7.17.13 Slowly Across The Darkening Field

The young ones don’t know. They don’t know, and its their first time with a mate; being called to a beloved. Where they feel a visceral imperative to take flight, now, from the sapped Pine branch, high above the lands, leave off the grove of their fleeting adolescence, and join this summoning one.

Oh, and how they race and sweep by,  far up into the sky! Everything new. Everywhere at home.

They flit and swerve and day after day come to know one another, sleep close in the thick leaves of the quiet foothills, the rushing stream below,

in the secret midst of all other two and four legged wilds, they lean into each other, bereft with happiness, with heady mate-ed-ness. This is the way of the Red Wing Blackbird. The male destined to be the surveyor of territory, much like the Wild Turkey ways, keeping watch while the female consumes enormous amounts of insect by preference: dragonflies, flies, moths,

 damselflies, but also berries, snails, frogs, worms...she feeds and fills herself, then finds just the right place within his terrain, in her new colony, and gathers materials carefully, meticulously, as she  knits together the beautiful nest, in amongst the tall waving grasses,

 beneath the clean clear sun and the wide motioning moon. 

Day after day she toils, the nest becoming the receptacle of her care,  until one fine evening she sits in the woven cup. The bottom, downy soft, she settles her young female self as the male stands guard with glory and pride nearby, and slowly she surprises herself, as she lays her precious clutch of eggs.

Four or five, pale blue-green, with purple, brown and black markings, the small ones hatch in 12 days or so, then fly free after the same. Take a break, the wind calls to her, until she feels the time to create another nest, and then a third, until the season of making and sitting and feeding, for her, and mating and surveying and protecting for him, is done.

Not all the eggs in her nest  are necessarily sired by he who stands guard.

They remind me of African women in one tribe, before Christian missionaries These women built and owned  their own huts and land, birthed and raised their children, planted and cared for their gardens, while their mate rotated among his wives, visiting each not more than every 3 years or so, and this ensured not too many babies from one woman, one woman who had her own home and power and choices.

When the missionaries came, and mandated monogamy, the women gave birth annually, their lifespans shortened, and soon there were so few wise old women to teach the ways of healing and living, as the missionaries slowly slunk out the back door, the culture and its ways and health all slammed askew.

Here, the elder Red Wing seem to eschew this land. They sit, restless, in the neighboring forests, with what I wonder is chattered warning, flying by, disturbed. The young ones,  heady with their delight, they toss their powerful young heads,  the male's black wings glistening, their red stripe calling out fertile power, all  of them young, passionate in their call and response. Who knew. This is what the future sometimes holds.

All around them, in their new adult-ness, the luminescence of the tall grasses shines and whispers its age old song to the air about them, as they somehow know what they are bringing out into the world.

Have you seen this? Or are you too busy? Too healthy? Too unwounded?

For the wounded see these things. They hear them and smell them and sense them ere they wake each morning. It's a fine edge of a sword, that slices through life, and creates the vulnerability, the awareness, of the small caterpillar making its way across the country road.

Of the nestlings atop your outside light. So they swerve their car carefully round the insect, 

pull the winged one from the swamp waters and hold them still til the water evaporates from the wings and , extending a finger once again, the winged one takes its  flight.

They tape down the light switch to prevent the forgotten nest and the roasting of the young. And notice the annual ways of  the young Red-Wing Blackbird, as well as so much more. Life in the tender-to-the-touch lane. No casual mindless sauntering here, I’m afraid.

So many flavors of humans, none better than the other, each with its loveliness and its limitation.

And so it goes.

For many types of birds tell each other the news. They go by each others’ nests and examine the work done. Ravens are like this.They visit later to survey the survival rates of the young. Many young mates build their nests exuberantly far out from the Maple trunk, probably thinking of the sun's rays recovering the nest from soaking rains,  the nest restored to a dry soft home.

The hard rains or the predators teach them this is not to be. And the offspring are gone. The pair cries, chases, or looks on with grief. Next year they build their precious nest near the trunk; surely this will be better. And yeah, fewer predators,  and safer from violent storm. But the nest remains dampened, the offspring endangered.

 So the third year they often build halfway in, halfway out, which the neighborhood adults all all do, by the way, for this very good reason. They do. And their clutch of eggs manages as well as Crow passerbys or cars or every other wild thing enables them to manage. All visit each other and all take notice and all study and learn and change.

Every year I drive the back way to my home, past these same fields.  Each spring, the young mated birds are  calling out to the world with the story of remarkable adulthood, of love found, of the urge to mate and create a spectacular nest and lay a clutch and be right there, right there, in the call of their lives.

Sometimes I stop driving that way, because the years past is thundring in my ears  And from years past, I know the end of the story. I do. You would too.

Other days I accept the ways of life, the ways of sweet trilling Red Wing Black birds preparing for their young ones, knowing, just knowing as do their elders, that these? These are the wrong fields.

Some days we are so present. What with every smile of a stranger walking past, the new leaves upon the young  Ginkgo out back, the dog kiss, the friends dying and the friends being born. Our own health and lives expanding and then contracting , or transforming…into some thing new.

All this turning and turning of life, like the feel I remember of an almost to term child in my womb, their womb, so huge, so powerful, turning their way this way and that, then finally, turning themselves upside down with such infinite wisdom at just the right time, so held, somehow.

 So pressed in, the space sliding between myself and them , saying to them "Here, here my love, here is where you arm ends and this womb begins. Here, here is the length of your glorious long small leg. Here is the ebb and flow of your remarkable heart. And here, here is you as you head, down , down, in your infinite, listening , wisdom." 

 As they stretch and turn and press out an arm, or a foot…you watch the outline in shocking wonder; you place your hand right there, or press your partner's or your neighbor's or possibly a kind looking stranger walking by, you grab their hand, you press it HARD into your belly, you look up into their face for the recognition of miracle, and their eyes, startled, look sudden into yours, they smile! And their face tells you "Here!! Here!!."

Right there on the sole of their foot, you greet them, one small person or another's, no matter, you say …"Oh hello, new one, hello, and welcome to this infinitely divine place you will enter out to,  so very soon". 

How many babies have I known in others bodies, from inception to birth, the fluttering as I worked gently nearby on a Large Intestine, or aligned the Mama's spine, or the  curious stretch by me as I said hello to the nearby ribs. Hello hello small one, I would  say, year after year, and then out they would come. Into their own lives. Sometimes with me present, camera in hand, making buddies with the hospital staff in order to advocate for the parent; or right there, quietly, with the homebirth midwives, simply to just be there, to support. Hello hello small one.  Please make way for wonder. We, we were all small ones once.

So here we are, to me all the exact same, a small humanoid, a baby slug noticing me in the dusk as they move slowly with their asexual familia, a clutch of Red Wings I cannot warn or intervene with or protect, as I live day after day, their elders and me, watching the season ease along.

two beautiful slugs making a baby

And now, today, here is the farmer on the old tractor, sweat streaming down her back, or another toiling, his creased tanned face as he turns round, hand on the haunch of the tractor, watching his hard earned progress, mowing the field. For his survival. For the survival of his livestock. Haying the field.

I remember when I first noticed this, several years ago. All my car windows open, I drove by on my way home, and all I saw were grieving parents. Streaming through the skies. And instantly I understood.

Frantic above the fields. Keening. Calling out. Crying out. As the big machine roars to and fro, down the long parched field.

 ................................................................................................

Down the road, next door to my own country home, is a conservation field,  that was at one time, long ago, inhabited by The First Ones, in the 1600s and not long after. You know the story.

Now and again in  spring time, some  resplendent male Red Wing will come by for a few days, and spend them perched , brilliant, trilling in the  highest Aspen, as its  pale green leaves flutter in the slightest breeze, this young male, certain this may just be his own territory. Does he wonder why, in fact, no one has taken it already?

“Come darling come darling come”, he calls , “Here is the field for us. Oh, here is the place for our first born. Hey hey, for I have found my territory! Come, darling , come!”

All day long he will call to her, pulling upon her, yearning in full new love to her, and all day long for days upon days upon days will be her reply, saying “Sweet thing, sweet thing, come along home. My parent sing to me ‘Never ever nest there’. Oh, my wondrous one, come come along home.”

And finally, he disappears down into the Connecticut outwaters, back into her winged embrace, to determine for himself another better territory, as she and other females are there, delightedly adult and pulling soft beautiful grasses fresh with their own seeded luminescence, the lot of them clutching them, selectively, weaving them so wisely, all those genetic truths they are following from deep within them, as do we all, til she nestles in, with her splendid one perched above all the females, defending and calling, as she swoops to catch her dinner and return to warm her clutch of small ones beneath her breast.

It is dusk. The fields next door today were mowed today, and we have the Wild Turkey family visiting, dining here upon strewn, ruined mouse nests, and shattered small dead mice, the turkeys gobbling down, the field’s mown smell carried across the woods to them, as they carefully bring their small young ones here to feed. Nothing wasted, all going round and round.

They urge farmers come fall to mow early enough to leave some length of grass, so that we leave enough young mouse nests, so that we have enough mice, for the owl, the hawk, the weasel during the long cold winter. Because, hey, we have killed off the Mountain Lion, we have killed off the Wolf, and the Coyote? The Coyote do breed. And eat up all the field mice and forest mice, leaving owls and birds of prey with hunger come winter.

Later in the evening, when the turkeys are roosting high above in the oak trees, tucking in their small beautiful young, the Tom's watching and listening with care, now does the cautious coyote emerge on the ridge of the field, a steep hill, a mother coyote walking slowly, carefully, her thick red fur glistening in the dusk, her slender ochre-furred  teen by her side, the only survivor of her last litter. Across the outwaters and fields and forests they have caught the scent of the field of dead mice, and come cross the land. Now here they are, making their way through the broken nests, pulling grasses apart patiently with their furred paws, moving slowly across the darkening field, feeding and surviving and living, on and on.