Bird feeders and the case for joy over urgency

🍃So-Slow Book Club, Week 12🍃

"Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is trembling into possibility." - Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows

I moved into my current home to live with my new husband, Eric, last May, but it's taken us this long to install a bird feeder. I kept meaning to, but other things kept getting in the way, as they have a tendency to do.

Eric hung the feeder last weekend, and just in time. The birds are out in full force this week, and every morning I'm awakened to the buzzy trill of the red-winged blackbird and the insistent caw of crows and another call (perhaps a mockingbird?) that sounds remarkably like a car alarm.

At some point each day, sometimes two or three times, I'm alerted to the approach of sandhill cranes, who give me plenty of loud warning before they fly over our house - usually in pairs - on their way to and from a nearby dune system.

If I act as soon as I hear them, I can usually make it outside or at least position myself below the tall windows in our living room in time to look up and see them pass.

With the bird feeder now in place, I can also watch as well as listen. All day long the tiny birds (finches and juncos and warblers, I think, though they rarely stay long enough for me to get a positive ID) dart in and around and away, while a handsome cardinal holds court, eating his fill and watching the show.

My “usual spot” in the living room - where I spend hours each day working, reading, and just gazing out the windows - used to be on the other side of the wall from where the bird feeder now hangs, but this week I noticed a serious drawback to that spot - it's just out of the line of sight of the feeder, meaning that if I wanted to watch the birds, I'd have to scoot way forward and crane my neck.

No good. I really, really like watching the bird feeder.

So, though habits like my preferred sofa seat tend to become deeply-ingrained for me, this week I've been spending about half of my time on the other side of the sofa, where I have a completely different vantage point.

Further away from the windows, I can't see the deer who pass through the lower part of our property quite as easily; but the bird-feeder drama is in full view.

It's a different, more intimate sort of relationship with the nature happening outside our window. It brings me a different, more intimate sort of joy, too. I can’t wait to watch the signs of spring multiply, with my bird friends front and center.

Week 12: Wild Joy was one of my favorite entries so far The Comfort of Crows. “The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets. For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway,” Renkl writes.

Our own personal “water buckets” look very different. For some of us, perhaps it’s tending to the immediate needs of our families, the urgency of earning “enough” even when we have no idea what that means anymore. For others it’s working to make a difference in our own homes or communities.

Too often it looks like worry, doom-scrolling, or self-medicating through consumption or distraction or outrage.

No matter how necessary our personal water bucket may seem, however, we need to put it down sometimes so that we can remember the reason we care about any of this in the first place.

Hope is not only warranted, it’s necessary. The birds are above us, reminding us that spring is almost here. We only need to remember to listen, and look up.