The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.

So poetic

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.

To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.

All this long winter long, the song sparrow in his pine tree pulpit has been teaching me that one exuberant, unceasing song can change everything.

Nothing is harder to love about the natural world—or the human world—than its ceaseless brutality.

The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty.

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. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world.

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.