The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

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.

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 microbes in freshly turned soil stimulate serotonin production, working on the human brain the same way antidepressants do.

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.

World, world, forgive our ignorance and our foolish fears. Absolve us of our anger and our error. In your boundless gift for renewal, disregard our undeserving. For no reason but the hope that one day we will know the beauty of unloved things, accept our unuttered thanks.

I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal. I watch the bald cardinals feeding their fledglings, and I know they feel awful. I remind myself of what I cannot remind them—that raggedness is just the first step toward a new season of flight.

But 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.

None of them are talking to me, but I feel the murmuring as a welcome. It is a mother’s hushing of a baby fighting sleep, a note slipped beneath desks when the teacher isn’t looking, a call to prayer across the rooftops in a land I have only visited in books, the notes of a song drifting out of a room with the door propped open.

The commandments don’t identify by name which day of the week should be the Sabbath. They don’t even mention the need to attend church. “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,” reads Mother Ollie’s Bible. “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work.” Reading those verses again made me wonder: What if resting, all by itself, is the real act of holiness? What if honoring the gift of our only life in this gorgeous world means taking time every week to slow down? To sleep? To breathe? The natural world has never needed us more than it needs us now, but we can’t be of much use to it if we remain in a perpetual state of exhaustion and despair.

Praise Song for Forgetfulness

Squirrels have a prodigious memory for where they have hidden their stores, but they don’t remember them all. There are worse things, I think, than leaving a task undone. The oak forests of the world would not exist if squirrels did not lose track of acorns.

Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.

In almost every situation where something is loud, obnoxious, and seemingly ubiquitous, resistance is an option.

The night sky is full of stars best seen from a dark place. I try to remember that, too.

So much life springs from all this death that to spend time in the woods is also to contemplate immortality.

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.