A Tide of Swallows

Two eagles circled in crystal-clear blue sky, peering down at the river of people below them on a day borrowed from spring. On the ground, 175,000 humans looked up, cheered, lowered their signs and took photos as the Womxn’s March trudged three more miles upstream.

As I watched a territorial hummingbird scrittle and flit over the tops of the trees, I noticed for the first time that the world was covered in moss – branches painted in a thick carpet, stones slick with green, grass blunted by winter into a paste of lichen. My muscles were so sore that I could hardly get out of the porch chair, so I just sat a while longer.

Nothing in the thick of winter makes me happier than hearing the clear, sharp chirp of a robin in the tall trees – a sound that reminds me of endless summer nights and bare feet in grass. My balance is shifting back to normalcy again, probably a mix of understanding and acceptance, though I wish that struggle wasn’t as familiar as it is.

I’m thankful for blue skies and fluffy white clouds- for an appreciation for the minute signs of earth change that I’m better able to spot and appreciate from doing this project and for seasonal transitions that are much longer than I’d ever noticed before. Had a late-night discussion about the balance between activism and self-care and went to bed way too late.

Everything seemed silenced by the return of the archetypical blue-tinted Seattle greyness, the intensely low cloud cover that pushes downward and compresses sound. I met a beagle-mix puppy who nibbled at my gloves and cocked his head at me when I spoke to him and I yearned again for a canine future.

I have a special affection for the loud birds – the flickers and the starlings, the crows and the jays – so I was happy to hear the repeating shrill chitter of a Northern Flicker high in the tree line, somewhere lost in the grey haze. We talked about the nature of love tonight and found that even after nearly ten years, we can still discover things about each other.

The starlings sat in my favorite towering tree, the one that looms over the rooftops, calling out meandering wolf-whistles from the bare branches. My body aches from too much typing at odd angles and my spirit hungers from not enough typing of the things that matter.

As the deciduous trees began to show the first tentative signs of budding, we took a forest walk through the Vashon firs as evening approached, listening to the sound of our footfalls on muddy, thawing ground, and heard the first Raven call of the year creaking out of the dark wood in the distance. My heart feels full after spending an evening laughing with cherished friends, and I am happy to have escaped the city and all the noise of life for a while.

Living in somewhat of a coastal town, much different from the landlocked state of my birth, the comings and goings of seagulls are a part of the business of nature that remains a mystery to me. My wife and I spent the day sick with some virus, and I napped in and our of sleep while hearing the cries of gulls as they visited our neighborhood and no doubt raised the feathery shackles of many a territorial corvid.

The entire first world was wooziness and acheyness and dreams of walruses in the far north, and so I did not visit with nature. The second world was full of anixety and protests and a general heaviness that matched the weight of my head.

There was a sharp turn in the wind today, frozen and harsh on brittle skin, even as the blue skies and summer-like light fooled me from inside looking out. After a visit to the dentist and an ill-advised dive into the news, I’m feeling more anxious today and needing to sift out my concerns one grain at a time.

When you start to pay attention, things like approaching snow and more inclimate weather is hard to deny, the air seeming more solid in the lungs and the sky seeming to push down a bit more on the forehead. I’m looking for things that I’m not giving myself, and wondering why that might be, hoping that once I have a bit more space in my spirit that I’ll be able to enact some change.

The wind rises in icy gusts against skin that is already winter-cracked and nothing else seems to move; when it trends towards snow and frost, all is still and hidden. I am dreadfully counting down the days until next Friday while hoping I don’t catch my wife’s low-throated cough.

It started early in the morning, a staccato tapping on the windows, and before I went to bed the grass was covered in a frosting of sleet- sleet which continued throughout the day and forced all winged and whiskered creatures into their nests and secret recesses and hollows. After a long day of both work and living too much inside my own head, I took care of a sick wife and fell into a rabbit hole of questionable television.

Our hummingbird, and the starlings that perch in the highest, thinnest branches of the tallest tree took advantage of the break in the weather to make sure we all knew that spring was still on the way and that birds have quite a bit to say about it. We spent the day in tasks and figures, preparing for some big events on the near horizon.

Snow is expected late tonight and the air is calm, the skies grey, but there’s not a hint of the ice wind that normally precedes the weather front. I’m facing my own mortality and the challenges of aging, while managing to strike a good-for-me balance of also enjoying the moment before me.

The snow began late in the evening as slender needles of sleet and rain, but by the next day had turned into the kind of big, fluffy snowflakes that dominate memories of my youth, blanketing our trees in soft, delicious, silence. I am using work as avoidance and wanting to curl up in some hollow until what’s coming Friday is over.

As the weather warmed, the streets were slush, and the gutters dripped, and the world outside was shaken free of ice, and nature went about its business, complete with a noisy visit by a nesting pair of flickers. Though choosing to look at Friday as a project, I’ve resigned myself to just getting through it, with nearly zero hope I’ll be able to keep up this approach for very long.

There’s a certain quality of winter here in the Pacific Northwest where refrigerator air plummets down the mountains into the warm coastal valley, raising a confusing mix of temperatures, lowering cloud layers, and bringing us skies that are such pure brilliant white that birds in flight appear as black animated ink smudges against them. I sat on the porch and watched all of this using work as avoidance, using anxiety as excuses, and all the while realizing how easily disconnected I can become.

In a near-60 degree day seemingly borrowed from late spring, I watched the rainbow stretch across our apartment complex just as an explosion of bush tits took advantage of the uptick in weather for a mid-afternoon joy ride. This was the night before all four wisdom teeth are going to be removed, and I spent it working until It was bedtime on an emergency that was half justified and half self-created to stop my brain from thinking too carefully about what was to come, a technique that extended into my entire dreamscape as well.