The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

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.

I do think this is very true, just one of the many lovely insights about nature in the book.

For him there is an entire world that exists beyond my ken, and in this matter he is not unique. For every living thing, there is a world that exists beyond my ken.

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

There should be a name for this emotion.

Paying attention to what is happening to the natural world can be a form of self-torment, and I sometimes wonder how much longer I can keep seeing the losses that surround me and not descend into a kind of despair that might as well be called madness.

All the hobbit holes in the Shire won’t be able to change the coming storm. But what can we as individuals even do? It’s a mess.

Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.

I fear they will be harder and harder to find.,

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.

Yep, truth.

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.

If more people would realized that the world reaches beyond their little tiny space.

You would not believe how soft a toad is to the touch—soft, soft, and so dry! Nothing like the way you’d think a toad would feel. I love the jutting toad elbows and the crouched toad knees and the splayed toad fingers and toes, all so dear, so similar to our own. We are gentle with the toads. They are as soft as a great-grandmother you can hold in your hand.

“They are as soft as a great-grandmother you can hold in your hand.” BEAUTIFUL PHRASE!

The years since then have turned into decades, and I never see a toad anymore.

This is so heartbreaking. 💔

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

Death at ninety-two should not be a surprise, but months later I can still be startled by reminders that my father-in-law is gone.

This is so completely true

There is only so much information a person can take in during an emergency. There is only so much active resistance a person can engage in without succumbing to despair. Sometimes a body needs to rest.

perhaps the reason I didn’t feel sad about the onset of fall when I was younger is only that I was younger, with my whole life still ahead. In those days my only worry was that my real life, the one I would choose for myself and live on my own terms, was taking too long to arrive. Now I understand that every day I’m given is as real as life will ever get. Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days have always been running out.

Truth.

But there will always be new children playing in the last light, and their glad, galloping games and their high, thin voices lift my heart.

Rare occurrence where I live (I guess)

you are trying only to pacify the angry neighbor who complained because some of your leaves blew into her yard.

It is hard not to hate people.