(art by Jackie Morris)

I am a creature of habit. I like my routines. One of them is getting up in the morning, fixing my coffee and watching birds and my kitchen window feeder. This one tends to be frequented by finches, wrens and Carolina chickadees. Perhaps the smaller birds prefer this one is that it’s not populated by Cardinals, Bluejays, Robins, Brown Thrashers and other bigger birds that drive the smaller ones away.

A house wren eats at the feeder and I give it my full attention. I stand still and silent. Gazing at its light brown markings on its short rounded wings and on its erect tail and the slightly curved brown bill that pecks at the seeds. I can tell that he’s not a Carolina wren as he is missing the prominent white eye stripe. He weighs about the same as two quarters.

While I watch, I think about how such male house wrens will pick out several potential sites and assemble several small twigs in each spot to keep other males from using nearby nesting cavities. He will then bring his mate to these dummy nests so that she can choose which one she prefers, as if this were some avian HGTV House Hunters episode. She chooses her favorite and then builds a nest there.

When the world becomes too much, as a child, I would go to the woods. I found peace in the woods behind our house. My parents arguing and fighting was replaced by the soothing sounds of birdsong. I would spend hours there, looking and listening. It took me out of myself, my thoughts and connected me to the trees, the plants, the animals and, of course, the birds.

I knew Cardinals because the males were a bright candy-apple red and were my Mother’s favorite birds. But I was discontent by the fact that I did not know the names of others; after all, one should know the names of ones friends. I would gather together the necessary items for just such a task: a bird guide that I checked out from the local library, a small notebook and pencil to write down a description of what I spotted and some binoculars. The binoculars were given to me by my grandfather, Papa Fred. He had bought them to take with him when he went to N.C. State games, his alma mater. A shy, quiet gentleman, he discovered he preferred to listen to games on his small transistor radio while sitting in his easy chair by the window of his den. So he gave the binoculars to me when he found me outside in his yard, staring up at trees. “What are you looking for?” he asked me.

“Birds,” I replied using my hands to make binoculars. He then went inside, got his binoculars and handed them to me, “Seems like you will get more use out of them than I will.”

He was also the first person to start teaching me the names of birds: from Robins to Eastern Towhees (which he said you could tell by their calls that sounded like a bird telling you, “Drink your tea!”).

Sometimes he would take me to Duke Gardens, not only because he had gotten his degree in agriculture and could tell me all about the different flowers and plants, but so that I could watch the large koi in the pond and birds that populated the grounds.

Before each exploration, I put on my baseball cap from my losing t-ball team, so as not to get ticks (my Father had warned me of their dangers since he had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever as a boy and had to go to the hospital) and set out into the woods.

Summer was a sense of freedom from the boredom and the prison-like rigidity of school. I had hours to explore the woods on my own. This was a precious gift and the Eden-like nature of this time has never left me. As an adult, like Adam and Eve, I feel the loss of my paradise (much of those woods are now housing developments and soccer fields for the elementary school I attended).

I would often sit by the creek with my feet in the water and watch birds drink and bathe there. I even saw a Common Grackle eat a crawdad. Or I would watch Gray Catbirds or Indigo Buntings eating the wild blackberries that I, too, loved to devour by the handfuls. I would note all of this down in my notebook as if I were Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. I would jot down how the male Indigo Bunting had vibrant-blue feathers and scattered dark markings on its wing and tail. This was my science class and I learned far more about the natural world than I ever did in school. Things I did not know, I would search for answers of in our World Book Encyclopedias or in books at the library using the notes from my notebook.

Yet I was not the only one whose keen eyed-gaze was watching everything. I happened to notice an American Kestrel perched on a limb of an elm tree. He had a rusty brown back and tail with double black vertical lines, a white breast with black spots, and slate-blue feathers on his head and wings. What was he watching so closely? I tried to figure it out but, before I could, he swooped down and grabbed a vole that was hidden among the fallen leaves and took it off to devour its prey somewhere in peace. I just sat there stunned and in awe of how quickly that all occurred.

Sitting in my garden, I feel the loss of just such woods. I just saw a story about a poor black bear entering a neighborhood in the town where I live and eating from a bird feeder because he was so hungry. More and more such animals are losing their habitats to progress. How much wildlife will we lose in the process? Not only are we losing their sanctuaries but our own: places where we step out of the hectic consumerism of our world and “adopt the slower pace of nature,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson calls it.

A local science museum that has been in my town for decades used to have woods behind it where you could walk the trails, sit by the small stream, or walk around the pond populated by turtles, including one old, large irritable snapping turtle. In the name of getting more visitors, that area is now a playground and has activity centers in to keep kids entertained. What they don’t seem to realize is the great loss they have just given these children; many of whom have no other way of being in a wooded landscape. I used to walk with my own sons there and we would spot broad-shoulder hawks and a black snake that was resting in the warmth of the sun on a rock. We would take our binoculars and search for birds among the trees. It became a game of seeing who could find the most birds and of looking them up in our bird guide.

After Papa Fred died, I went to the woods with my grief. I knew the woods could hold it and allow me space to grapple with the first real loss of my young life. As I sat beneath a tree, tears running down my cheeks, I heard a familiar bird’s call. “Drink-your-tea! Drink-your-tea!”

I laughed.

It was the Eastern Towhee.

The poet John Brehm was correct when he wrote, “I open my grief to accommodate this wonder.”

The woods allowed me wonder in the midst of my grief. It still does, as I mourn the loss of my Father.

It is why I sit here, watching wrens.

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On Saturday, I went with my younger son to a second-hand bookshop that’s not far from where he lives. It has very limited hours, so we made sure to check beforehand to ensure the shop was open. Inside, the books were disorganized and cluttered as a hoarder’s home. Aisles, if you can call the narrow spaces between towers of books stacked on the floor, were barely enough for anyone to move through.

There were general areas for categories (fiction, poetry, plays, classics, philosophy, etc) but it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended.

I navigated my way cautiously to the poetry area whereI dug in boxes, sorted through piles and attempted to find what was on the shelves behind the piles and boxes to little avail. I attempted the same in the classics and philosophy areas. There was no way I could get to the nature writing as it was completely blocked by boxes of books stacked on each other. I had almost given up finding anything, when I spotted The Letters & Essays of E.B. White in a boxed set.

I was glad, too, as the shop was stuffy from the heat (there was no air conditioning) and the dust that covered everything.

As with all of the books, there was no price on this boxed set so I took it up front to the older, exasperated woman who apparently owned and operated the shop to her dismay it seemed from her attitude.

“How much is this?” I inquired.

She proceeded to search for this boxed set on her smart phone. After a few minutes, she answered, “Well, I see one person online trying to sell it for $100 and another one selling it for $10, so how about I meet in the middle and sell it to you for $20?”

I paid her and quickly made haste with my son to a nearby coffeeshop to have iced coffee and read our recently acquired books.

We sat near a window so I could not only read, but also observe passerby and jot down thoughts in the small journal I always carry with me.

In between reading some of White’s essays, I especially loved the one moving essay entitled Death of a Pig, I began to think about how I first discovered E.B. White on the shelves of the library at Olde Providence Elementary School. It was the cover showing a mouse rowing a canoe that peeked my interest and made me snatch it from the shelves and instantly check it out. This became one of the many books I would get in trouble for reading in class when I wasn’t supposed to over the years. It was also the first book that I repeatedly checked out; so much so, in fact, that the librarian finally told me, “You know, Elliott, Mr. White wrote other books. In fact, this one’s my personal favorite.” She handed me a copy of Charlotte’s Web.

It instantly became one of my beloved favorite books of all time. I have said many times, without a trace of hyperbole, that Charlotte’s Web is one of the most perfect books ever written. One of the lines that has stayed with me ever since I first read it was, “…human beings must always be on the watch for the coming of wonders.”

It ties in to another quote by White that is one I always try to live by: Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.

What I love about this is how it shows that curiosity is an essential compass for a meaningful life. Curiosity is active. It is the cultivation of a questioning mind. One that is filled with wonder and not cynicism and is able to see the world anew and forever changing.

As humans, we tremble with a longing for meaning.

What makes a life and gives it meaning?

I find mine through being guided by curiosity. Curiosity is continuously learning how to see, to notice, to pay attention, to listen. Curiosity over certainty. “It is best,” E.B. White once said, “to have a strong curiosity, weak affiliations.” What he meant is to not be trapped in rigid beliefs, to hang our hats on certainty. To not be rooted in certainty or a defined narrative allows one to remain open and expansive to wonder.

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(art by Jackie Morris)

I found a dead sparrow on the sidewalk. I know it’s a female because she is smaller with light brown feathers and single wing bars. On a nearby branch, her mate watches over her. Flies have already started to circle and land on her tiny body.

Getting my Grandmother’s gardening spade, I first dig a small grave in a bed beneath an oak. When I have finished, I return to the sparrow and gather her body in my hands and carry her over to the grave. Her body only weighs as much as four pennies. I settle her in the ground and then cover her with soil. For some reason, as I do, I remember a hymn from my childhood, “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” The only difference is that the he now is the sparrow’s mate who is on a limb of the oak watching me as I bury his love. His song is mournful and melancholy fills me as well.

I buried this sparrow when I have not even buried the remains of my own Father.

Gazing up at the male sparrow with his large black spot on his throat that extends downward to his chest. He feels sorrow no less than I did when my Father died. This sparrow may even morn his lost mate for months.

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(art by Claude Monet)

There is something disconcerting about picking up my Father’s cremated remains from a furniture store. Yes, it was owned by the same people who owned the funeral home next door but it felt disconcerting to enter a business centered around selling home furnishings to gather my Father’s remains. Even more so when a came came out of the back and asked, “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to pick up my father’s remains. His name is Robert Blackwell,” I answered.

The man nodded and returned to the back. He came out with a cardboard box and a slip for me to sign. It felt very transactional. I almost expected him to say, “Here’s your father’s remains - and can I interest you in this fine ottoman?” I signed the slip. He gave me the box and the death certificates. The box felt heavier than I expected.

Earlier that morning, I arose at 6:30. I walked the dogs as I watched the soft sunrise. The air was filled with the birdsong of Robins, Cardinals, Wrens and Mockingbirds. When I came back inside, I made my coffee while watching a house finch eat as messily as a small child from the feeder.

Once I poured my cup, I went to the den and lit the candles that filled the fireplace. This was born of the need for ritual, for the sacred, for rooting myself before I went to pick up my Father’s remains. Cremains, they call it.

Sitting in a room lit only by candles, I wondered how I would react when I was handed the box containing my Father’s ashes. My mind instantly thought of what I had been told every Ash Wednesday by the priest as he made a cross of ashes on my forehead, “From ash you came, and to ash you shall return.” This stark phrase reminds me of human mortality - something that will be even more profound as I take the box containing my Father.

I told myself: Be present. Allow whatever this moment has to teach you to do so. Hold it as you have throughout these last couple of months. Remember, yes, there is suffering and sorrow. Do not flee from it. And yet - there are such miracles of life. Whales who sing songs that travel for miles through the ocean. Dolphins give names to each other. Raindrops that weigh less than an eyelash and yet can contain traces of fossilized rocks that are 2.7 billion years old. Or that I can see the memory of stars that no longer exist but whose light can still be seen in the night sky.

To embrace life means to hold both the wonder and the woe equally.

Opening Rilke, I begin to read The Ninth Elegy:

...because truly being here is so much; because everything
here 
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us the most fleeting of all.

Holding the box that is surprisingly heavier than I expected, I realize what is not contained inside of it: my Dad’s memories or stories or his spirit.

On the day, they called to tell me they had received the signed death certificate and were going to cremate my Father, I looked up the process. This was not out of some morbid curiosity but a desire to understand what, exactly, was going to happen to my Father. I read about how the intense flames (that can be as hot as anywhere from 1,400 Fahrenheit degrees to 1,800 Fahrenheit degrees) consumes the body’s soft organic tissue. As I read this, I thought of of the metamorphosis of the Monarch butterfly. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar’s enzymes dissolve all of its tissues turning it into a kind of nutrient-rich soup. The cells, called imaginal discs, survive and from these grow the antenna, head, body, wings and legs of the butterfly. The consuming of the body leads to utter transformation.

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While my Father’s body was being cremated, I was mopping the kitchen floor. I was filled with grief but, not wanting to be stuck in my head, I began to clean. I needed the physicality of the actions: of wiping off counters, sweeping the floor before mopping and then mopping itself. I paused only to watch birds at the kitchen window feeder. A sparrow. A house finch. A black-capped chickadee. A red cardinal.

Cardinals always remind me of my Mother. They were her favorite bird. After my Father breathed his last breath, I saw a bright-red Cardinal sitting on his room window. A sign? To what do I ascribe the chance of a bird that mattered so much to my Mother showing up right as my Father died? We search for meaning in the randomness. To make sense of the senseless.

I clean with all the careful attention I would as if I was washing his body.

Even when I sit down to write these words, I am sitting at his desk.

I take out a stick of sandalwood incense, put it in the lotus holder and light it as my Mother used to do before she drew or wrote in her journal. There is something sacred about letting one’s love and loss be transformed into language, into expression. It becomes an act of respair. Respair is a sixteenth century word that means fresh hope or the recovery of hope after a period of despair. It’s a word that I recently discovered and have allowed it to become not only a part of my vocabulary but a part of my grieving process.

To love is to grieve. The latter is born of the former. Grief reveals the depths of our love for someone. Yet we are never fully prepared to grieve, to feel the loss.

It was the last day of school and I left early to go and check on my Father. It was a beautiful Friday. Carolina blue sky with soft, gentle clouds floating overhead. Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror) played on repeat. This transcendent piece of music had been a deep balm for me - reminding me of the infinite, of space and its continued unfolding of universes.

I had not expected to receive that call from the hospital at 5 in the morning. The one where I learned my Father had fallen and suffered a trauma to the head and brain.

I had expected to find my Father, as he usually was, in bed. Either asleep or looking out his room window at the trees, the wild grasses, and the clouds. Instead, I found him sitting in a wheelchair, asleep, mouth open.

“Hey Dad,” I told him, “I’m here now. I love you.”

His papery skin was paler than usual. How many times had I carefully rubbed lotion on his face, arms and hands? Sometimes love is nothing more than the act of service to someone to help, in some small way, to ease their pain, to ease their suffering.

I attempted to wake him up but found myself unable to.

Going to the nurse’s station, I asked one to come and please check his vitals.

The night before, my Father had been alert and I could understand what he was saying (many times his speech was incomprehensible and rambling). We talked of deep sea fishing, which was something he loved to do with his own father and his brothers. It was their form of connection. I listened, asked questions, and laughed when he joked about something that had happened that was funny. When I left him that night, I told him, “I love you, Dad.” He replied, “I love you, too.”

I know all too well from my own Mother’s death how one can have such polar opposite days.

Sitting beside him, I took my Father’s hand in my own. Throughout this process, I have learned to sit with what is being offered me: pain, joy, silence, frustration, sorrow. To sit with these things and ask: What does this have to teach me in this moment?

A blue bowl with red cherries sits on my desk. Cherries symbolize the fruit of Paradise. It represents eternity. Beside it is a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. He talks about how one should “do every act of your life as if it were your last.” I thought of these words as I tended to my Father.

Being in my Father’s room, I removed myself from a world of hyperactivity and agitation. Instead, I stepped out of time and there was only the present moment: of being fully present to my Father. We were there in the not-ever-before and the not-ever-again.

I was present at the birth of my older son and I was present at the death of my father. Both were sacred moments and connected. Birth. Death. Rebirth. The cycle of my garden.

Sometimes, when I sat with my Father, I would read to him. This last day was no different. I had a copy of Force of Nature: A Novel About Rachel Carson by Anne E. Burg. I read these words to my Father: Everything pulsing, alive, full of mystery and wonder!

I paused.

Looked up.

My Father had stopped breathing.

I put my hand to his mouth and under his nose.

Nothing.

I took my fingers and felt for his pulse on his wrist.

Nothing.

I dashed down the hallway to the nurse’s station.

Before EMS showed up. Before they hooked my Father up to their machines to discover there was no electricity flowing in the brain to the heart, before I head that sound of flatlining, I knew my Father was dead.

The nurse and I had shared a moment. She had told me, “No matter how many times this happens, it never gets easier.” Her eyes were welling with tears as she tried to keep my Father alive. A fruitless task.

Once my Father died, the nurse and I hugged. We comforted each other. There was the connection of grief and humanity. We were not black and white, female and male. We were simply humans meeting in that jagged edge of sorrow. We shared in our shared humanity, which is loss.

Before the funeral home came to get my Father, I mourned and I kissed my Father’s forehead one last time.

Unable to see him wheeled out in a body bag, I went out to my car. I listened to Spiegel im Spiegel on repeat. The leaves on the trees gently blew in the breeze. Bees moved about the purple blossoms of the butterfly bush. Two cats sauntered across the road. Clouds passed overhead.

The world kept turning.

Even after death, life continues.

There are many who want everything to stop, but I didn’t. I needed to be reminded that there was still life, still beauty to be found even as I felt the full oceanic force of grief.

Grief is not something to be fixed. Grief is something to live. Grief ebbs and flows like the tide. Yet the grief I felt after my Father’s death was not the same grief I experienced when my Mother died. I was younger and, when she was gone, I felt as if the world no longer had gravity and, as it turned at over a thousand miles an hour, I had been flung into the coldness of space.

My grief is not the same because I am not the same.

The preciousness of life lies in its impermanence. After my Mother’s death, I came to understand more fully the fragility of mortality. I have moved through the powerful current of existence.

The grief of going to the funeral home to plan my Father’s cremation.

The grief is felt when my sister and I sorted through my Father’s clothes; many of which still carried his scent and the scent of memories.

The grief of getting the call that the funeral home had gotten the signed death certificate and would be cremating my Father’s body.

Each a reminder of finality.

It’s hard to sit with uncertainty during death. I long for my childhood certainty of heaven and reuniting with loved ones. It’s much more difficult to say, “I do not know. I do not know what happens to us after we die.”

All I know is that, despite the complex and complicated relationship I had had with my Father, at the end, there was only love. I loved him and he loved me. That was enough. It took fifty-eight years for me to get here. It took my Father eighty-six years. While he was in the hospital and I was alone with him, he admitted, “I wish I had appreciated my family sooner.” I took his frail hand and held it. “I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, too, son.”

Right now, I look out the window in front of my desk and gaze at the clouds. My Father used to make fun of me for stopping to admire or take photos of clouds. But, one day, while I was driving him to the grocery store, he said, “Those clouds really are beautiful, aren’t they?” After that, we would share in the beauty of clouds even in the hospital. I would hold his hand and we would gaze out the window together.

Yes, I have begun what Roland Barthes called “the ceremony of mourning.” Yet, even in that ceremony, I am still dazzled by the beauty of the brevity of this life.

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(Listening to the Birdsong by Dawn Stacey)

My life has been a courtship with wonder. As I am approaching another year around the sun, fifty-eight times to be exact, and I have thought about how do I want to spend the time that I have left. I know that I no longer require absolutes but, instead, am content to say more and more, “I don’t know.” The less answers I have, the deeper my questions become. What need do I have of answers when I can choose instead to enter into what Emerson calls “the universal grace.” After all, there is no common life for all of life is ablaze with wonder if one is open and present to it.

In an age of growing divisiveness, I long for communion with and not to simply comment on. More and more I want only to live out E.M. Forster’s epigraph, “Only connect!” from his novel Howard’s End. Not the shallow on-line connection but those deep, resonant connections that can shape and transform one’s life. That recognition of spirit to spirit. To not live fragmented but to live more fully. To move past a depersonalized world but striving towards human connection, empathy, and a balance of head and heart. I want to love existence: both the pain and pleasure, sorrow and joy.

This morning, I awakened and walked the dogs. I caught, breathlessly, the sight of my New Dawn Roses all abloom and touched by the sunrise. It filled me astonishment - in no lesser degree than when a blue heron flew over my car as I drove on a bridge over a river or when I heard the screech of a broad-shouldered hawk and gazed up to see one flying directly overhead. Nor less than watching just such a sunrise in the Appalachian Mountains, which are older than the rings of Saturn (a fact that is no less amazing). I stood there, listening to a chorus of birdsong: Cardinals, Robins, Wrens, and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers. There, in the background, the soft cooing of mourning doves.

I was born with a capacious curiosity that has never lessened, abated or waned. Each new year, brings new astonishments, delights, desires, dreams and wonders. I allow my day to be wonder-filled by devoting myself to courting wonder. Beginning and ending the day by reading poetry. No matter how rushed my morning is vital and necessary - not a mere luxury. Though I do luxuriate in the language. Poetry awakens me, makes me feel more alive, and reminds me to be more present. As Shelley once wrote, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”

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(art by James McKeown)

This was one of those weeks that felt heavy for a variety of reasons. Yes, there is a global and existential anxiety - political instability, wars, climate disaster and the constant overload of information. Students share the heartbreak and hardness of their lives with me. I hold that heaviness. It reminds me of those lines by Etel Annan, “I am light / I keep saying living in dark luminosity.”

Things are very difficult for a lot of people who are struggling, who are wrestling the best they can in this world. It is very easy to forget awe and wonder and beauty. It’s very easy to despair, to become cynical, to become hardened. When I feel prone to despair, I think about the composer Olivier Messiaen who spent time in a German POW camp. He was thirty-one years old. And during this time of deepest darkness, in the worst that humanity had contrived, he composed Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time). It would first be performed in that very same camp. Years later, he would say, “I am convinced that joy exists, convinced that the invisible exists more than the visible, and that joy is beyond sorrow, and beauty beyond horror.”Later, Messiaen would incorporate birdsongs as a fundamental element of his music - meticulously transcribing the sounds of birds into musical notation. In fact the first part of that piece begins with morning birdsong and stillness before moving into the apocalyptic chaos that the world had become before returning to the beauty of a final ascending movement for violin and piano.

As I write this, I hear the sound of a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher outside my window.

I also think about one morning, as I came into school very early, and I stopped to listen to almost a dozen different types of birds singing their sophisticated songs. A Cardinal can run through more notes than are on a piano or that a Mockingbird can sing over 200 different songs. I just stood there in the chill of that morning just letting the symphony of birdsong soak in. I understood what Messiaen meant when he said, "The birds are the opposite of time. They represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song.” He believed them to be the greatest musicians on the planet.

In the midst of a difficult week, I went to the Peace Center to see Yo-Yo Ma perform. I came into the concert feeling worn down emotionally, physically and psychologically. Between Bach’s Cello Concertos and Arvo Pärt’s "Spiegel im Spiegel” was the most profoundly transcendent concert I have ever experienced in my life. Bach and Pärt are music of the infinite. With the latter, images from the James Webb and Hubble Telescopes, as well as from the Artemis mission, were shown on a screen and the lights became a galaxy of stars all over the auditorium as this piece of purity and the limitlessness of the very space we travel in on this “blue point” as Whitman called it o a “pale blue dot” as Carl Sagan termed it. And as it played, tears streamed down my cheeks.

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(An Afternoon Tea by Elena Wuest)

As I made my coffee, I watched a House Sparrow at my kitchen window feeder. Still and silent, I watched this tiny sparrow feeding, Content to observe this moment, I noticed how this small female with its brown wings was marked by black lines on its brown-streaked back. She was a fast, messy eater. Pecking at seeds using her conical beak. I watched her crack them open before eating the dark seeds. I did not move until she flew away.

I gazed out at the morning sunlight coming through the large leaves of the Big-leaf Magnolia tree, a gift from a friend long gone. I think of him when I gaze at the tree, a birthday gift he had given my older son when my son was just a small boy. Beneath that tree, we buried my son’s dog, who was more of a sibling and close companion, as she loved him with such devotion that she stayed at his bedroom window, watching him play outside.

I watched as the sunlight cast shadows on the wall of the garage.

A female Cardinal sat still on a branch as other birds came and went from the feeders. Her stillness matched my own.

We all have a gravitational center of our own private universes. That which grounds us and gives our own lives meaning. As I approach getting another year older, I reevaluate what mine is. It is becoming less and less about owning and more and more about experiencing. I am releasing my grip instead of clutching at certainty. As I write these words, I listen to the sounds of a Cardinal, a Tufted Titmouse and a Carolina Chickadee.

I gaze at the great, grand old oaks in my yard. Tagore’s lines, “Be still, my heart, these great trees are prayers.” I love the feel of their lichen covered bark against the palm of my hand. These trees are universes unto themselves: supporting up to more life-forms - insects, birds, mammals - than any other tree genus. How much life have they lived and seen? What wisdom is hidden in their trunks? They who grasp that one must be rooted to reach toward the heavens.

Last night, in the cool of early evening, I went for a walk. As I walked my dog along the sidewalk of my neighborhood, I stopped and stood in awe. There, before me, was sunlight coming through the red leaves of a Japanese maple. There was in that moment only that moment. I did not want to move on. I wanted to be awash with this beauty that only existed then and there and would not come again in that exact same way. I was awash with the beauty of the world. Nothing else mattered.

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(art by Edvard Munch)

The other day, my older son and I were going somewhere in my car when he asked me, “Do you think we are going to be in a nuclear war?” His question stemmed from the worry of a post the President of the United States made stating “A whole civilization will die tonight.” Genocide of a n…

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Growing up, I was a shy, solitary child. I didn’t feel like I belonged at home, at school or at church. It was the latter that drove me into my encounter with the woman who would become my own personal saint. When I was of elementary school age, I found that my questions were unwelcome in Sunday school, probably because those poor teachers did not have …

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(Gyoshū Hayami’s Tea Bowl and Fruits)

I am approaching another year around the sun and find myself asking: What is essential?

Making my morning cup of coffee and get my bowl of fresh fruit ready, I ruminate on this question. Is the essential a paring down? Removing all that does not have meaning. Essential comes from the Latin essentialis, which means “belonging to the essence.” This is derived from the Latin essentia, meaning “being, essence.” Getting to what something truly is, the inner nature or meaning of a thing. The Confucian philosopher Epicurus believed, “Nothing is sufficient for the person who finds sufficiency too little.” Not a sentiment one tends to see in our culture. We have technology and distractions to divert ourselves from asking what is truly important in our lives. We instead accept the answers of consumerism that we can somehow buy our ways to contentment.

Is what is essential an act of simplification over accumulation?

Such an idea is contrary to the culture. We are not taught to be aware of where our need ceases and surplus begins. Instead, we are taught that we can never be enough until we buy enough, which is never, ever enough. Then we look about ourselves and see all that encumbers us and, yet, instead of pausing to ask: Does all of this nourish me? Instead we falsely believe, this does not satisfy me, what else do I need?

At the heart of the question “What is essential?” is the question of “Why?”

Why do I have this? Why do I keep this?

Do I gain a false sense of security from my accumulation? Do I stop to question this? Do I ask myself: Does this nourish me? If not, why do I keep it?

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(art by Alma Thomas)

I was a very anxious and fearful child. I never felt a sense of security and belonging except when I was exploring the woods behind my house. When I was wandering amidst the maples and the oaks, the pines and the dogwoods I felt at peace that I felt as if they were saving me. I would touch their bark and thank them for their companionship. I still talk to trees. If only people were like trees, I thought. Unlike my parents, I never heard the trees fight. Unlike kids at school, the trees did not make fun of and bully me. They accepted me as I was. Unlike the church, the trees revealed the sacred without preaching about salvation and damnation. They offered their prayers in the rustle and resplendence of their leaves. The sunlight comes through them casting shadows along the woodland floor. They tell me: All is holy here. This is all the heaven you need.

To name is to know. Birds become Robins, Cardinals, Brown-headed Nuthatches, Cerulean Warblers, Wood Thrushes… Trees become loblolly pines, white ashes, boxelders, red maples, Eastern Redbuds, Oaks, Beeches… And it also meant escaping the ones I was called in anger or mockery.

The loneliness of crowds was shed like the old skin of a Eastern Kingsnake as I found myself anew in the woods - transformed. Nature does not pretend - there is no artifice - unlike people.

I escaped the world and found a new one in those woods.

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(art by John Leslie Breck)

This morning, I went out into the garden. Along with the usual sounds of the Cardinal, the Robin and the Wren, I hear an unfamiliar one- that of a Yellow-rumped Warbler. A Brown Thrasher is at my feeder.

I move through the cool morning air. Overhead are clouds and swallows. The grape hyacinths are in bloom as are the Eastern Redbud Trees, the Summer Snowflakes, and the Dogwoods.

A squirrel races along the fence.

I keep hearing the insistent chirp of the Cardinal.

There are the blooms of the yellow jessamine and golden-bells.

No other morning will be this morning.

None of this will be repeated. Not in this way. The shifting of the morning light as the clouds pass before the sun.

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(llustration from "The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars" by Agnes Giberne)

We live in very bewildering times. Yet we don’t like to be bewildered. We like certainty. We like assurances. We like safety. We like answers. After all, to be bewildered is to be perplexed and confused. It is to be puzzled. And why should we be when we can just Google …

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(art by Sophie Blackall)

Once a week in my third grade classroom, as part of our morning meeting, I ask if any of them have an “I wonder…"?” question. It can be about anything and I have been asked everything from “How long would it take to travel from Earth to leave the Milky Way Galaxy” to “Who invented math?” to “How are stuffed animals made?”

After one student asks their question, I open it up to the class so that they can offer their answers to the question. It is only when a few of them have given their answer, that we look it up online. This has become one of their favorite parts of the week.

We have talked about wisdom begins in wonder, which is born from curiosity. As a teacher, my main goal is to spark their sense of curiosity: about the world, about themselves, about the universe. I want them to, as Ray Bradbury said, “Stuff your eyes with wonder.”

Curiosity leads to wonder and a true sense of wonder leads what Saint Augustine coined as “Amor Mundi (love of the world).” Augustine wrote that love “is a kind of motivation, and all motion is moving towards something.” For me, if I can get a child to have a sense of wonder about the world about and within them, then they will have a desire to love and protect this precious world. As Rachel Carson understood when she wrote, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

Contemplate the beauty and wonder of it all for contemplation is, above all, a way of seeing. Yet how often do we marvel at the wonder of our outer world without so much as a glance at the wonder of our own inner one?

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine wrote:

Men go forth to wonder at the heights of
mountains, the huge waves of the sea,
the broad flow of the rivers, the vast
compass of the ocean, the courses of the
stars: and they pass by themselves
without wondering.

I have always been a rather inward person. As a child, I was prone to introspection and to questioning as a way of understanding. Often I found my questions unwelcome, often because the adult was unable to satisfactorily answer them and was afraid to respond honestly with, “I don’t know.” It’s why, from a young age, I dislike school and Sunday school. It’s also why I began to stop asking questions to adults and to search for answers in books, especially the set of Encyclopedia Britannica my parents invested in. I used to pore over them with the same intensity I would a dictionary, seeking and soaking up every bit of knowledge and answers that I could.

It’s why I checked out armloads of books from our public library since we didn’t have a lot of books in our home. All of this was a way of connecting and understanding, a way of diving deeper into the beautiful beguiling mystery of life. The older I got, the more my questions became focused on, “Why are we here?” or “What is the purpose of life?”

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This morning, as I got out of my car to go into the school where I teach, I stopped and listened. The cool morning air of March was full of the sounds of Cardinals, Eastern Bluebirds, Carolina Chickadees, Northern Mockingbirds, Carolina wrens, Chipping Sparrows, Brown Thrashers, American Robins, House Sparrows and Brown-headed Nuthatches. I did not rush…

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(art by Marc Chagall)

As this world seems, yet again, on the precipice of its own destruction, I find myself preparing my coffee, staring out at a misty, rainy garden. The only color is the bold yellows of the daffodils. I poured the coffee in my favorite ocean-blue glazed mug with a golden-brown rim that matches the bowl I eat my yogurt and berries in. This is a small aesthetic pleasure to remind myself that, even in such mundane details, beauty matters.

I sit down at my kitchen table, sip my coffee and read a poem.

I don’t rush through the poem but savor the language in the same way I do the fresh berries in my breakfast. Since it’s the weekend I don’t have to rush, but can fully inhabit my morning unfolding.

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a Black-capped Chickadee at the kitchen window feeder.

I do not have my phone. I am trying to live in a world that is more than mere distractions, mere surface, and endless noise.

Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in a letter to Willa Cather, “You must find your own quiet center of life.” Wise words that I am trying to live by. A quiet center requires of one: attention, devotion and intention. All three of these things are woven inextricably together.

Devotion originates from the Latin word devotionem, which means a vow or dedication, and stems from devovere, which means to consecrate oneself. There is more than one Gaelic word for devotion. One of the is diograis and I love that it means fervor, intensity and deep attachment. Deep attachment requires of us to go beyond ourselves to the very world around us.

Too often we assign devotion to religion, but this is a narrow view of something that offers the opportunity to enter into a gracious, loving engagement with life, nature and the divine In Upstream, the poet Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” More and more, I am learning how attention is one of the most sacred acts we can attend to.

This morning, I am giving my full attention to the changes in natural light and the shifts in shadows.

I am slowly eating my breakfast so I can taste the berries and the yogurt and fully appreciate them.

This kind of devotion is not a rigid duty but a quiet, disciplined commitment to listening, presence and intimacy. Devotion draws one out of an empty life of rote routine into more sacred rituals be it drinking one’s coffee, eating one’s breakfast, listening to birdsong, watching the clouds, noticing the daffodils…

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(art by Kazuyuki Sutoh)

For many, my life might appear small and boring. It certainly doesn’t show success by our culture’s standards of power, prestige and money. There is nothing glamorous or social media spectacular about it. No endless photos of international travels to exotic locales.

It is quiet, reflective and contemplative.

This morning, I prepared my coffee and went outside into the rain soaked world and listened to the sounds of the Song Sparrow, the Brown Thrasher, the Northern Mockingbird and the Robin. I sipped my coffee and walked about the garden, noticing the daffodils were about to bloom and that my purple crocuses and my hellebores already had. I also saw that the bulbs I planted in the autumn were beginning to sprout, pushing through the earth.

I gazed up at the small remnants of sunlight peeking through the gray canopy of sky.

I noticed a Robin pecking at the soft, wet soil as he pulled a worm from it.

When I went back inside, I got some cold, juicy plums from the refrigerator and ate them. They were so juicy and sweet and put me in mind of William Carlos Williams’ poem “"This Is Just To Say.”

Sitting on the sofa, I read for awhile in the soft light of one lamp. Poetry. Philosophy. Maria Popova’s latest tome, Traversal. Perhaps it was this last one that had me asking myself": What is the deeper underlying current of my life? What gives it meaning?

Certainly there are no grand revelations nor electrifying epiphanies. It made me think of the lines from my favorite Virginia Woolf novel, To The Lighthouse. In it, Woolf writes, “What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”

I love her phrase “there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark…” How transcendent and true. Yet we so often want that bigger revelation, that grand sweeping understanding to the question “What is the meaning of life?” Yet the older I get, the more I realize that I am less interested in answers than I am in developing deeper questions. Certainly I’m led less by knowing and more by curiosity which leads to wonder, leads to awe, leads to humility over hubris in realizing how truly finite I am in an infinite universe. It gives me the perspective just as staring at the sea and realizing how deep and unexplored it, too, is.

The kids in my class often ask me, “How do you know all this?” whenever I introduce them to the wonderment of the world and the universe. “Curiosity,” I reply and hope that mine sparks theirs.

Instead of constantly searching for meaning, I allow the moment to offer up its own, no matter how minuscule. It might simply be noticing the beauty of raindrops of the leaves of a plant in my garden. Sometimes, it’s sitting in traffic, and noticing the way light comes through the clouds. Or it might be listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes.

One night, I walked a few blocks from my small gray house to a local Argentinian restaurant. As I did, I noticed the trees were filled with hundreds of Robins. The air was electric with their songs and the sounds of their wings. I just stood there and wasn’t present to that moment. Or, as I sat there, silently, in the restaurant, listening to others gathered, speaking in Spanish. The beauty of that language no less than the birdsong I had just heard in the trees. Both filled me with a sense of gratitude for being alive in that moment.

I did not need an answer. I only needed to be present.

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(art by Margaret C. Cook from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass)

Yesterday morning, I prepared my coffee and headed off to school. On the radio, I listened to Chopin’s Nocturnes. The sky was dark and the moon was still out and so were a sprinkling of stars. Getting out of my car at school, I heard the sounds of Robins and one bird sound that I was unfamiliar with.

Before classes started, I sat at my desk and centered myself by reading a poem. On this particular morning, it was “Miracles” by Walt Whitman. It begins:

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles...

Reading and reflecting on this gorgeous poem, I became enchanted with existence. Whitman’s words reminded me that the ordinary and mundane are indeed miracles. Walking, breathing, seeing, loving are all profoundly miraculous. That our very existence is sublime. Miracles are not about the supernatural but about the sea, the stars, everyday life, the touch of one hand on another, the sound of someone you love’s voice, the cycle of life and death. All of it is a miracle.

All of his words entered into me and gave me a radical sense of awe as the children in my third grade class began to show up. Each one interconnected in ways that didn’t even know or understand. Every student a living, breathing miracle of 13.8 billion years of existence that it took for all of us to be in that classroom in that moment in time. Each one the collective narrative and histories of all their ancestors. Each their own personal story full of deep thoughts and profound feelings and emotions.

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While brewing my coffee on this rainy, dreary morning, I gazed out at the garden. It appeared lifeless. And yet, it wasn’t. There were buds on some of the trees. The daffodils were coming up through the soil and leaves. In the midst of the daffodils bed, a Robin searched in the rain for worms. He would peck here and there for his morning meal. On a near…

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