As the pandemic kept me close to home last year I had to forgo my usual distractions and activities.  Not having my day broken up with meetings, errands, classes or socializing with friends opened up the day to sustained opportunities to read some of the dozens of unopened books that have piled up.  And I made a very disturbing discovery.  I couldn’t sit and read anything but the most page-turning mystery for more than 10 minutes without my mind wandering away from the page.  

My concentration had been hijacked by the internet’s endless click bait.  I realized how much of my time was taken up doom scrolling and “catching  up” on social media.  And that I was being prostituted by the big media companies, selling my personal information—my attention to their advertisers.  For these and many other reasons I decided to delete my social media accounts.

It has had the benefit of shielding me from a lot of the ugliness, anger, despair and just plain silliness that went on during the election.  But it also meant that I wasn’t able to get a daily dose of news from my friends and family.

Instead, it pushed me to be much more present in my own immediate world.  And to get to know, on a daily basis what my avian neighbors were up to.  I watched the snow geese on their migration through the spring.  I kept up with what was happening in the heron rookery.  I watched the drama of the osprey who returned only to find their nest occupied by Canadian Geese squatters who would not be evicted.  Eventually the goslings fledged and the osprey managed to bring a single chick to adulthood.  I frequently caught a glimpse of the sandhill cranes that nested in the field across the river parading  around with a string of chicks trailing behind them.  And I monitored two different red tail hawk nests, learning where the line was, when crossed, would send them into a protective screeching swoop.  

But my favorite was the common Robin who nested in the aspen tree just outside my window.  Every morning I could watch as she wove the nest into the branches twig by twig, then sat vigil for weeks, leaving only briefly to snatch a worm from my garden and return.  

Then one morning she was gone and the nest quivered with a faint mewling and four tiny gold beaks gaped just above the lip. The mother robin’s weeks of sitting still, patiently waiting had abruptly ended with the hatching and she was back and forth, dozens of times a day trying to keep up with the plaintive cries from her chicks who soon crowded the small nest, jostling and pushing until it seemed they would burst it with their size.

Then one by one they fledged, first hopping from the nest edge to a nearby branch, fluffed their wings and glided/flopped to the ground where they made stuttering attempts at take-offs.  The last one to leave the nest had to be coaxed by the mother who scolded from the branches relentlessly as the chick teetered on the edge, tentatively at last, taking that fateful leap into its new life.

I feel as if, through the long year past, I too have been sitting on my nest, waiting for some new way of life to hatch.  I can feel the stirrings beneath me, ideas are chipping away at their shells, ready to break out into the world.   When they do, will I have the stamina and determination to feed them and nurture them until they are ready to fly?  We will have to see.  This has been a strange and tragic year.  But it has also given us the space and time for reflection and the chance to respond thoughtfully, rather than just react to how we want to live our “one wild and precious life.” 

A wind storm ripped through the valley a few days ago and sometime between the midnight howling of the coyotes and the early morning trill and thrum of redwing blackbirds I heard the crack and whoosh of falling trees. The next day I found, stretched through the middle of the heron rookery a newly wind- felled cottonwood and there on the ground, the huge tangly branched nest with broken eggs, the blue shells still spattered with yellow yolk.

Over the last two weeks the herons have been returning to the rookery and are busy building and repairing nests, the old established couples reuniting and reclaiming their places, the young males hopefully proffering a particularly fine twig to perspective females. There is much flying about, loud grumblings and neck stretching threats when rivals fly too close to an already claimed nest space. One or another flies out to hunt the nearby field for emerging ground squirrels or fish from the ice cleared river. Meanwhile, back at the rookery long necks stretch and contort to preen feathers into place. Then a sudden cacophony as a red tail hawk flies through on a recon mission, razor sharp heron beaks clacking warnings at the interloper.

As the sun sinks lower more hunters return. A male settles onto a branch above a nest. The female stands and stretches her neck up to clack beaks. Loud gurgles and harsh cooing intensifies, wings flap and the male hovers over the female. The mating is quick, then both smooth their ruffled feathers, settle side by side into the nest and watch the darkening night sky.

The windstorm of the coronavirus pandemic has blown through our world, toppling all our well laid plans and breaking open our day to day lives. In other crises–fire, hurricane, earthquake or flood, even 9/11, we have rushed headlong into getting things “back to the way they were.” But this time we may not be able to get “back to the way things were.” And perhaps we shouldn’t even try., This crisis has really put the flaws in the way things are into sharp relief. I’m hoping, given the time we have now for reflection, that we can, as individuals, businesses and a country, use this hiatus to really do some soul searching and re-imagine different priorities and a different lifestyle. My mother talked about the depression and how that changed everything–made people more self-sufficient, more frugal, put the emphasis back on relationships and community and being more generous and empathetic to others, even when people had so little to share. She was horrified to see how our society changed in the prosperity that followed the war–how we became, not citizens, but consumers. How we stopped making do and being grateful for what we had, but became unhappy and dissatisfied always wanting more and more. And she was so disheartened when, on 9/11 the rallying cry was to go out and go shopping. I never really took her complaints seriously until now. I can see how so much of my life is consumed with consuming, and how, my generation feels so entitled.

The tree has fallen, our nest lies shattered on the ground. Let’s look to a different, stronger tree in which to rebuild and lay out our priorities.

In one of Elizabeth Strout’s stories in Olive, Again a character remarks on the quality of February light. “What she would have written about was the light in February.  How it changed the way the world looked.  People complained about February; it was cold and snowy and oftentimes wet and damp, and people were ready for spring.  But for Cindy the light of the month had always been like a secret, and it remained a secret even now.  Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see, if you really looked.  You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised.”

The promise of spring is all around if you look carefully, past the grey days and the occasional flurry of snow.  One day you will walk past the same bank of willows and suddenly they seem to glow golden with an inner light and the red osier dogwoods flame a blood scarlet.  The great horned owls who began calling back and forth in the twilight last month are already nesting. And beavers, coyotes and foxes are all mating. As are the hairy and downy woodpeckers and flickers whose drumming fills the morning quiet. Even the hardy little chickadees are practicing their mating calls.

 The ground is scattered with wind blown seeds already softening in the wet snow, just waiting to drop down into the dirt and germinate.  Even beneath the ragged snowcover, in the subnivean layer, voles who torment you in the summer garden are reproducing.  And as more sunlight filters through, plants have begun to grow. Newly hatched stoneflies are crawling over the snow and in their dens mother bears have already given birth. 

The ancient Celts recognized the beginning of spring, on the first of February, the Cross Quarter, half way between the Solstice and the Equinox.  To them it was Imbolc or Brighid.  For me, this light of February is a bittersweet light.  I am reluctant to see the end of winter.  Every new snowfall now is a celebration, a chance to savor for a few more days the quiet, contemplative beauty of a winter’s day.  But these last snowfalls are fleeting, giving way to the slush and blue skies of longer days and warmer weather and all around me are the reminders of the changing seasons

I