The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. —Mary Oliver

The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away.

Everything that waits is also preparing itself to move.

This game is an inspiration to place yourself in natural circumstances that will yield a heavenly bird, blessing your year, your perspective, your imagination, your spirit. New year, first bird. —Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds

“What do crows symbolize?” auto-populates the search field just behind “What do crows eat?” Many cultures have associated crows with death. Their uniformly black coloring, their harsh cries, their taste for roadkill—all may have contributed to that most famous of collective names among birds, a murder of crows. Crows have been observed conducting “funerals” for fallen flock mates, and this somber ritual may account for the gloomy associations, too. But other cultures have associated the birds with intelligence and adaptability, even transformation, and these are the connections I’ll rely on as the year unfolds. I have entered my sixties now, a time of change—to my body, to my family, to the way I think about my future—and I cling to the crow’s promise of metamorphosis. What more could anyone ask from a new year than the promise—or just the hope—of renewal?

The natural world’s perfect indifference has always been the best cure for my own anxieties. Every living thing—every bird and mammal and reptile and amphibian, every tree and shrub and flower and moss—is pursuing its own vital purpose, a purpose that sets my human concerns in a larger context. The dramas and worries and pain that are the warp of my life, woven tightly through the light and love and joy that are its weft, don’t register on the blue jay at all. The earthworms beneath the soil haven’t the least idea of the frets that pluck at my heart. In their rest, I find rest.

I can scroll and worry indoors, or I can step outside and remember how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me, too.

“I now appreciate that he enjoyed those days on the boat because the family was together without being in a hurry.” Instantly I was thinking about those Post-it notes stuck all over my house. How had I allowed myself to become so busy? How long had it been since I’d spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake? Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my own beloveds, listening to birdsong and wind in the pines? A child who grew up playing in graveyards ought to grow up understanding the reach of mortality, the way it is always hurtling toward us faster than spring turns into summer on a southbound highway. Faster than a sapling becomes a shade tree and a house becomes someone else’s home. Faster than a newborn baby becomes a man. And yet I conduct my life as though I have all the time in the world, filling my hours in ways I can’t always account for when evening falls.