The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

“Nature” is what we see— The Hill—the Afternoon— Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee . . . —Emily Dickinson

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. —Mary Oliver

Stop and look

Stop and listen to

Stop and consider

Stop and peer

Stop and notice

Stop and contemplate

Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship.

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

What more could anyone ask from a new year than the promise—or just the hope—of renewal?

Life

can

change in an instant, that’s a fact. But life isn’t changing only in those split seconds when it appears to change, wh...

Haywood and I are desultory gardeners. In spring I prefer planting to weeding.

Before I learned the worth of a messy

yard,

tree pulpit has been teaching me that one exuberant, unceasing song can change everything.

Feel your feet solid on the Earth. You have already arrived. —Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Walk

I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful.

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.

The sky the bluebird carries on his back, as Thoreau observed,

Beauty and light will always be their own reward.

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

brutality.

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.

Notes on springtime and on anything else that comes to mind of an intoxicating nature.

We are creatures built for joy.

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.

It’s almost impossible to think about nature without thinking about time. —Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life

Life is what life does.

We, too, will live. In the morning we will wake and rejoice, for we are once more among the living.

You can’t come back to something that is gone. —Richard Powers, The

Are we all, generation upon generation, destined to mourn what seems in this moment impossibly abundant but is already far on its way to being gone?

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.

Their names alone serve as a clew to their entire histories, giving us that sense of companionship with our surroundings which is so necessary to the full enjoyment of outdoor life. —Mrs. William Starr Dana, How to Know the Wild Flowers

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

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

Homeowners are still in thrall to a status symbol invented by English nobility. People enraptured with the

idea of a lawn as a rolling carpet of grass, a green that remains green even during seasons when grass is supposed to be dormant,

there is a symmetry to this arrangement that floods me with gratitude. They will take care of one another,

We are gentle with the toads. They are as soft as a great-grandmother you can hold in your hand.

This faith wavers and often fades, but what else do I have to offer anymore? Faith sometimes feels like the very last thing I’ve got.

The visible world is astonishingly, heartbreakingly lovely. Why waste it looking at myself?

How truly valuable is a device that makes you take your eyes from an experience so momentary you might miss it altogether? I