If Song...
Since the appearance of the bobcats, the fox only comes around at night. I haven't seen her for about two weeks and am unsettled by how much I miss her... The cautious approach... nabbing the pear first, then the egg... napping on the deck late in the day. Still, in the morning, if my offerings are gone, I know she has come in the night, under cover of darkness, and I am reassured. I try not to worry, but worry sneaks in. I know it's the way of things, but if the bobcat eats her, I know it will be partially my fault.
I must admit. I had been lulled into thinking that things would continue uninterrupted. That she would continue to come at dusk as she has for the past year and a half, and I would, by luring her close to the house, borrow her presence to catch a glimpse of wildness. Human cares intrude on the wild yet again, and this time the intruding human is me.
I feel foolish. Selfish. I have grown attached. The occasional feeding serves me more than it serves her - except, perhaps, during times of long winter rain. and even then... A needy delight has snuck in. Of course, I know that the animals have their own rhythms, inexplicable to us, and rightly so. The appearance today of a baby whale, after a whale-less summer and fall, confirms this, though my unruly mind still wonders whether the whales have been absent simply because they are elsewhere, or because they're fewer in number, and ill, as this summer's mass beachings down the coast might suggest.
In my mind, there is a strange confluence: the changing of the seasons, the quickening drama in daily headlines, Yom Kippur, the broken climate... all clamoring for attention, creating a steady drumbeat of concern. And there's something else. Relief, alarm, at the voice that says, 'This is it, folks', as in, This is the moment to pull out all the stops and sing our life's anthem out loud... to name our relations and all that we love, to set them free to be themselves so that we, too, can be free, knowing that we have done everything possible to love life enough.
A poem arrives.
If song is prayer is history is layers of truth is a living being is a portal;
If seeing is remembering and language is memory and reverent honoring an offering;
If speaking is dreaming is recollection is a path as we listen
For what has been left unsaid
Which is not the same
As what has gone unheard,
Is an entirety, a universe, a galaxy, a particle.
If we are the singers being sung
Then the river is the ocean is the song is the pattern
Is the hologram containing all the hardship and possibility wrought by devotion
Including ignorance and blind cruelty.
If all our sorrows have swum to the surface, wrestling with joy
Waiting to see, hoping for love, hoping for hope
Then now is the call and we are the response.
