Apples and pears hung from the trees like ornaments amongst still leaves. Then, a rumble and a wave of wind slipped through the treetops. The Silver Maple flashed white and the air went sharp. A distant hum. The soil exhaled.

The western sky roiled and I was enveloped in a gray mist. The first raindrops fell sporadically, then uniformly, as water ran down limbs, down trunks, and around roots. The soil softened. The wind unfurled and lashed the trees with increasing force. Branches were cracking like a whip. The Cicadas fell silent.

I watched my young Illinois Everbearing Mulberry get pushed parallel with the ground to the east, straighten up, and then go parallel to the ground to the west. In the midst of this turbulence I heard loud thuds, and scraping noises.

The microburst lasted about 15 minutes and then we returned to a normal Midwestern storm. The damage was done.

Our power went out, our basement flooded, and we had four large Silver Maple limbs laying on our roof. What I didn’t realize at that time was that my psyche was as perturbed as my surroundings. I was overwhelmed, and I dealt with that by taking action. I called our favorite arborist within five minutes of the limbs dropping, then paused to talk to my son Ben about how his last two days at home were going to be memorable. The storm hit on Friday afternoon and we were dropping him off at law school on Sunday.

When the storm subsided I stepped outside. Everything was in disarray. Herbaceous plants were flattened, our tomatoes were all flattened, and I walked into the muddy garden and noticed one of our Apple trees had snapped at the graft union and was lying on the ground. Then I looked up through the new gap in the canopy. Where there once had been green, now there was only blue.

Just beyond our garden I noticed that the large Basswood in our neighbor’s yard was uprooted and laying on her house. I looked off in the distance and saw broken limbs, downed trees, and strange new vistas. I walked into our front yard and down the sidewalk, and that is when the extent of the damage hit me. Trees were down everywhere, the street was blocked by downed limbs, and my neighbors were out in their yards. I have never seen so many people in our neighborhood before.

Like me, people appeared to be in shock. Many were standing still looking up, others were talking to their neighbors, some were picking up limbs. Everywhere I looked the core goodness of my neighbors was on display as they helped each other. They had surrendered to the storm and surrendered to their differences. We were all present to the same weather-beaten reality.

Extreme weather made us all moderate for a moment. We were quietly going about the work of picking up shattered tree limbs that once cast communal shade.

After walking down our block and back my thoughts turned to our two fridges and two freezers full of food. I called Mercy at work and learned that Uptown Normal had also suffered damage from the storm. She started walking home and when she arrived, we came up with a plan for our food. We called friends around town and learned that some of them had power and fridge and freezer space, so we stashed our food at their homes.

When we got back home, we decided we should try to find a portable power station to recharge our phones and power my CPAP machine. We stopped at three stores before finding a small power station at Menards. It was 7 PM and as I read through the manual for the battery, I learned it would take four hours to charge it. That prompted us to find a hotel room.

On Saturday night another storm passed through and dropped 7 inches of rain on already saturated soil. The thunder woke Mercy up around midnight and she checked the basement. It was flooded worse than ever and we spent six hours mopping up the water. The next day we were in a bit of a daze, but we started packing up Ben’s belongings for our trip to Columbia, Missouri. It was nice to leave the storm-induced chaos behind. We got Ben set up in his new apartment and then we stopped by the bookstore to get his books before heading over to Schnucks to buy groceries. We filled his fridge with food and then we went to the Barred Owl restaurant for dinner. We lingered over the delicious food before saying goodbye to Ben and driving back to our dark empty nest.

On the drive home, I listened to a Ten Percent Happier podcast about the power of journaling. As soon as we got home, I started writing about the storm in my journal. I was motivated by a deeper appreciation for the fact that putting grief on the page is cathartic and bringing quiet anxieties into the light defuses their power. Carrying that weight in silence breeds isolation, but naming it reconnects us to the world.

On Monday I tried to resume my typical routine of writing, Zoom calls for work, gardening, and birdwatching. I continued picking apples. This time of year my life is subsumed in fruit. Lately it’s been processing elderberries for juice, making applesauce, and watching the Pear trees bend under a heavy load of ripening fruit.

I went for a walk over lunch and saw another sign of the storm’s reach along our street. About half of the houses in our neighborhood now have piles of carpet and furniture set out by the road because of flooded basements. Many of those carpets had probably been in place for decades. I continued down the street and found myself at an intersection and I looked to the right where I could see Ewing Park, my favorite birding spot in our town. I hesitated, but then found myself walking into the park. At first it did not seem so bad. Many trees appeared to be intact. I made my way down to the woods and walked the interior trails. I came around a corner and exclaimed “Noooo…” I was faced with a gut-wrenching sight. Splintered wood and long horizontal lines. Two large Hackberries were laying on the ground.

I turned and walked down a narrow footpath that I have traversed thousands of times. I stopped. Something was different. The canopy was lower, sightlines had changed. I stared at a Sugar Maple that I have long admired for having a straight trunk that aligned with other straight trunks behind it. The trunk had a subtle lean to the east, its lower limbs were closer to the ground and there was a slight bulge in the soil on the western side of the tree.

I walked through the rest of the park and found pockets where the trees were heavily damaged. The tops of mature Sycamores were ripped off and Basswoods were split to the base, many Maples lost large limbs. It was hard to take in. I turned and walked back home.

I walked into the kitchen and grabbed a car key so I could get my camera gear out of the car. I noticed there was just one key instead of the usual two. I unloaded my gear and checked all the usual places for the missing key. I could not find it. I called Mercy and she did not have the key. I waited a couple of days and then felt the urge to do something, to try and restore order and a sense of normalcy.

Our Hyundai Tucson is a newer vehicle with push button start and a fancy electronic key. I called the dealer and learned that it would cost $386 to get a new key. That was shocking to me and I researched alternatives. I learned that I could download an app that would turn my phone into a key.

So I downloaded the Hyundai app and logged in with Mercy’s credentials. Then I downloaded the digital key app. I synced both of these up with my Google account and then my Apple account, and I went out with our last key and my phone for the final step of syncing up with the vehicle itself. I was about 40 minutes into this remarkably complex and frustrating endeavor. I got to the final step and was told a code was sent to my phone. The code never showed up. I realized that the code had been sent to Mercy’s phone. That is when I broke down and started crying. Sobs, tears, anger, and grief poured out of me. The waves eventually settled. Then I called the Hyundai dealer to make an appointment to get a new key.

I went into my bedroom and started unpacking clothes from our trip. I pulled out a light jacket and felt something hard in the pocket. I ran my fingers over the key and knew what it was before I pulled it out. I sat there looking at the lost key.

I realized that the busyness of the past few days was partly necessary and partly an ineffective coping strategy. So I sat on the couch, took a few slow, deep breaths, and the rain from a disaster transformed into a RAIN protocol: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture.

I became still and sensed tension in my chest. I told myself that this was a lot to take in, and I needed to acknowledge and process the experience. I have been through worse, I can handle this, but I need to take time to sit with the experience, to feel it and allow it to dissipate.

If I was this stressed in my middle class bubble, it seemed many other people must be suffering even more, and now I know that some of that suffering could be released through stories.

That prompted me to think about StoryCorps on NPR, and how a similar project might help our own community heal. I reached out to our library to see if they could help capture local tree stories, and contacted the parks department to offer to graft the storm-battered Pears, Crabapples, and Persimmons in our public spaces so they don’t disappear. My hope is that stories will release human potential just as gaps in the canopy, windows into blue release life that is waiting to emerge from the soil. The resilience and ecological value of that life is up to us.

I walked up to the large Silver Maple in our backyard. Broken limbs and leaves were everywhere. One of my Elderberry shrubs was crushed by fallen limbs. A few berries poked through the Maple leaves and branches. I heard a Catbird call and watched her fly in and pluck berries off of the crushed plant.

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Think back to when you were interested in befriending another kid in high school. Did you chase them around all morning? No. That would freak them out. Instead, you might wander around in their vicinity, occasionally glancing their way but acting blase’. Your attitude projecting, "Nothing to see here. I'm just wandering around. Definitely not interested in getting to know you."

It's the same with birds. One of the keys to getting close to birds is not to care too much about getting close to them. Birds can read our body language. If you move quickly and stare at them, they will likely move away. A single misplaced footstep and a crunching leaf is all it takes to scare them off. You should not embody the intensity of a predator. Taking on the demeanor of a demure fan is the way to go.

I have had many close encounters with birds recently. Something seems to have changed, but I am not sure what it is. I suspect a subtle shift in my way of being has occurred that is beyond my conscious understanding. I have so many images of birds now that I no longer need more portraits. I am primarily out to enjoy the birds' company and to get to know them. As a result, I am more relaxed and move more slowly. 

When I try to get close to birds, I consider imitating how herons move when hunting. They move so slowly that you can barely discern movement. Being still inside and out, moving slowly, minimizing direct eye contact, and knowing when to move are all important. Understanding context ties it all together.

Bathing birds seem to sense their vulnerability and are very wary. Preening birds on an elevated perch tend to be more relaxed and approachable, so I pay attention to preening birds. 

I recently watched three redstarts streaming through the canopy of a Sugar Maple when one of them came to rest on a bare branch 10 feet away. Seeing a redstart sit still is rare. When she first landed on her new perch, she assessed her surroundings, so this was not a good time for me to move. I waited until she started preening, then slowly took baby steps toward her while she was actively preening. I held my camera up to obscure my face. She became progressively larger in my viewfinder. I could see she was watching me, but she was intent on preening and seemed relatively calm for such a hyperactive little dynamo.

I could see the beautiful symmetry in her primary feathers and the subtle yellow colors on her flank and tail. She held individual feathers in her bill and pulled them through, zipping the barbs back together again. She was tuning herself up before continuing her high-speed, acrobatic pursuit of insects.

I kept moving closer, 6 inches at a time, until I reached the 4-foot minimum focusing distance of my lens. She fanned her tail and suddenly doubled in size as she fluffed up her feathers and shook like a wet dog. She cast an occasional glance in my direction with her dark, starlit eyes. 

I love moments like these when you're completely engrossed in an encounter and time ceases to exist. I had crossed a threshold and entered her world. My thoughts had disappeared as she filled my consciousness. When she disappeared in a flash, I came to my senses, looked around, and thought I had just experienced a hint of heaven. I had more spring in my step, and my thoughts were lighter. There had been a transmission of energy. We comprehended each other. She rebooted my mind.

The worldly demands that fill my days seemed far away, receding into mist. How could I leave the birds for a ticking clock and blinking screen?

Mary Oliver was well-versed in close encounters with wildlife and wrote about them in one of my favorite poems. 

I see more redstarts than any other migrant this time of year. This encounter highlights the value of being curious about common birds. Many birdwatchers invest a lot of time and energy into less common birds. They have a certain appeal, but you are less likely to get close to them in most instances.

Close encounters with common birds are a good way to build intimacy and empathy. This is where you can become familiar with their silhouette, subtle patterns in their plumage, and the underside of their tails. Sometimes, all you need to see is the underside of a tail to identify a bird. Magnolia Warblers (or "Maggies") are a good example of this. The tip of their tail is black, and when viewed from underneath, you can see a straight black line across otherwise white feathers. You will also come to know how they move and the character of their call note and song. The next time you see Maggie in the canopy, you will know an old friend is nearby.

We have a magic elm in one of our urban parks. Tiny flying ants hatch under the bark in the fall, and the warblers fixate on them and deftly pluck the tiny insects off the bark. They must eat thousands. The birds are so intent on eating that they let you get close. It is like they are at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and they are worried that other birds will gobble up all of the food. 

I watched a Cape May, Tennessee, and Bay-breasted Warbler pick ants off a low-hanging horizontal branch on this tree. At one point, the Bay-breasted Warbler got too close to the Cape May, and a chase ensued. The Bay-breasted Warbler disappeared, and the Cape May returned to continue foraging. 

Knowing these flying ants hatch out of this tree in the fall is valuable knowledge. Out of the tens of thousands of people who live in our community, only a handful know about the relationship between this tree, the ants, and the warblers, even though it is adjacent to a paved walking trail. The tiny birds flitting about at eye level ten feet away just do not seem to capture most people's attention. People walking by tend to be lost in thought. This is a heavy burden that cuts them off from the world. 

If you take the view that every bird is an unfathomable miracle, you can see them in a different light. Free your mind from the need to identify and make lists. Instead, come into the moment and allow your attention to deepen and appreciate this brief encounter where your life intersects with a fellow traveler. A tiny being on an epic journey. Many of the birds we see this time of year are juveniles. They are only a few months old, yet they can navigate by the stars and fly across the US and down to their wintering grounds in Central or South America.

Mysteries upon mysteries. The voices of birds speak to the voices inside us, prompting us to be true to our nature and speak with the same clarity of purpose. 

I bargained up my new book designer. Dan is married to a Grand Prairie Bird Alliance board member and I met him at a neighborhood potluck. I told him about my book and how I was meeting with a book designer in Minneapolis. They were great to talk to and I learned a lot about book design. When I told Dan I was about to commit to a $7,000 contract with them, his eyebrows raised slightly and he asked me to send him the first 50 pages of my manuscript.

He told me he was recently retired from Illinois State University, where he taught Media Design. He said once we decide on a few basic parameters, laying out the book was relatively easy. I was intrigued, so I set up a Google Meet calls and we talked through the pros and cons of different size books, type of paper, layout, and design. During our third call Dan said “I am enjoying this process and I would like to design your book.” That came as a surprise and I had to shift gears. I was prepared to work with the company in Minneapolis and this felt like a reassuring yet uncertain change. I had developed a rapport withDan at this point, so I decided to trust our relationship and commit to working with him. We developed a contract and settled on a price that was much easier for me to manage.

On our next call we discussed fonts. I use Georgia for my Substack essays and Dan suggested I consider EB Garamond. As soon as I saw that font I thought, that looks like a book. It turns out my reaction is rooted in history. Georgia was created for screens. EB Garamond originated in Paris in the fifteen hundreds and was created for ink pressed into paper.

I have had one meeting a week with Dan over the past month. During that time my manuscript has been transformed into a book.

The next step is for me to upload all of the photos so Dan can insert them into the text. That sounds simple, but for me it is not simple. I have 20,000 images and the JPEGs I use for Substack are not high enough resolution for the book, so I have to find the original raw file for every photo and re-export it as a TIFF in the appropriate aspect ratio. This has proven to be time-consuming, so I will be sharing some reader favorite essays from my archives over the next few weeks. This will give me more time to work on the photos.

I have recently settled on an image for the cover. I tried several, and when I saw the Barn Swallow, I thought, that’s the cover.

Here are two versions we are considering. They both have their own merits, so I would appreciate it if you could let me know which one you prefer.

We have a clear path forward and I am looking forward to holding my book in my hands.

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A small plate, delicately folded roast beef, pansies, and a dollop of Blackcurrant barbecue sauce. I press my fork into the beef, slide it through the barbecue sauce, then over the flowers and onto my tongue. I taste a light burst of salt, followed by the sweet tang of currants, then a trailing cascade of floral notes. I look around the room and see other tasters standing still, heads down, contemplating. Our first Blackcurrant tasting event is off to a good start, though we are terribly late to the table. Birds have been enjoying Blackcurrants for millions of years.

My work with The Savanna Institute is spreading the joy of Blackcurrants far and wide. I brought culinary creatives together at our Elderflower Retreat in Spring Green, Wisconsin to taste and evaluate a wide variety of Blackcurrant dishes. No one talked about Blackcurrants being tart, instead they reveled in the way this berry brought savory sophistication to dishes.

Tables were arrayed with chocolates, tea, baked goods, salads, drinks, jams, syrup, and molasses. This powerful little berry paired well with fat, salt, and sugar. In the best preparations, the boldness of the berries brightened the food.

At the end of the event, our Blackcurrant breeder did a little coding on the spot, and we managed to get a spreadsheet full of data to generate a list of the most appreciated dishes. As she went through the results, I was surprised and thrilled to learn that my Blackcurrant stem tea was number five.

I almost didn’t bring it. Amidst tables weighed down with rich chocolates, delicate pastries, jams, and glossy molasses, my brew felt far too plain to belong. We are so accustomed to valuing a plant solely for its fruit that it is easy to overlook the quiet, subtle gifts carried in the rest of its body. At the last minute, I grabbed my humble bundle of sticks, leaves, and buds anyway, thinking I might just set them out quietly during lunch.

In the flurry of setting up, I hastily steeped the tea and left it on the counter. When the labels were handed out, the pot received one too, inadvertently entering the official tasting. I am committed now that I know this experiment resonated with chefs and super-tasters. They sensed the same thing I did: there is magic in the whole plant, if we only slow down enough to taste it.

I already ordered little paper tubes, pouches, and Mulberry paper and I will be sending out Blackcurrant tea samples far and wide. This is the beginning of introducing this plant to American palates.

We expect to harvest 4,000 pounds of Blackcurrants in 2027 and 15,000 pounds in 2028. As our agroforestry plantings expand and cover more land, the birds are responding. In an initial survey by the agroforestry company Propagate, young chestnut plantings held 40% more bird species and 103% more insect species than the neighboring soy. Our partners at the Ecdysis Foundation have sampled insects and birds on more than a thousand farms across the country, and they find the same pattern everywhere: as farms move away from chemicals and monoculture, life returns.

A new study out of Ohio State University shows that areas with intensive industrial agriculture are associated with accelerating declines in bird populations. This data documents something many of us have known for decades. I can drive through seemingly lush cornfields for hours without an insect hitting my windshield. It did not used to be this way. Twenty years ago, we had more insects. Now, we have precious few. The bare soil blows, life retreats to the margins. How could it be any other way?

Research by Doug Tallamy reveals the quiet starvation built into exotic hedgerows. Compared to native plantings, exotic hedgerows harbor 91% fewer caterpillars and nearly 96% less caterpillar biomass. They are lush, green illusions—all structure, no function.

The same thing is happening in corn and soybean fields. We have allowed two plants to dominate our landscape, and two plants are not a home. Insects, birds, and people vanish in their presence, ghosted by monoculture.

The reason our soil and culture are blowing away is that one story shapes our thoughts about food. We have been told over and over that we are feeding the world. Believing and embodying that story is a hard way to go.

Our food system is amazing in some ways. It produces a staggering amount of cheap calories and has maximized yield. In doing so, it has emptied the land of wildlife and people. We have overshot our mark.

I used to farm, and one of my primary motivations for the work I do now is to help farmers. They are my friends. I know how hard it is for them to handle the cognitive dissonance of living within the feeding the world story. They know the majority of our corn and soybeans go to feed livestock and make fuel for our cars. Very little of it is food for people.

We are witnessing a landscape that can’t hold and a story that can’t hold together because both have shallow roots. Soil eroding, the story eroding, everything washing away, disappearing, life becoming thin, life becoming quiet. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Farmers are changing. I recently attended the annual meeting for the Down at the Farms Cooperative in central Illinois. One hundred and thirty farms are members of this co-op, and they sell two million dollars worth of diverse food every year. Just after lunch, Marty Travis, the founder and driving force behind the co-op, asked some of the farmers to tell their story. I remember Doug slowly and reluctantly standing up to tell the group that he used to be a backhoe operator and farm row crops. That meant he spent a lot of time sitting in a machine. This led to back pain and a real crisis in his life. He got laid off from his work operating a backhoe, and that is when he met Marty. Marty invited him to grow vegetables for the co-op. Doug started using his body and his back got better. He ended by saying, in a halting and shaky voice, “Marty showed me that my life still had value … that I still … had something left to give.”

Imagine a version of that story repeated 130 times. That is the power of the co-op. That is culture change in action. These farmers are committed to the co-op because it restores a measure of dignity to their lives.

This dynamic is not limited to this co-op. I used to host town hall meetings and we would have 30 farmers from a community come in and take a few minutes to tell us what matters most to them. They all talked about the same thing. They most value their families, the land, and their communities. I have yet to hear a farmer say the thing they value most is growing the maximum amount of corn and soybeans at any cost.

At a time when so much is out of our control, food offers a tangible way to effect positive change in the world. The way we eat determines how the land is farmed. If more of us chose to eat the products of agroforestry farms, the land would be covered with perennial plants, and the insects and birds would come back.

This is not an all or nothing proposition. If enough people made a small commitment and started buying some local perennial food we could keep more of the soil covered and improve life for people and wildlife.

I never felt at home within the old story. Something always felt off, though for years I could not say what. Only now, past fifty, am I learning to inhabit a different story. I feel relief in stepping off the treadmill and onto steady ground, into relationships with people, land, and birds. This is where my sustenance lies.

Some of us are called to tend the earth and foster life. In doing so we become more whole, like the earth itself. Mystery flowing into mystery.

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P.S. If you’d like to begin in your own backyard, our cultivars Savanna Zap and Savanna Zing fit easily into ordinary landscaping. They can be found online at One Green World, Pense Nursery, Food Forest Nursery, GardensAlive, and Peaceful Heritage Nursery. The Blackcurrant we grow came to us from Europe, but it has native cousins here, like clove currant and American black currant, and the birds have been eating their fruit far longer than we have. If you want to plant for the birds first, a native currant is a beautiful place to start.

There is an old Japanese story about Momotaro the Peach Boy. An elderly childless couple ate a peach and became young again and had a baby boy. When he was a teenager he traveled across the countryside with a pheasant, a dog, and a monkey that joined him because he shared his millet dumplings with them. They traveled together to a remote island where they battled and defeated demons.

I thought of that old story as I reached for a peach in my garden. I lightly pressed on the shoulder to feel for a little give. I felt ripeness and decided it was ready to harvest, and as I was about to twist and pull, I heard a fluttering of wings, a rush of air, and ruffling of feathers. I peered through a small opening in the leaves and caught a glimpse of a preening male Cardinal. He was bathing in the pond and then he was perched 4 feet over my head.

I noticed that he was intent on preening and looking out over the garden. He did not seem to care about me. I slowly turned and walked back to the house to get my camera. I came back and stood in the same place and started taking pictures. That got his attention and he glanced at me while he preened and fluffed.

At that distance, I could see how expressive he was. His wet crest was in constant motion going straight up and then down flat. He was intently watching and listening to other birds, his whole body tuned into his surroundings.

He departed after a few minutes, and I was left wondering why he let me get so close. I have found that if I am working in the garden weeding, harvesting, and pruning, the birds tend to go about their routines. They have learned that if my gaze is on the ground, they are safe. If I stand up straight and look at them, they take notice.

A lot of people tell me they believe that when a Cardinal comes close it signifies a visit from a deceased loved one. It comes up almost every time I post a Cardinal photo. Someone will say their mother believed it, or their grandmother did, and that they think about it every time they see one in the yard. What strikes me about the belief is that the bird is understood to be carrying something. It has come from somewhere else and has something to deliver, and the whole encounter is a message that arrived. The Cardinal is the envelope.

I remember when I was a kid I would notice my grandma standing still looking out the window at our birdfeeder. I would stand next to her and she would comment on how beautiful the Cardinals were. She appreciated all birds, but had a special connection with Cardinals. She also had an abiding interest in genealogy. She created elaborate family trees with the names of our ancestors. She did this long before there was an Internet. Maybe the Cardinals were her conduit.

I can see why we have so many stories about Cardinals. Their constant presence and red feathers provide beauty all year. They tend not to migrate and they do not fade into drab winter plumage, so the bird at the February feeder is the same bird that was there in July, which is worth something to a person who is grieving. And they come to us. They work the hedges and the feeders and the edges of the yard, close to the house, at the hours we are most likely to be looking out the window.

For me, the garden produces vegetables, fruit, solitude, and relationships with birds. I see Cardinals every day. I know their routines and they know mine. I believe they recognize me as an individual.

When I am harvesting elderberries, the Catbirds come to the same shrub. They seem to be worried about me taking too much. A few days ago I was filling a bucket with elderberries when a male Cardinal flew in close and started eating Goji berries nearby. He was selecting the darkest red berries, which provide him with sustenance and brilliant feathers. The carotenoid pigments in these berries are what give him his red color.

I headed back to the house with my elderberries, and I noticed a juvenile Cardinal at the bird feeder. I took a closer look. The bird was a warm brown with subtle patches of orange mixed in. He had a thin crest and a hint of red in his tail feathers, but the most interesting thing about him was his bill, which was mottled gray and orange. This was a visual display of a garden becoming a bird. He was taking in yellow-orange pigments, and an enzyme in his body added a small amount of oxygen to each end of the molecule, turning yellow into red, and depositing that red in his bill. He was in the process of becoming one of our beloved red birds.

The Cardinals in my garden are made from the fruit and insects in my garden. I am helping create the beauty I so admire. Maybe, if I get close enough and allow my routine to merge with the Cardinals’ routine, I will be able to reach out and hold my grandmother’s hand.

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It’s 4 a.m. in Illinois. My son Noah is in Japan, where evening is just coming on. We are on opposite edges of the same shadow — I’m at the trailing rim of the night, he’s at the leading edge of his. His voice fills the room. Everything else about him, his face, the light he’s standing in, whether he’s tired, the distance keeps.

Birds find their way into most of our conversations: we discuss what he’s noticing over there, and what I’m noticing here. Lately I’ve been thinking about bird migration and Tom Johnson. Tom was one of the Morning Flight Counters at the Cape May Bird Observatory. He spent his mornings on the dunes counting songbirds as they came down at first light, identifying stream after stream of migrants, and he had a gift for making whoever stood beside him feel let in on the wonder. He was curious, humble, and generous.

What intrigued Tom was the part of migration no one could see. The morning flight he counted was only the leftover evidence of it, the birds coming down after a night of travel. He wanted to see the dark part itself.

People in the United States have been monitoring bird migration since the 1880s. For most of that time, our picture of the night sky came from listening to the flight calls birds give as they pass overhead in the dark. Those calls became our sense of what migration was. What else we knew came from indirect evidence, the victims found at the bases of buildings. But a microphone can only find a bird that makes a sound. What if some of the birds do not call?

Tom gathered friends on the dunes and together they formed “The Night Club” to find out. He paired three tools: a thermal camera to detect body heat in the dark, a tight spotlight to illuminate the passing bird, and a digital camera with a telephoto lens to photograph it. Heat, light, photo: a way to see the quiet flyers.

Over three autumns, they watched silent birds appear in the thermal optics, species no one had ever caught crossing the dark. This research is its own kind of migration, a way of seeing passed hand to hand.

We have always known that birds migrate in the dark; you can watch them pass across the face of a full moon. But the calls were most of what we could put a name to, and so the callers became our sense of the night. What no one could measure was the proportion, the sheer weight of the birds that are quiet.

The microphone was not the only instrument with a blind spot. Weather radar can measure the volume of a night’s migration, but it cannot tell one bird from another, and it does not sample the lowest few hundred meters, where these birds were crossing. Silent birds flying at a hundred meters fall through the gap between our two best tools. These birds are flying under the radar.

This study, watching instead of listening, finally counted them. What the researchers learned is that most of the birds crossing overhead were silent.

We had built our whole picture of migration from a talkative minority, while the greater number passed above us without a sound.

I have been thinking about why the silence surprised me. Part of it is that we are a talkative species. We navigate by conversation, we find each other by voice, and when we imagine a long journey we fill it with company and talk. So when we finally got microphones sensitive enough to eavesdrop on the night sky, we heard what we were listening for and built a picture of migration from it. It did not occur to us that most of what was up there had nothing to say. A bird can cross a continent in the dark without a word. I find I have to work to imagine that, which tells me more about myself than about the birds.

Back in the spring I wrote an essay about flight calls. Benjamin Van Doren and his colleagues had recorded thousands of them and found that birds of similar wing length tended to travel in loose company, calling back and forth as they went. I called it stars talking to stars. It felt like a glimpse of how migration really worked, and as far as it went, it was true. But I had inferred a world I could not watch, and mistook the inference for the whole.

The researchers photographing birds at night made another startling discovery. Birds we think of as homebodies, the ones at the winter feeder we assume never leave, were crossing the night sky, too. Northern Cardinals. Red-bellied Woodpeckers. Downy Woodpeckers. And nearly every one of them was flying west from Cape May Point, out over the mouth of Delaware Bay: seventeen miles of open water in the dark.

The Cardinals are not a fixture. They are travelers we happen to catch standing still, part of an endless flowing-out and returning, a movement as old as the tides, going on over our heads whether or not we look up.

That same tidal pull reaches far inland, washing over the Midwest long before the seasons visibly turn. On a recent birding trip just north of town, I passed a flooded field and slowed down. Killdeer were working the water’s edge, and out across the shallows stood Lesser Yellowlegs and Least Sandpipers. Fall migration had begun in mid-July. I felt as if I’d just watched these same birds pushing north in late April, and here they were already coming back.

The Least Sandpiper standing in that wetland weighs about an ounce. Since spring, she had flown past the Arctic Circle to the open tundra, nested, raised young, and turned right back around. Now she was aiming for Central or South America, a journey across the hemisphere, with this flooded field as a single stepping-stone.

We tend to think of migration as a straight line: north in spring, south in fall. But standing at the edge of that field, it looked more like nested returns, the small circle feeding the large one.

For most of human history, we lived within these nested returns. Polynesians settled a third of the Pacific by reading the water and sky, using roosting seabirds like the Noio and Manu-o-Kū as living compasses. Because these birds fish at sea by day and return to land at dusk, their daily commute draws a forty-mile ring around islands otherwise invisible in the vast ocean.

As anthropologist David Lewis realized while sailing with these master navigators, the difference was never in their eyes, but in their attention. Years of practice had made an instrument of the navigator himself. Even when Hawaiian navigators found Rapa Nui in 1999, a tiny remote island whose seabird colonies had long since vanished, their attention was enough to bridge the silence of the sea.

Now, standing on a dune with thermal optics in the dark, we can focus our attention, watching the quiet ones pass, and learning to name what was always there.

Every time we learn to see an animal more clearly, something shifts between us and them. They become harder to hold at a distance, harder to reduce to a category, easier to recognize as a life crossing the same dark we cross. Knowing them more fully is the beginning of holding them more dearly, and holding them dearly is where care begins. And care, followed far enough, shapes the choices we make.

If we can see the low-flying birds that pass through the blades of a wind turbine, we can learn where not to place one. If we can watch the silent multitude stream over a sleeping town, we can decide to dim its lights on the nights they are passing through. What we are learning to see, we can begin to protect, in a hundred practical ways, so that birds and people might go on sharing the same night.

The night still holds secrets. We do not know all that birds sense as they cross it. Maybe they can feel each other’s wings beating the air. We do know that the birds who call fly with distance between them, each one alone in its own patch of dark, and still they call, and still they are answered, threads of sound stitched across the space between.

Across half a continent and the Pacific, Noah’s voice reaches me through the dark. Most of what passes between us isn’t in the updates but in the cadence, the pauses, the shared reference points, threads of sound holding us together.

We hang up and the room returns to its 4 a.m. stillness.

Eight hundred miles east of me, the sky over Cape May is already going gray. In a few weeks someone will walk out to the dune at first light to count what came down in the night.

Out there, six thousand miles away to the west, Noah is stepping into the evening streets of a small fishing village in northern Japan, embarking on his own quiet flight, moving steady and unseen across the dark. I sit a while longer, grateful to be in the presence of fellow night travelers.

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I pull up behind a line of cars and park in a gravel lot by Lake Evergreen, my kayak in tow. I walk back to my kayak, and I’m surprised to see a Killdeer flush from the gravel, feign a broken wing and try to lead me away. There is very little space here. The vehicles and the road on one side, the grass on the other. The grass is mowed short by the parks department. The road is busy. And yet there’s a brash bird calling loudly. How could she possibly nest here?

I resist the urge to walk around looking for the nest. I don’t want to add more activity on top of an already busy parking lot. So I launch my kayak and glide out to a mudflat in the middle of the lake.

I paddle up to it and sit still in my kayak for a few minutes to let the birds get used to me. Then I start to drift, blown by the wind. I pass by the mud, stabilize myself with the paddle, but otherwise remain still, and the birds seem to be at ease. They don’t react to me the way they do when I’m walking.

I come to rest again and watch the Killdeer busy foraging. She dips down and picks at the moist soil every few seconds, grabbing tiny insects. It would be like us grabbing a single sesame seed and eating it. They occasionally find a worm or a larger insect, but a lot of their time is spent picking tiny insects off the sand. And then there is time spent calling, chasing, flying fast looping flights over open water and back to rest on the sandbar.

The Killdeer on a mudflat looks like other shorebirds. But when she takes flight, circles over the lake, and settles back down onto a gravel parking lot, she becomes something different. She is choosing to nest among us.

More curious than ever, I decide to follow her. I paddle back to the parking lot, pull my kayak up the slope, and stand beside my trailer. There she is, standing in the gravel, looking at me. She bobs her head, chatters, darts away, pauses, and looks back. It is clear that she has a nest nearby. I work on loading my kayak while continuing to watch her.

I keep wondering how a nest in this area could produce young Killdeer. They used to choose gravel bars along rivers and other exposed areas of land in an intact landscape. These gravel bars were bordered by moist soil that was full of life. This is where the tiny chicks learned to feed themselves. Now this road is a proxy for a river, and this parking lot is a proxy for a gravel bar. The Killdeer doesn’t know the difference. So here they are, trying to adapt to an asphalt river.

I look out across the parking lot and realize just how threatening it is. There are tire tracks everywhere. The recently mown grass is two inches high. There are crows calling off in the distance. A Red-tailed Hawk is perched on a nearby wire. A Cooper’s Hawk is calling in the woods. There are cat and dog tracks in the mud. The cats, dogs, Raccoons, and Crows are more abundant because of us. We feed them, and their numbers grow. That there are any Killdeer at all is remarkable.

How do they thread that needle? I’m not sure, but I know the chicks can run shortly after hatching, and remarkably, they can feed themselves. They spend thirty days flightless and at risk in the short grass. Both parents incubate. Both do threat displays. They will renest if their first nest is destroyed. And despite all of these adaptations, most nests fail. Roughly a quarter succeed. These are the strategies that keep the chattering plover in our midst.

Of all the threats a Killdeer faces, mowing is the one we choose and the one we have the most control over. Some mowing is required, to maintain sightlines and a certain order. But we tend to take this too far. Mowing a narrow strip along the road is one thing. Almost invariably, though, the mower continues. Into the ditch. Up the next slope. Into the field. The whole area cut short, and most of the life that was trying to survive there is gone.

The strips we leave would fill the countryside with song. It costs us almost nothing. Just a little restraint. The reward is more chattering Plovers, Meadowlarks, and Butterflies, making a life in our midst.

We decide whether this ground invites life or cuts it short. The Killdeer is searching for safe ground, just like us.

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As the Martin House slides down the pole, the air fills with a purple cloud, birds swirling above drenching us in liquid warbles and down-slurred whistles. Then Mercy stops turning the crank and the box comes to rest.

Mercy and I have been Purple Martin landlords for this twenty-four-compartment house for a couple of years now. It stands with two other Martin houses in a restored prairie on the edge of an urban lake, where a walking trail passes close by.

Before we start, a broken piece of a dragonfly catches my eye on the ground, dropped or spilled from the box above. I pick it up. It is a fragment of the head, mostly a curved dome of eye packed with thousands of facets, tiny lenses side by side, each its own window. Each known as an ommatidium.

I turn the dragonfly eye in the light and a rainbow flashes across it, sliding over the thousand faces as I tilt it, green to gold to a wet blue. I look up and the Martins are wheeling above the box, their flight tracing small circles that expand and open loop over loop into the morning.

We begin counting eggs and nestlings and noting their age. It is harder than it looks. The cavity is small and dark; the nestlings hunker down into the nest; grass stems cross in front of them. Sometimes it is hard to tell how many are in the nest.

As we finish one side of the box we notice a family with young kids walking down the trail. Mercy calls out: “Would you like to see some baby birds?”

A curious young boy and a girl run over, phones in their hands. Mercy cranks the box a little lower so they can see in. They lean toward the opening and then I hear, “They’re so tiny,” and, “This one is trembling. Why is he shaking?” They begin to move around the box, following Mercy from compartment to compartment, looking in at eggs and nestlings at every stage. At the next opening the little girl leans in, sees three-to-four-day-old nestlings, and exclaims, “They’re naked!” The phones are in their pockets now. The grandparents have come up behind them, standing close, watching, smiling.

I was not surprised by the kids reactions. We have felt the pull of these birds many times over the past few years. It is why we decided to put up more Martin houses around our community. At first we worried we would not find enough people to tend them. We thought we were asking busy people to take on one more chore.

It was the opposite. People fell for the Martins and could not stay away. They recruited their friends. Soon we had more hands than boxes, enough that they banded into groups to share the work. One of them told us it was the highlight of her week.

At first the response surprised us. Now I see it as part of a larger pattern. Britain offers a striking measure of this shift. A study by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds found that regular birdwatching has grown 47% in eight years. Among the young, the rise is steepest, more than tenfold since 2018.

Some call it an analog movement, young people putting the phone down on purpose, reaching for something slower and alive. The children at our box did it without being asked. A generation is recalibrating by tuning into birds. But statistics only tell you that something is happening. They do not tell you what a bird can do for a person. For that, I think of our friend, a therapist and one of her clients. She sits with a lot of young people who are struggling with depression, and she told us about one client, a young woman so sad and shut in that she had stopped leaving her house. Our friend gave her one small, concrete thing to do: “Look out the window. Find a bird. Watch it, and come back next week and tell me what you saw.”

The young woman returned a week later. She hadn’t just looked; she had counted ten distinct kinds of birds, all entirely busy with their lives. She watched them go about the morning, each intent on its own small errands, and somewhere in the watching, the tight, hard loop of her own thoughts loosened. For a while, she was no longer trapped inside the small room of her own sadness. She was outside the window, pulling the world into view, and it let her breathe.

I think about that young woman a lot because the loop she was trapped in is one our dominant culture builds for us. A consumer culture constantly trains us to feel a lack that never closes. It prompts us to want, to worry, and to guard, until even those of us living comfortable lives come to feel poor. This is not the scarcity of an empty refrigerator. It is the other kind, the one that lives in a full house. This manufactured scarcity drives us inward, fixing our attention strictly on our own anxieties and walling us off from one another.

But we are not built to live in such narrow cages. We evolved in reciprocity and community, shaped by connection to a living world. Turning back toward that world isn’t an effort; it’s a relief. The young woman at the window wasn’t trying to fix herself. She was simply a creature made for connection, connecting briefly with ten busy birds on an ordinary morning, and remembering that the world is full.

We often treat being well as the absence of stress, a matter of removing what troubles us. But her trouble was not removed. What changed was that she found something beyond herself to attend to, a world going about its life without her, and yet holding space for her within it. That is the other half of mental health: not the absence of pressure, but the presence of meaning. And meaning is almost always a line anchored to something larger than the self, a purpose that points away from us and toward the world.

There is a reason birdwatching is taking hold of a generation who grew up with phones and social media. When you watch a bird, the mind gets quiet. You give the bird your attention, and the bird gives you back a wider world, the shape of the wind, the dragonfly’s wing, the near life you had been walking right past. The more you attend, the more there is to receive. Attention creates an opening, and what comes through is life.

You can walk around our lake in ten minutes, and in the evenings people do, a slow procession of walkers, strollers, and dogs, going around. The Martins circle above us and the water, but their circle does not close. It widens. They rise in loose loops, up and up, until they are specks, until they are gone, and the same birds that were swooping over our little lake will trace an arc that reaches Brazil and comes back. The circle that begins above a lake in Illinois crosses over the Amazon.

There are circles everywhere once you begin to see them. The dark wet eye of the nestling looking up from the box. Your own eye bent to the opening. The compound eye of the dragonfly contains a thousand small circles inside the one. Poets have stood under this same sky and felt it, the pull to live outward in widening ripples, to let the one life open past itself. The whole air above the colony is turning, arc within arc, a net of circles thrown across the sky.

Our minds also move in circles. Sometimes they are the tight kind, the small hard loops our thoughts make when they turn on themselves, around and around the same worry, the same want, the same narrow room. The young woman at the window knew that circle. Most of us do. But there is another way for a circle to turn. Watch the Martins long enough and something in you lifts with them, and the loop loosens, and the thought that was going around a small dark room begins instead to rise, and widen, and trace a broad arc across the earth.

The latest Living Bird Magazine from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology arrived last week. I opened it to an article on what birding does to the brain. Researchers studying attention have found that people who have watched birds for years seem to carry the mark of it in their brains, growing denser in the areas used to perceive and attend. Birding, one of them wrote, turns passing moments into lasting knowledge.

That is the oldest work the mind knows how to do, the turning of what we notice into what we understand. The mark is not only in the tissue; it accrues in a life. Each morning you spend watching lays something down that stays, until, without meaning to, you have built a reserve of steadiness you can draw on when you have lost your way.

I think of the Polynesian navigators Wade Davis writes about, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean with no instrument but their own attention. They learned hundreds of stars by name. They read the swells moving through the hull of the canoe, several distinct swells at once, and knew from the pitch and roll if the course had shifted in the night. They read the clouds, the light, the flight of birds. And most astonishing of all, they could pull an unseen island out of the sea, reading the way the waves bent around it long before it climbed over the horizon. Sitting still in the dark of the boat, taking in everything, the whole body an instrument, they knew exactly where they were.

I will never read the ocean like that. But I have felt the smallest edge of what they know. Learn to watch, even a little, and you begin to pull birds out of the sky the way the navigator pulls islands from the sea, the same act, made small. The blank air turns out to have been full the whole time. You tune in, and there are more birds. You keep tuning, and there is more world, the insects, the light, the wind. And somewhere in the widening you find there is more of you, more awake, more here.

More birds. More world. More life.

We finish the nest check and begin to crank the house back up the pole. As soon as it starts to rise, I notice a change in the Martins. They have scattered high into the sky, and now, one by one, they turn and begin to descend. They have been watching the whole time. The moment their home returns to its place, they come back to it.

The box comes to rest near the top of the pole and we are surrounded. Martins swirl around us, dragonflies and moths crosswise in their bills, and then they come streaming down to the house to feed their young.

I look up into the swirl and follow them, the arc of one bird and then another, the arc of a dragonfly, the crossing paths of all of them at once. The sky is full of threads. It is a net, woven and rewoven by everything that moves through it.

And the net holds. It holds the Martin and the dragonfly, the hunter and the hunted. It holds the child at the box and the old man on the trail. It holds the sad and the well, the near and the far, the living and the long since gone. It holds Illinois and it holds Brazil. It was here before us and it will be here after us, and every small attention we pay is one more thread drawn tight, one more knot tied, one more length of it woven while we are witness to it.

A Martin lands above me on a perch with a dragonfly held in his beak. The dragonfly’s wings are still open. Her long body still curls. And her head is still turning, catching the last of the light, taking in the world she is about to leave.

I lean in close, the way I did at the start, over the broken dragonfly in my hand. But this eye is whole, and living. It is not one eye. It is thousands, thousands of small lenses set side by side, each a facet looking out on its own sliver of the world. No single one of them sees much, just a dot of light, a fragment. But the dragonfly gathers them all at once, every facet contributing to one wide picture that sees almost everything. That is the trick we forget. We press our faces to the single narrow lens of our own worries and mistake the small dark room of the self for the whole world. To watch a bird is to open another facet. And another.

The Martin shifts its grip. For one more moment the dragonfly holds on, wings spread, its thousand eyes still bright, still gathering the light.

Then it is gone into the dark of the box, into the open mouths, into the net.

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I bend and push a stem aside, and there, low in the shade, is a heavy cluster of ripe berries. I work my hand in through the leaves, careful, feeling for them more than seeing them, and I am so lost in the reaching that the high thin whine circling my head barely registers. My fingers close on the cluster just as the mosquito settles on my cheek. I am easing the berries loose, one at a time, when the bite begins to burn.

Across the garden another currant bush is shaking, a catbird somewhere inside it, working the berries the way I am working mine. For the past two weeks, I have watched them at it, the Robins and the Catbirds, taking their share. I go back to my own cluster, plucking the ripe shiny black ones, leaving the reddish-black ones to ripen more fully. At first I am only harvesting, intent on the work. Then my fingers brush the leaves and the Black Currant releases its scent, green and resinous, a sharpness like pine, and I draw it in without meaning to. My shoulders drop. The picking slows to a rhythm I am no longer driving. I think of Robin Wall Kimmerer, and her book The Serviceberry, where she gathers fruit with gratitude and a sense of reciprocity, and calls it a way of living inside a climate of sufficiency.

Later, I walked back to the edge of the garden, stood beside the pear tree, and looked out across the beds where I have planted Black Currants. The one near the raspberries is crowded, smaller in stature, its leaves dull, its berries few. The plant in the middle of the garden stands in the open. Over the winter I pruned out old canes, in spring I mulched with wood chips and weeded a four-foot circle around the shrub, and the plant has responded with eighteen inches of new growth and broad, glossy leaves. I clipped four short sections of stem from it and carried them inside, where I laid out the whole plant on the counter, stem and leaf, berry and bud.

I stood there a while, taking them in. Then I went looking for a way to make tea, and found that Europe has steeped Black Currant leaves for centuries, and that the trail led on to Japan, to kukicha, twig tea. It began as a lesser thing, the prunings and stems left over after the leaf harvest, handed to the workers on the tea farms. Over time the recipe was refined, and the humble tea became a touchstone, a taste of home and of rural life. There was something fitting in that, a tradition built from the parts that were ussually thrown away, and I wanted to see what the same attention would draw out of the Black Currant.

So I followed the old method and let the plant correct me where I was wrong. I wilted the leaves in a hot pan and finished drying them in a dehydrator. The stems I cut into short lengths and set in the oven to roast, waiting for them to darken and match the description in the recipe. They never did. They shrank and dried. They gave off a toasted sweetness, then began to lose it, but they stayed the pale brown of bare wood no matter how long I left them. The color I was waiting for was not coming. The plant was telling me that I would have to know it was ready some other way, by the smell and not the eye. I took the stems out when the kitchen smelled faintly of toast.

I lightly simmered the roasted stems for six minutes and the water turned a deep amber. The first taste had the smell ahead of it, toast and a dark caramel and somewhere under that, the resin of pine. Then the flavor, sweet at the front, with a tannic grip at the back that dried the sides of my mouth.

The leaves brewed up a bright yellow, mild, with something earthy beneath the mildness, the quietest of the three.

The buds I almost didn’t trust. Five of them in a little water threw off a clear liquor with the strongest character of all, pungent, catty, a sharpness that crowded the nose and read at first as something gone slightly wrong. It was not an appetizing smell. It did not invite me in. And yet there was something in it I wanted to go back to, the green concentrate of the whole plant, new life waiting to be released, intriguing in the way a strong cheese is intriguing, the off-note and the depth impossible to separate.

Then I poured all three into one cup. They fused. The sharp and the mild and the sweet found each other and settled, and what had been three strange and partial things became one. The plant, rejoined.

As I sat with the cup, the plant went on teaching. My mouth registered a grip at first, a dryness along the sides of the tongue, and I thought I had ruined it, steeped the stems too long and pulled the tannins out of the wood. But I had not done anything that needed undoing. As the tea cooled and I kept drinking, the grip softened on its own, and as it softened the cup turned luscious, an improbable richness rising as the tannin let go. I had reached for a mistake to correct and found instead that the tea only asked me to wait. What was left in the mouth was something you feel more than taste. One body nourishing another.

That feeling of nourishment was still with me later that day when I listened to Andrew Weil and Wade Davis talk about coca on the Tim Ferriss podcast. They spoke of a plant the outside world has badly misunderstood, sacred for thousands of years to the people of the Andes, woven into their work and their worship, their greetings and their grief. The war on it, they said, was never only a war on a drug. It was a war on the people who hold it, on a way of living with the world that the conquering mind could not abide and set out to erase.

What stayed with me was a gesture. In the Andes a person takes three coca leaves, stacks them into a small fan, holds them up, and breathes through them, sending the breath to the mountains and the earth before chewing a single leaf. They call it a k’intu, and it is everywhere in the life of the people. Two travelers meeting on a mountain trail will exchange it before they speak of anything else. It is laid into the great offerings to the earth each August, folded into the bundles a healer reads like a map, carried to the thresholds of a life, its plantings and marriages and burials. The plant is the thread the whole culture is woven on, and the principle it teaches is always the same one. The offering comes first. You give before you take. I sat with that for a while, my cup beside me, and understood that I had no such gesture, that I had drunk the whole plant down and thanked nothing.

I walked past my neighbors’ houses after dinner, traversing a linear grid of uniform lawns, straight lines of choking green, quiet and perfectly even. Then came the sound of disconnection, the near-constant grind of a mower, the high whine of a leaf blower, so much energy and effort directed toward stasis.

I looked up as the sound of the wind drew my attention into the canopy of one of my favorite bur oaks in the neighborhood. The leaves shook. One released, floated through the air, spinning in slow motion, until it settled on the tips of the Kentucky bluegrass, perched on the monoculture. We, like the leaf, have drifted into monoculture gradually, almost unknowingly.

When I finished my evening walk, I turned off the sidewalk into my own backyard and stood before the rustling Black Currant, the one I had pruned and mulched and weeded, the one whose whole body I had finally come to know. The day had not been easy. The harvest was hot and slow, the air close, mosquitoes at my ears the whole time, and making tea went on for hours, the wilting and the roasting and the waiting, the kind of fuss a person could be forgiven for not bothering with. But I have bought a great many easy things, and I can tell you I valued none of them the way I valued that cup. I had spent the day in the plant’s company, taken the parts most people leave behind, learned the way it tells you it is ready. That was the offering. Not three leaves lifted to a mountain, but this, a plant tended and a tea made, attention paid to a being emerging through a crack in the monoculture.

A culture that holds the world in reverence is not built by decree. It is built the way a garden is, one person and one plant at a time, small acts of attention accumulating into a way of being.

Inside, the cup was still on the counter, gone cool. I lifted it, and the smell of the whole plant rose to meet me, toast and green resin with dark sweetness underneath, drifting up, breath meeting breath.

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The sunflower seeds rattle against steel and wood, an avian dinner bell. I press the lid down on the feeder until it seats with a satisfying thud. The morning is hazy and golden, the air still, and the dawn chorus vibrates through the cool foliage — a House Wren spilling its bright tumble of notes, a Gray Catb…

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You hear them before you see the water. Driving in toward the refuge the sky begins to fill, ragged lines of waterfowl crossing low over the road, flock after flock wheeling off toward the river, and by the time the wetland comes into view the air itself seems to be moving. On a good day in fall you come up over the ri…

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I set up for a four-hour bird sit, hoping a crowd of kids would walk over from the festival to watch birds with me. I had empty picnic tables, six pairs of binoculars, a “Birdwatching Here” sign, and the Constitution Trail on three sides. I looked at the empty tables and imagined them full of curious young birdwatchers, maybe fifty of them. The day seem…

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The tree no one planted

plants itself everywhere—

fencerow, alley, the seam

where garage meets ground.

We call it weed.

We call it volunteer.

The birds call it food.

The catbird knows

what we refuse:

the branch bent low with fruit,

red going to black

going to ink.

She takes the gift

with her whole gray body,

chin stained like a child’s,

like…

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They arrive singly, slipping through the canopy and sliding across the water. Then in threes and fours, then a dozen at once. As they settle, their contact calls quiet. By the time the flock has gathered there are thirty, mostly drakes, a few hens. They move quickly to the densest wooded cover, huddling, turning, bobbing, scanning.

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We approached Magee Marsh in a long line of slow-moving vehicles that came to a halt for no apparent reason. Mercy, Randie, and I could see our destination off in the distance. We started slowly rolling along and we eventually came to the source of the traffic jam. Three families of Canada Geese were foraging on the roadside and they fel…

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We carry their names all winter:

Black-throated Blue, Prothonotary, Blackburnian, Chestnut-sided, Nashville.

The names held inside, half-asleep,

listening for the wind to turn.

And then, one blustery evening,

the wind turned and brought us gifts.

I walked into the park and the air was full of song,

…

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The asparagus spears snapped in my hands. Then, the sound: a squeak of shoes on a gym floor, sharp and unmistakable, falling from the canopy of the Silver Maple. A Rose-breasted Grosbeak.

I scanned the leaves on the walk back to the house. I hoped it would not be long before I caught a glimpse of him.

I stood inside watching. Sparrow…

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Graceful trees line the shallow riffling water of Sugar Creek — Black Walnut, Cottonwood, Mulberry. Each one speaks to me in hushed tones. Each one draws me into deep time. My heart and thoughts slow down in their presence as I traverse the well worn path, listening to the water, and watching the light mingle with leaves. Their da…

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Dear friends, thank you for walking with me through these essays and thank you for the notes you send, the quiet reading, and your willingness to sit with the birds and plants that arrive on the page. I am sorry I have not been able to respond to all of your thoughtful comments lately. We are in the thick of grant season at work, navi…

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A bumblebee works wild plum blossoms as a Blue Jay lands on the top of a nearby serviceberry, releasing a cascade of white petals fluttering through the morning light. The air is perfume. Then a soft, elaborate song emanates from the woods. It is hard to believe it comes from such a tiny thing. A winter wren, hiding in brush, fills the …

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