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.