The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

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

The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets. For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway. Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world. Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is trembling into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.

The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty. Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again. Tears will always spring up at the wood thrush singing through the echoing trees, at the wild geese crying as they fly. A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass.

What you call the wildflowers will tell you who you are.

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.

Everywhere, from sunup to sunup, the world is full of song.

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

We have not yet learned how to cook for only two.

Autumn light is the loveliest light there is. Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world a brightened dream.

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.