A Tide of Swallows

Inside, grumpy humans caught off guard peer out the windows at the downpour and scramble to gather their warmer clothing, heaters groaning and clicking as they burn away the last year’s dust; outside, I walk through it, head bent and eyes cast downward in mourning the sudden loss of summer, until I meet a man who excitedly tells me of his hunt for the chicken of the woods mushroom, vibrant orange, thriving best in the autumnal rains deep in the heart of the forest, and I again see the wholeness of nature. My new routine began today with enough sleep and enough space to stretch, and a new project to sink my teeth into from my chair by the window.

All around me, the green of fern and vine and moss was alive with new purpose as the rains broke through the dry, hardened ground, rousing earthworms from their beds and exciting the gutter crows in a flurry of iridescent black as another season of the corvid arrives. It’s been so long since I was in the planning and discovery phase of a project that I have forgotten the simple joy of not having to pound my fingers for hours to achieve results, and the ability to stop and ponder life out the window without a particular problem to solve.

As the first taste of autumn’s rains faded like the moon, unseen jays loudly claimed corners of the drying land for their own, shrieking at us from the cover of pine needles and the darkness of an early sunset. I’ve been sleeping better lately, which I put down to the reassurance my body has been given that bed times and mornings will come at appropriate and predicable hours.

From the fisheye, I spied him, the jay on the porch hopping from chair arm to chair arm with the click of talons closing around metal, tapping on the tabletop, beaking around the planters with their dead dried leaves, until he found the Buddha and came to a stop, cocked his head, stared at the closed eyes and restful face for a long, drawn-out moment and then flew off to continue his data gathering. I had another lovely evening with my friend who also cuts my hair, visits that leave me wanting more of her and wondering why the social life of introverts seems so difficult to manage.

I can see the color change now, a subtle red shift that will begin at the edges of leaves and spread inward as death and change is celebrated in fire hues, until the branches are again bare and the ground hard with frost – but not today, not this sunny afternoon. I had a quite capable day at work, a welcome gift for end of week, and a balm for my brain that is again very full of racing thoughts.

The air is crisp, and even though the winds have yet to change direction, life in the city is punctuated by the sounds and the motion of birds busily grabbing for the autumn’s harvest, crows eagerly awaiting the moment of opportunity, and squirrels racing up and down the grooved bark to secret away their caches. We spent a fantastic evening tonight playing games with friends to the south, drinking good beer and laughing into the late hours until our sides ached.

In the afternoon, I turned to the closed window and the separation already felt acute, the loss of bird song behind it, the lack of wind ruffling my pages, and with a long season of silence ahead, this project’s transformation has me needing to consider a different way to spend my autumn and winter days than listening to the hum of the refrigerator and my own breathing. One of my favorite times of the week are my Sunday game nights, a chance to giggle like idiots and connect in a very unique way to old friends.

Sometimes all it takes is a single puffed-up sparrow balancing impossibly on a fuzzy-headed weed to stop me short, to halt all my internal storms and my mundane list making, to calm the monkey mind and shift all focus to that speckled body vanishing into the shrubbery, down deep into the shadowy places where an unseen world thrives below our notice. It feels like my face has been buried for hours in technical research and solving problems that do not yet exist, and I feel a bit lost, looking for some solid task to achieve and yet achieving so much in the meantime.

We took a walk in the last of the warm evenings for some time to come, and were startled by the brilliance of the first trees turning, blazing red against the low sun and casting long shadows, a black cat curled in fallen leaves beyond them, and a silver sliver moon beginning to rise in the darkening southern sky.  My ability to sometimes move quickly from lack of knowledge to becoming well-informed is always something I forget about myself when it comes time to rejoice in my merits and today was a good example of this in practice.

The summer grabs for the last of the heat, a final blaze before the rains, but in the garden by the side of the house, the frantically dug holes barely covered with a dash of soil hide the squirrels’ secrets for they are not fooled at all. It was a busy day as things ramp up at work and I sit on the eve of a watershed moment, the last vacation before I need to face many challenges and truths I’d rather delay.

In near-total silence, lake waters calm as glass, we stood in the darkness with our heads tilted towards the night sky as the legion of constellations proceeded before us, as Altair the Eagle shone brightly over the mountains, as the planets twinkled low on the horizon, all set against the faint yellow river of the Milky Way and accented by the sudden flash of shooting stars. We arrived for our first night at Crescent after a long, in-depth conversation about feminism, paganism, and the dharma.

You could hear the wind coming from a great distance, a stampede of rain and fog that rode the surface of the lake, thundering hooves that kicked up a wake of froth as it passed, until it slammed into the shoreline tossing chairs asunder, bending branches double, and startling juncos from their foraging in a chaotic explosion of wings and alarmed chirping. After some initial attempts at sitting outdoors, the weather won out and we settled in for a long afternoon and evening of reading and reflection.

I awoke to Raven’s call, the throaty creak of ancient wood, mist and shadow, and before me a rainbow arced over the lake, its terminus at the meeting of pine-covered hills as the weather held a tenuous peace that would soon be broken by wind and downpour. We donned our waterproofs today and took a many-mile hike amongst the moss-covered trees, then settled in for coffees and a long read, card playing and conversation until the late hours when we trudged to our room through the leftover puddles.

We sat in the early fall chill, our bodies straining towards any last lingering sunlight as the lake waters lapped the smooth grey stones and time slipped away to the sound of Ravens over the valley, the slapping of duck feet in the reeds, and a hidden woodpecker searching for lunch high up in the pines. Our last day at Lake Crescent ended with a bit of drama as we discovered we’d been visited by a hungry and destructive mouse during the night who ate holes in my wife’s new backpack, but despite this minor rodentia emergency, the weekend was as near perfect and as close to my imagined and wished-for getaway as possible.

The weather is turning now, the winds nearly shifted away from the warm meadows and their fragrant grasses to the snowy expanse of craggy mountain faces and the approaching ice lands to the East; yet under the moonlight, the tuxedo cat is warm, his aloofness lessened by the gradual bite of cold brick, his back rising to meet my fingers as we both seek company in the dark. Re-entry is very difficult and it is at times like this, on a return from nature immersion, that I question how I spend the majority of my life and where I place the emphasis of my energy, realizing that none of that is helped by the sudden bout of insomnia I experienced the night we arrived back home.

Time has again come to the old monk, the tree that stands across the street, home to a Benedictine congregation of birds and squirrels, its crown now bare of leaves, the first tonsure of a near distant winter. I took a long walk with my wife tonight after a particularly fruitful work day and ended up at the library to retrieve two more volumes of graphic novels as I continue to revisit my old passions.

The October harvest moon hung in the fork of a tree branch like an ornament, no longer the illumination of youthful summer nights but the hermit turning away and beginning her slow path inward. It was another very difficult day of the week as I continue to struggle with my own monkey thoughts and my easy toppling by the changing winds of the moment.

That sleeping baby with his tiny mouth open has no idea of the wild world that is out there waiting to be discovered; all the things I’ve seen and heard, all my moments of quiet observation and immersion within nature are undefined and unknown to him, and it makes me both very tired and also full of wonder to think that we all start as blank pieces of paper with an endless potential for co-creation. I’m ready for the week to be over and hoping that this weekend, I can find some of the peace I left behind at that lake.

The wind blew throughout the day and into the evening, rattling my windows and calling to me with a roar of invitation; as I willfully entered the storm, the trees were shedding red and orange leaves that scattered across the roadway like dying embers, the clouds were racing across the grey sky and blurring the early-rising moon, and I felt myself relax and let go, fully immersed in its rough embrace, unified and at peace. A long day ended with a fruitful outcome and we launched again into a weekend that felt strangely magical, starting with a chance meeting with a dear friend until the rain chased us off into the night.

This was a lost day spent deep in myth and saga, in dreams, archetypes and journeys of the spirit, while outside, the chilled, clear air and the coming of rain cast a grey template, and the low golden sun obscured by the weight of the season began to imprint itself again on this darkening northwestern world. The big event of this Saturday was watching Fellowship of the Ring in its extended cut and having long conversations about its importance especially in our present global situations.