Migration Station

On Tuesday, we saw a Virginia Rail. I have no photos, some wind battered audio, and a story that I can't find the words to tell because it was so simple, so silly, so unexpected. When I think about this moment, the bird gets smaller in my head every time, and it's wings weren't beating. It hovered across the path. I know that's not true, but the story takes new form each time.

A Canada Goose flew 5 feet from us, just barely above our heads. I want to be able to describe the sound of the wing beats, how surprisingly loud it was, how big a Canada Goose is in reality.

I remarked that we kept hearing an Eastern Warbling Vireo but hadn't seen it yet, only to see it half a minute later, darting among the branches.

I wish I had the right words in the right order to tell these stories in a way that would do them justice. They were a small taste of the magic available in the real world, the magic that only a creature so unlike yourself can cast.

Checking In

I haven't written in awhile because everything I write is sort of sad. I'm an endless pit of reality lately with very little optimism. I've been wallowing in the news of the world, the many ways we're destroying so much of the magic, these creatures who were here before us and deserve to be here long after us. Migration season is a reminder that the world is so much more complex than what we see or touch on any given day.

Every day is mostly the same – I eat, I work, I sleep, some days I go to the gym and push, pull, or hinge with heavy weights, most days I walk around hoping to hear some birds at some point in the day, I don't drink enough water, I eat too much sugar... All while being hit with an endless barrage of high-speed horrible news headlines.

It's... exhausting. After over a year of this, I'm pretty tired of springing myself back into action. It makes anything I write sort of bleak, which I don't want to share because I don't want to drag anyone else down with me.

When you add the inability to articulate a simple story to that long list of things to feel shame and embarrassment about, it starts to feel very "what's the point" more often than not.

Practicing Gratitude

Taking long breaks in between writing doesn't help. It all gets saved up for one entry, which gets weighed down heavily by each drop of angst until it just rains all over everything. It's easy to look back and see the bad.

It's not so easy to look back and see the amazing moments in between, especially if you never write them down. While the internet may be what keeps me from sometimes experiencing joy, it's also a personal archive of so many things, like the birds I've seen.

Keeping all of this in mind – the complexity of the world, how bird migration makes it all so much more apparent, the many moments the world gifted me to appreciate – I know I can feel grateful for so much, in all ways.

I recently came across an Ada Limón poem that I keep coming back to:

Calling Things What They Are

I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Stellar’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.