My Marsh Wren (48)

I'm taking another bird class at the community college. This one is wintering birds. We met last Saturday at the Wild Bird Center. I'd been there before, but this was the first time I'd walked out to the wetlands area. There were a zillion water birds, mostly ducks, I think. I found myself growing frustrated. There was no baseline for observing them. I had no idea how to find the different birds our teacher, Kurt, was calling out. I got cranky. This is not why you are here, I told myself. Look where you are. You are doing what you love. The rest of the class had moved past me on the trail, and I let them go. I stood still and listened to the birds calling from all directions. I knew I was hearing the marsh wren because Kurt had told us. But they were hidden in the high growth surrounding the water, flitting from stem to stem. It was hard to get a good look at them. When I did get a clear view of one, I had an "aha." She looked familiar to me. She made me understand wrens for the first time. They have a delicateness and a curving grace. This one was a brown speckled beauty. I was glad I'd hung back, found my center, met my wren. But I'm happy, too, to think I may recognize the next new wren I see. I may know she is a wren before I identify what kind of wren she is. It sounds so basic when I say it out loud, but it feels like a sign for me of forward movement.

My First Rejection (47)

I got my first rejection "letter" the other day. It was emailed to me. "Dear Riba Taylor: We regret that your manuscript does not fit our current editorial needs, but we appreciated the opportunity to consider your work. Thanks very much for submitting. Sincerely, The Editors of Ploughshares." I couldn't help thinking, in this day of cut and paste, it might have been a tiny bit more substantial. I wondered if they had various versions. Maybe mine was the bare bones rejection, the one they sent out to people whose work they thought was particularly inappropriate for their magazine. What was she thinking? Maybe they send out more richly crafted rejection letters to people whose work they liked better. When I saw it in my inbox, my heart fluttered. I don't remember it plummeting when I read the note. I think I just went on, sifted through my other email, made my morning "rounds." But tonight, days later, I'm still wishing there had been more to the rejection letter. And maybe I'd like it better if it had come in the regular mail. Maybe a bow would have been nice. I don't let myself feel my disappointment. I tell myself it is still a beginning. I am moving now.

The Kestrel Takes a Sparrow (46)

The other day I heard a commotion among the house sparrows in the hedge at the far side of my landlord's yard. I looked over the fence, worried Sofia or Sable might be the ones causing the uproar. Instead of glimpsing their telltale gray or black fur poking out beneath the pyracantha, I saw an American kestrel flying away, a house sparrow grasped in his talons. I watched him fly east, flapping his wings and calling out as he went. I could hear the sparrow screaming. I stood in the courtyard, hands on my hips, listening to them long after they disappeared from sight.

The Talking Hawk (45)

Yesterday I was working out on the patio in my little courtyard, my laptop resting on my thighs, my feet propped up on the chair before me. I'm not sure what made me look up from concentrating on the screen. I think there must have been a subtle shift among the birds. It was nothing like the usual commotion a hunting bird will cause. Even today, when a hawk came calling, they all took wing from the pine tree at once, a dark cloud against the sky, so many more than I would ever imagine resting there. But yesterday there was no big commotion, only a quickening, a quieting. In that lull I brought my head up, and a hawk appeared before me. He perched on the fence, almost lost his balance on the thin wooden slats. I could hear his strong talons clawing for purchase in the wood as he steadied himself. I sat up, brought my feet to the ground. My mouth hung open at the sight of him. He was so big, so beautiful. And gods, he was close. He looked around, his eyes light and intelligent. He acted like this was our ordinary routine, neighbors chatting over the fence. Then he talked. Before that moment, I'd only heard the calls hawks make in flight. But this must have been his everyday voice, the one he used to talk about the weather, about the scarcity of field mice of late, the abundance of cottontails in a certain gully. I wouldn't say he chirped. But it was very close to that, a short, deep, soft sound. He made it a handful of times as he sat near me, alert and interested. I talked back to him, but what I said escapes me now. He seemed satisfied, though, before he launched himself again and sailed away.

Stolen Moments (44)

One new thing I am doing is working to make good choices in moments. It means being present, and it means not procrastinating. It means weighing priorities and debating lasting pleasure and the value of having a thing done rather than undone. I know I often misgauge a task, especially in my teaching work. I think it will take two hours and it ends up taking five or even seven. But there are times, too, when I think things will take much longer than they really will. I think I am too busy, think I can't possibly stop to take the time to put my neatly folded clothes away after my trip to the laundromat, so they sit on the table in my studio in their pretty woven baskets, and I root around in them whenever I need clean clothes. I don't stop to create a new avatar for my online teaching because as much as I would like to, as much as I would enjoy it, I think other things take priority.

What I am learning is to sometimes stop to do the little thing I have been putting off or not indulging in, to take the little bit of time to cross something off my list or to enjoy the pleasure it brings even in the midst of all my more pressing tasks. Today I acted on a task that combined both the thing needing doing and the thing to be relished. I've had a half gallon plastic pot of snapdragons sitting on my patio, and a packet of catnip seeds lying on the table there, both waiting to be planted for more than a week now. Today I took a handful of unplanned minutes and planted the deep magenta flowers, spread the tiny black seeds and covered them with fresh dirt. I watered them both with my old metal watering can, the sun vanishing behind the mountain, the air cool against my arms. I have plenty of work still awaiting me this evening, but those stolen moments won't change that. Or maybe they will. Maybe I'll feel a gladness when I'm grading assignments tonight, knowing while I type on my laptop the snapdragons sink their roots into the wet earth, and the sleeping catnip seeds dream of sprouting new fragrant green life.

Flights of Fancy (43)

I have begun entering writing contests. It is part of my new commitment to my writing work. The first one I entered was not offered by a literary magazine, but by the Celebrate Urban Birds section of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The contest was called "Flights of Fancy" and asked for photographs, videos, artwork or writing. It called on us to, "Go outside and notice the wonder of flight. In some creative way, document the way birds take off from a branch, fly in flocks, hover, dive, frolic, and land." So, I wrote a little piece in response to this prompt. And because it is the first writing contest I have ever entered, I am counting it as a new thing and posting it here.

Bird Wings
I begin my qi gong late today. It's the first day of the spring semester, and I devoted extra time to answering questions online, to replying to my new students' introductions. I lost track of time, tore myself away from my laptop, headed back outside. But I am lucky in my timing. The late afternoon sunshine is still splashing across the patio when I begin. I place my bare feet on the sun-warmed cement facing north. My right kidney has been hurting, and north is the direction of the kidney. So I face north, and I move through the ancient Chinese movements.

The San Jacinto mountains are on my left, steady companions in my efforts. The sun disappears behind them early in the winter, but today I bask in the last of its light. I am not rigid about looking straight before me. I take in the sunlight on the mountains, the way it filters through the pine tree, falls on the patio, across the open doorway. At one point, I notice I can see a tiny, distant me, across the living room in the mirror behind the kitchen sink. I stand just so and grin at my reflection. A hummingbird visits the tecoma blooms by the front windows. I move through each exercise, and the teaching world recedes. When I turn to look at my arm stretched out behind me, the dragon looks at his tail, I see between the edge of my body and the sweep of my arm the crinkly papery blossoms of the white poppy that opened this morning.

The last exercise is a standing pose, knees bent, elbows out, arms raised across my chest--the dragon stands between heaven and earth. I close my eyes and breathe. I can hear the mourning doves passing between the tray feeder at the corner of the house and the pine tree in my landlord's yard. The pittery sound they make is unmistakable, not their voice as I'd once thought--declaring their passage? trumpeting their arrival? a kind of happy muttering?--but a sound created by the flapping of their wings. They don't fly close to me; they give me a wide berth, this woman who feeds them but who is unpredictable, prone to sudden moves. I can hear the hummingbirds flitting past. They fly close to my head, their whirring wings and high-pitched calls both familiar and dear. They become second nature, like breathing. The house sparrows fly close to me, too, darting back and forth between the pyracantha, their sounds a quiet backdrop, their wings soft feathery brushes in the air.

When I am lucky, a raven will fly above the courtyard, the slow, strong strokes of his wings loud, a sound from another world. I will turn, wide-eyed, almost startled into ducking, always awed by the big black wings and how near the noise of their flapping, like a creature from my dreams. But today there are no raven wingbeats. Today I keep my eyes closed and my knees bent and breathe the feathered air, and the birds fly back and forth behind my eyelids. The sparrows are almost more presence than sound, their darting flights above my head like shadows crossing between me and the sun. They gather on the ground beneath the feeder. When they startle, they take flight in unison, lifting in a blur of motion, 40 wings whooshing to the shelter of the hedge, one large feathered creature. Then they drop from the pyracantha again, one after another, sinking to the ground like autumn leaves from a tree.

Today I keep my eyes closed, and I breathe. I can feel the sun on my calves. The cement begins to cool beneath my feet. My still form becomes a part of the garden, and the way the birds flit past me, the way they fly near with no fear lifts my heart. Today I keep my eyes closed, and I breathe bird wings.