It’s been mostly birds, a week of birds. Five bluebirds down the chimney into the cold wood stove, ashy and terrified. I got four out, two flying madly, miserably through the house (here’s the routine: close all inside doors, open all outside doors, or try to gently catch them in a towel in a window), one already dead because I didn’t know to check the stove at least two times a day.
There was the nest of starlings screaming for food in the hole in a bedroom wall where the clapboard is rotten. I will not say how I dealt with that. Then, the woods were full of bird calls and songs I’ve never heard before. My friend Kristy walked up to the pond with me and used – is it Merlin? – and identified about 15 different birds, none of which I could see, all traveling, nesting, feeding, living there, or passing through.
So I go to the pond late in the day with the dogs to feed the fish and sit, to listen to the music in the trees instead of the awful news, and the most unexpected thing has happened.
The fish came to eat as they always do when I throw the food. But this time, the muddy leaves moved below them in the shallows, clouding the water, and a bony-ridged head, then the long shell body, showed itself, the old snapping turtle I tried to kill and never could – it got away from every chicken neck on every double hook. I’d thought it was dangerous, then I’d finally had the good sense to read up on them and found they are shy creatures who wouldn’t snap off dangling fingers.
I hadn’t caused one more death. I have killed too many innocent things, but not this. Not this one. The old turtle appeared and disappeared, careful or frightened. It tried the fish food pellets and quite liked them. It became more comfortable except when Jack moved around, then it retreated, but it returned, and then it began to raise its strange head each time and stare at me, and I stared back, I in my chair and the old turtle in the shallow green water, looking at each other.
I tossed it a few bits, and it ate them, as contemplative as a Buddhist monk, but no chewing, only a long gulp and then another and another, slowly, very slowly, focused and peaceful.
I lost my Self. I sank into the water and down into the mud. It happens more and more, often in the garden at the end of the day when I am really, really tired. This place, this life of this place, permeates you if you can allow it, and then you stop being what you think you are and become bird, old turtle, dog, bees, the clouds, the rain, grass and wildflowers, a resident of the pond water or air or dirt.
Is it age or revelation that brings us to the peace of no fearing or needing to be who we think we are, the merging with the Other, hearing, seeing the Other, and then becoming all of it and them.
Is anyone else tired of Self, ready to shed and lift or sink, fly or become still, moved only by wind or flow, grow and burst open?
Anyone
