March 8, 2012

Looks like not much sun this morning, gray evenly distributed and looking thicker and thicker, shadow over everything.  It’s getting lighter just not much brighter, sort of like it’s seeping in but having a difficult time of it.  It’s so still, not even a single leaf moving.  A huge hawk is circling just above the trees, I see it on one small portion of its round, haven’t seen a hawk out in a long time.   One afternoon at Dawn’s house, we watched a hawk chase some of the smaller birds and the rest just vanished.  Could be why I don’t see any smaller birds this morning, actually I don’t hear any either, strange for so late, usually at least hear the mockingbirds by this time.  It’s so quiet I hear one of the big ships in the channel, the throb of its engine a regular sound but louder than usual, maybe they are hurrying in ahead of the bad weather.

I think it looks like a good morning to do errands early, the weather guessers say rain surely by this afternoon, and looking out, it seems they might be right.  It’s odd how last year’s devastating drought changed my attitude about rain, even living in the desert did not have such an impact on me.  In the desert there is supposed to be little rain, you did not think anything about not seeing rain for months at a time, because that was normal.  But here, months without rain is not normal, here so much green needs all the rain it usually gets, and not getting it changes the landscape in ways that are heartbreaking, so hard on plants and animals both.  I think of all that water filling up the low lakes, and swelling the rivers with water for towns to drink, so that now, though I am not fond of the grayness that sometimes lasts for days, I can’t seem to resent the rain one little bit.

A poem by Wendell Berry that makes me smile, about rain, and about all this singing, about joining the chorus!

The Law That Marries All Things

1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.

The rain is free
only in falling.

The water is free only
in its gathering together,

in its downward courses,
in its rising into the air.

2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.

3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.

It is the great chorus
of parts.  The only outlawry
is in division.

4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.

5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows.

Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.

Wendell Berry 

There is such joy in this, in following the natural progression, of water that is rain falling down and spirit rising up to fall again, in all the singing you hear joining parts of the earth together, the way our hearts lift with birdsong, with the sound of rain after a long dryness.  In those moments, it’s easy to feel that law of joining, of being married to all that beauty.  And you can feel too that the only bad things in the world are those things that divide us from each other and us from the earth and all its glory.  Some mornings the birds sing so loudly you can’t miss their song, and some mornings, like this one you have to sit still and listen intently to hear them.  No matter, they are all singing here here here, here in this moment is your gladness.

Hear birds today pointing out gladness, raising voices to say here it is, just open up and take it.