The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.

Age has given me an internal source of warmth, and hubris has given us all a burning planet, but I still love the seasons of light and color.

Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are reckless metaphor makers anyway, and only a fool could fail to find the lesson here.

New year, first bird.

There can be no reasonable argument about what is happening to the planet, now that daffodils so commonly bloom in February.

Epigraph

I am learning that it is possible to want two contrary things at once. I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.

Beauty and light will always be their own reward.

Suddenly, it seems, time is something I think about all the time.

Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world’s barren ugliness. The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails.

Epigraph

So much life is imperiled by what is merely fashionable: a green lawn, a tidy yard. It makes me feel lonely to think about it.

I wake in the morning to find that our resident rabbit has nibbled all the petals off the tickseed, and I am thrilled. The flowers are for her. All the flowers are for her.

Faith sometimes feels like the very last thing I’ve got.

can’t see the point of taking selfies. This pronouncement is surely an irony coming from an essayist, someone who keeps her finger on her own pulse for a living. As a writer, I err toward earnestness, but I’m at ease with this particular irony. The visible world is astonishingly, heartbreakingly lovely. Why waste it looking at myself?

I can’t change Americans’ love affair with poison, and I can’t solve the problems of climate change, but I can plant a garden.

But feeding the birds is why I planted my serviceberries in the first place, and I am happy to cede every blue berry to them.

People often ask how long it takes me to write an essay, and I wish I knew how to answer. When I start, I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t know what wandering route I must take to get there. The whole thing is an exercise in faith. It begins with an image, a feeling, a vague sense of why something matters to me. It never begins with a plan. I just start writing and trust the words to keep coming. I need the words themselves to guide me, to tell me where to go and why. When I lead workshops, I tell young writers to write. That is my whole pedagogy: Just write. Trust the

Recursive process

words to come. If they don’t come, go for a walk.

When the world has lost its still center, we grasp for any reminder that it is nevertheless spinning exactly as it must.

The accruing indignities of a body that is no longer predictable makes it hard not to ponder what other burdens might lie ahead.

And then I thought, “Stop it. Nature is not a sermon.”

Would be a good chapter title: Nature is not a Sermon .

imagination isn’t necessarily a wrong-headed way to encounter nature.

Most writers I know spend more time writing responses to email than anything else.

Correspondence!

Planting a tree is a gesture of faith in the future.

At Thanksgiving, every year is a mast year.

In light, there is human companionship, birdsong, a sense—however illusory—of forward motion.

When my doctor called to say the biopsy had come back with no sign of malignancy, relief swept through me like a high autumn wind. Never mind that such news is only ever a reprieve.

December reminds us that the membrane between life and death is permeable, an endless back and forth that makes something of everything, no matter how small, no matter how transitory. To be impermanent is only one part of life. There will always be a resurrection.

I experience my own life as a linear narrative, as days pile upon days, but I experience the life of the natural world as a repeating pattern.