LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

Oh Lord, the beauty, the solace, the gratitude, the birds.

What is that bird with the loud, two-note liquid trill who sings just at dawn?

I have ordered a standing bird feeder with four arms and mean to set it up outside my front patio. So here I will have an increasingly plant-bedecked private little space where I can sit on the glider, muse and give thanks.

I returned home to Tucson to a house that had been re-painted, which was nice, but all my hummingbird feeders had been taken down, my plants, many in heavy, hard-to-move pots had been moved, and a good third of them had died for lack of water.

All this seemed hideous and egregious at the time, and it’s also all been remedied.

I did a bunch of work on the yards, front, back, and side ramada, which helped—but I also needed just to putter, to case the joint, to re-ground, to re-integrate. To suffer a flurry of puncture wounds, to get stuck with thorns and spines, to re-fill my bird bath and bird feeders. To re-stock my larder, to bask in the light, to be bathed in birdsong.

That is one thing I missed beyond belief—constant birdsong. The dawn and vesper choruses.  

A friend’s wife is going to give me a bunch of cuttings, and I’ll divide the Santa Rita cactus—the bottom of it has never been right, and is now cracked, and brown—the soil’s not quite right—so I can make three or four plants out of it, and it grows fairly quickly.

Meanwhile–what is God’s will for me?

I am praying for the grace to grow in love, bit by bit, day by day.

A priest friend reports that he’s made an addendum to the Litany of Humility: “From the desire to know whether and how I’m being transformed–deliver me, Jesus.”

I think that is brilliant.