End of Summer 2019

(1)

Every year of my adult life, in the summer mountains by the lake, a song-bird echoes through the forest, thrilling in its simplicity and thusness.

*  *  *

Years of renewal and refreshed love – ardent in the forest dusk.

*  *  *

As Bugbee muses in The Inward Morning – there is no need to name the bird. Naming – a distraction from the penetrating, ecstatic ‘Thus’ of the call.

*  *  *

It is enough to hear that call, to be at home in the Unknown.

*  *  *

Every year, my song-bird connection to the depths of being –
             Reanimated, reaffirmed, renewed.

*  *  *

Every year thrilled – an unknown song from out of the stillness.

*  *  *

The call echoing through the tree tops, fleeting,
Sometime near, sometimes far, but always the thrill of thusness.

* * *

(2)

This year, after decades of expectation and renewal,
There was no call, no bird, no song – only the chatter of the chickadees —  here and there.

*  *  *

This year, my renewal took the form of loss,
The on-going death of nature. Listening not to song, but to silence.

*  *  *

Oh, what do we have to go on as nature dies? Does our soul, connected to nature in a thousand ways, die with it?

*  *  *

Oh, how can we renew our faith in the awakening? Where is hope? Where is “the adventure of our dim delight”?

*  *  *

Picard muses that the sound of the birds is simply “the tweeting of the silence.”
The silence – the emptiness must now give hope.

*  *  *

“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown”
Till the death of nature strikes us, and we drown.

*  *  *

Behind this death, the silence grows, encompassing all,
Its fullness sparks out – the birds tweet from the trees.

* * * * * *