to see what the disturbance was and – mole! I watched the earth heave and roll as the little digger chased worms underground. Worms, especially earthworms, are some of their favorite foods. Yes, moles disturb your lawn, but they also aerate it, which is something we pay men with machines to do, right? Why not let the mole do it for free? They will also eat harmful grubs that destroy your lawn, flowers, and vegetable garden. By the way moles have the softest fur I’ve ever touched, though today’s mole never let me see him/or her at all. I carry the memory of the mole that got into our house in Indiana like a sensory touchstone. Mole fur makes mink feel rough.

I saved one worm that got lost on the bricks, and put him away from the mole’s hunting area, and then a bird sang high and bubbling in the holly tree just beside the house. It sang out several times the sweetness of the song falling down around me as if joy could be translated into sound. I’ve checked and double checked and the small bird that I barely could glimpse through the thick branches, I believe was a field sparrow. They are supposed to like more prairie than we have in our yard, but we do have a hedgerow area, and with habitat vanishing maybe they’ve gotten more adventuresome, or maybe he was just passing through for the running water. We’re getting birds to the water that wouldn’t normally bother with suburbia. It might have been a warbler who’s song I’m unfamiliar with, but it moved more like a sparrow, and wasn’t quite as small as most of the warblers I see in this area. I’m always loathe to bird just by ear – I don’t seem to trust it without another birder to say, “Yes, that’s the song.” But for right now I think it was a Field Sparrow, and whatever bird it was, another male answered in the distance. I’ll have to check that direction and see if there’s a grassy field area. If I’m closer to the right habitat then them coming for the water makes more sense.

To top it off I had a pair of Cedar Waxwings just outside my office in the big sugar maple right by the pond. They are one of my favorite birds! I never saw any until just a few years ago. They love the water garden. One of our robins chased them off, because Waxwings are fruit eaters and so are the robins. Everyone is raising babies, so they guard their food sources.

Will any of the above translate into more story ideas? I don’t know, but one thing I’m learning is anything that fills up the tank of my energy, creativity, or happiness is useful in some way. I spent too many years trying to just write without thinking about where the creativity comes from, or what feeds my muse, what feeds me. In the last year I’ve really looked hard at that, and one of the first things that sparked that excitement that is so necessary for an artist, or a scientist was ladybugs and irises. I remember squatting in the grass by a tree, pushing the grass aside and finding a cluster of ladybugs like bright red and black jewels, so shiny in the sun when I revealed their hiding place. There were purple bearded irises growing against the white picket fence. I stood and gazed up at them as they rose above me. It was the white picket fence and irises, that my grandmother had never mentioned to me that convinced her it was a real memory. We’d rented the house so briefly that she’d almost forgotten it herself, but it bothered her that I remembered it, almost scared her, because babies under two aren’t supposed to remember details like that. I don’t remember anything else about the house, but the wonder of those tall flowers, and the cluster of insects, that first sharp smell of ladybugs as I poked at them with my fingers, that remains. Flowers, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, all of it can still fill me with wonder and joy. It still feeds a part of me that first toddled out into the sunshine to stare up at flowers taller than I was like some pre-school Alice in Wonderland. As an artist you need to find out what feeds your inner child, because a sense of wonder needs to be a permanent part of you as an artist. I know it’s cool to get jaded and world weary like Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, and Gods know that I can get weary of the world, but if I let it make me feel jaded I lose something I need to create. It harms something I inside me if I forget to admire the beauty and life around me. Think back to your earliest happy memory, what was it? What thrilled you as a child? Usually whatever that was is something you still need in your life. It will refresh your heart, cleanse your soul of that harshness that seems to gather. It will feed your muse.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; –
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away . . .”

William Wordsworth (1710-1850)

Don’t give your heart away, you need it to create, to love, to be.

The picture is of me about the same age that I saw those irises and ladybugs. That may even be the same house. That’s my mother with me. She died when I was six, and she was twenty-nine.

20140518-195349.jpg