Hearing and Heeding
A few weeks ago, I was lying in bed, desperately hoping
the alarm was not about to go off. Then it did. And as I tried to gather my
wits about me to lurch into my day, I heard a bird call I had not heard before.
It was a little bit like a wolf whistle, but after the first part of the
whistle there was a sound kind of like the whir of a ratchet wrench. Whoot (crik-crik-crik) Whoo!
It was a new sound to me, though I hear all kinds of bird
sounds around the woodsy area where I live. There had been a soft lovely
birdsong I had been hearing for a while in the mornings that was more like a
trilling sound, throon-HEE! I realized
as I lay there, the difference is seasonal. Migratory. I have lived in Georgia
for dozens of years and I have no idea what birds are here during what season.
It seems like the seasons creep on me every year, and while
I can name many of the lovely plants that bloom through spring and summer, I am
only partially able to sketch out their pattern. Forsythia, then azaleas, then
everything at once, Azaleas-dogwood -Bradford pear. Then a pause and then the
magnolias and the hydrangea and then the crepe myrtle. But when does the
mountain laurel bloom? And what about the sweet shrub, best smell on earth?
I think it’s time for me to start keeping track, to be more
like my beloved grandmother Ruth Burns, who kept a kind of journal noting the
comings and goings the earth, rainfall and temperatures, the harvest of her
garden. She knew nature, and she believed in it more than she believed in the progress
of the human set. If you asked her what time it was during the summer, when the
clocks were set to daylight saving time, she might say, “Well, the government
says it’s five o’clock, but I believe it is four in God’s time.”
I’m quite a bit more modern minded than my grandmother—like
I am wondering if it is possible that there is a birdsong database that will
return an answer to a search query, “wolf whistle interrupted by ratchet”? Still, I see the value in the simple
recording and observing a journal would allow. But then, I have also been
meaning to start keeping some kind of a spiritual journal, so I was wondering,
which journal to keep: prayer or nature?
Lately, finally, it has been occurring to me that they might
be, actually, the same thing.
It has usually quite turned me off when I heard someone use
language like, “what God is doing in my life.” That kind of language tends to
alienate me, as it always sounded before as if I was expected to have some
dramatic evidence of the divine presence, some showy spiritual experiences. I
haven’t got so much to report by that standard. Not many voices in the darkness
or burning bushes or wild raptures. There have been moments —moments when I
held my breath so as not to break the ineffable tenderness. But recently the
words of a colleague made me rethink my reaction to the “what God is doing”
business, and I began to realize that maybe what God is doing is as slow and
natural as my deepening interest in the world around me, that the call of God
could sound like a birdsong. What God is speaking might not be so much an
audible voice God is speaking to me, as it is a deep sense of compassion and
acceptance God is speaking through me.
So, I am going to keep this nautureprayerspirit journal. And
try to catch a few of the moments that matter. Because to not see and hear all
this—the bird in the morning, or the smile of the young man at the coffee bar
who asks if I need room for cream, or the smell of sweet shrub, or the delight
of dollar vinyl at Wuxtry, or the speed of the search engine—to not see it all
as the divine fingerprint is a kind of poverty of imagination, like that of the
guy I once heard described as “standing knee deep in the river, dying for a
drink.”
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photo credit: Green Heron on Flatrock River, © Waldopics.
