A Tide of Swallows

Nothing but the moon tonight, huge and glimmering, skirted by blue-black clouds edged in gold. I sit with ice packs and gauze between my teeth and try to make a day’s meal of liquids and purees, nevertheless happy that I survived and am on the other side of it.

Due to my recuperation and the sharp chill in the air, I did not visit with nature today other than to watch the black dog frolic, the crow light in the bare tree, and the sunshine dance through the windows as I shifted ice packs from jaw to jaw. It’s sinking in now that things are quiet that I made it through, I’m alive, and on the other side of what I had dreaded.

Bright blue sunlight taunted me as the birds once again began to gather in party-sized numbers, the downturn in weather slowly retreating. I sat and read and ate mushy foods and dreamed of crunchy carbs and a return to normal body activity.

Today was all about the Flickers – propped on the telephone poles or perched on high branches, letting loose their rising jungle twitters and their sharp, vociferous mating cries, occasionally pausing to hammer into the nearest wood for early-spring insects. I left the house for the first time and immediately lost energy – soft foods, lack of sleep, and continued pain and swelling winning out.

The first song sparrows arrived today, puffed and proud and fearless in their voices, and made the whole sunny world feel like spring had arrived. My healing is going much slower than I want, which making me feel emotionally fragile and ready for change.

As seen through the bright eyes of glistening, wet crows landing next to puddles and searching with cocked heads for drowned earthworms – a long, flooding period of rain has begun, waterlogging the 50-degree days. I took an extended and accidental walk along the derelict warehouses and the oil-slick harbor in search of some way back home.

The days where I am prevented from my relationship with nature, I feel somewhat less than; the days where I prevent myself from my relationship with nature, I feel lost. Today was a day of dental visits and excruciating pain, which consumed all my thoughts, but hopefully should lead to better healing.

Signs of spring are now everywhere, and when the rains come, they come in full force without the attendant chill and everything seems to be at the tipping point of budding. I wandered through the unique but interconnected rooms of Dvorak 8 tonight at the Symphony, profoundly delighting in each luscious vignette.

The air smelled like the rich, loamy awakening of fertile soil in a forest drizzle – fresh and cool as felt from a secluded cabin’s deck in the heart of the woods first thing in the morning. My wife left for a retreat as the return of the Stellar’s Jays bid her a good journey, while I returned home to continue to heal.

The night sky after a big rain is painted with deep blue clouds – the absolute darkness of winter giving way to the northern latitude’s affection for light. I threw my first IChing with the rabbit coins from Hong Kong and as a result, began to build a new altar.

The crows were everywhere today in the grey drizzle, trying to call me outside as I sipped my tea and listened to their throaty song. My heart was filled by “Letter to Momo” as I rediscovered my love of anime.

The squirrels wandered down from their tangled, leafy nests for the first time this year, pacing low and hungry across the driveway next door, leaping with tiny claws onto the fence posts and scurrying across rooftops as grey blurs. I fell to an early spring/late winter cold, which mixed with my inability to sleep without my wife in the bed, has created a haze around everything I do.

Crows were everywhere, calling, scolding, greeting, swooping down through the blue skies, their shadows falling across the stirrings of grass. I texted with my wife today, a rare retreat blessing from so far away.

And then, the unseen came into blossom and the undercurrents of spring’s thaw ran on hidden journeys to turn the smallest gears of the season’s most minute machinery. I know this because I am rendered nearly unconscious by a sudden and violent attack of hay fever that is ravaging my nose and my eyes and upturning my sleep.

The smallest, brightest voice came out of the silence of a cold, blue-skied day, a solo bird song that rose and fell and twittered happily from some tiny, feathery, puffed-up body that I could not ever see, only hear. I continue to sneeze in fits and yearn to go outside, but outside is battling me and so instead I read and wait for my wife to return back home again.

Inside, outside, internal, external all merged as one today as I slept and slept in sickness. My watery eyes managed to recover enough to watch movies before falling back into sleepy.

I noticed a bursting forth of pink flowers in the yard across the street, the first flowers to push through the winter ground to find sunshine, or in this case, torrential rain. My wife came back to me tonight and we spent an evening connecting and sharing in each others’ exhaustion.

Peals of thunder shook our apartment and the downpour of snow and hail plastered the windows and painted the world a violent white – weather that began with a morning snowfall and continued in bizarre patterns of intensity and calm throughout the rest of the day, punctuated as both evening and storm’s end approached by the clear call of a single robin. My cold began to lift, which I’m hoping will give me the energy I need to make it through the rest of this week.

The sun’s arc now rises above our rooftop in the evenings, casting all the bare, budding trees in warm shades of gold and flooding the secret places with sunset. I’ve been working too hard in advance of tomorrow’s financial meeting, which I’m dreading in the deepest parts of me, but understanding finally the necessity of certain evils.

The world continued without me. There are trying times when my struggles with anxiety and depression come to a head, triggered by real-world events, producing deaths of innocence and overwhelm tornados and I am currently in one of them.