Contemplation, January 2015

To me everything is supernatural.

-Richard Jefferies,

The Story of My Heart, 1883

2015.  The second day of the new year feels cold outside. A bit of snowfall early in the dawn hours on New Year's day greeted us in Albuquerque.  It is welcomed magic for the soul, a clean slate to begin again. By day two it is almost completely melted away but some dusting remains on the duck pond where I am enthralled by nature this morning.

My friend, Karen, is co-leading an educational workshop for teachers. While most of the class group takes a walk to the river, I stay back with another woman named Deborah and watch the ducks on the pond from a warm spot inside. With cozy chairs and couches, a library to our backs of reference books and bird specimens on shelves, we two are enamored with the feathered party happening beyond the large windows in front of us. Some aquatic creatures viewed through binoculars look like abstract paintings-especially the wood ducks.  Pairs of colorful green headed ducks and their camouflaged mates float in the small area that is not frozen.  Others walk about on the frosty ice leaving their prints and occasional skid marks.  The coots are my favorite, they have a dark grey plumage, a stark white bill and celadon- green lobed feet.  

Ruddy ducks, a stiff tailed duck with a broad bill are amongst the other ducks-they have feet set back on short legs for paddling around in the water but on the ice they are clumsy, almost completely disabled.  I see one struggling to stand up and walk, it is painful to witness. 

Groups of geese fly in and out. A lone coyote curled into a ball next to the edge of another pond we stood near earlier looked out at us from behind low shrubs with one eye, his other eye tucked into a fold in his fur. He is super natural.

Speakers in the corners of the room bring the quacking, honking sounds of the pond like music inside our glass -walled theatre. Deborah and I continue to watch the ruddy duck-we are distressed that she may be distressed- stuck on the thin ice. She sits in one spot with her back to us, Deborah tells someone who works at the nature center about the stuck duck and she let's us know she will keep an eye out for us when we leave. I wonder if the ruddy duck knows she is on thin ice, that underneath is water and freedom?  

Richard Jefferies, a nineteenth century nature-mystic-writer, a British Thoreau, speaks to me across two centuries in words that pull at my heart.  I just recently learned of him from one of my favorite contemporary environmental writers, Terry Tempest Williams.  She and her husband Brooke, reintroduced Jefferies book, The Story of My Heart, in the hope that it will be meaningful to a new generation of readers.  In it Jefferies says, 

"Through every blade of grass in the thousand, thousand grasses; through the million leaves, veined and edge-cut, on bush and tree; through the song-notes and the marked feathers of the birds; through the insects' hum and the colour of the butterflies; through the soft warm air, the flecks of clouds dissolving--I use them all for prayer."

I relate with his revery for nature- everything is supernatural- some great mysterious force in action, beyond our comprehension.  Every thing is cause for prayers, prayers of gratitude.

Later in the afternoon we get word that Ruddy flew off when someone from the nature center approached her at the pond's edge.  All is well.