It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like even looking at this blog.

I was all set to post every month in December of 2022. I had finally worked up the courage to sit down and look at themes and generally tidy things up for beginning again. And then . . . I installed a Bad Theme. And it ran a script and put nasty spam messages at the bottom of quite a few posts before I caught it and deleted it. I had to edit each post. By hand. Dozens and dozens of them. And I felt so stupid for installing something so awful. So it was hard to even think of the blog without feeling gross for a while. Nor have the curators of AI engines helped encourage one to put original content online, in an easily accessible format.

But I’ve been feeling like writing for a long bit. I’ve been reading, which is kind of like writing. As a teen I thought of writing as a kind of substitute for reading. The thing you did while you were waiting for the next book. But as I age I see how writing is itself useful as part of the conversation that reading exists to continue. To read, and read, and read and never discuss is not to read at all. Just as to eat, and eat, and eat but never digest is not really eating. Writing is one way of discussing. Not just what one reads, but what one sees and feels. What one is discovering. The joys and the sorrows and the truths and the illusions that almost misled: these are all part of the conversation too, and useful to record some where, some how. Over tea with a friend, or over a laptop keyboard with the whole silent void.

Today, as I lingered on my front walk, looking over my weedy patch of wilderness, I had such a strange, possessive feeling towards the insects therein. For a moment, and a 100 moments, it was not the flowers in my garden which mattered but the creatures that they sheltered. Indeed, when I planted the fennel two or three years ago (it’s a weed, beware!) I did so specifically to attract swallowtail butterflies, but still. To see three tiny green caterpillars, already twice as large as they were a few days ago, and one even tinier black one makes my heart swell right up with joy. And so with the bumble bees who show up in my garden in the first weeks of April and practically take up residence, hardly paying me any mind as I hover near them. Praying mantis and butterflies – someone saw a monarch here, a few days ago. The milkweed’s buds are just starting to show orange – and all the hundred little critters in between. How many things are affected by our smallest whims and fancies! Who would have thought so much life could exist in one small postage stamp of a yard? It feels miraculous. And miracles are personal things.

Miraculous like coming home and seeing a falcon atop the lamp post, tall and regal looking. I’ve grown spoiled with wild life here: once again we have a young deer attending preschool in our fenced in drainage pond. Just now he walked through my field of vision, as I sit here looking out the window, writing this to the constant jabber and retort of birds. But even still the falcon was special. It looked unmovable, and proved to be so when a red-wing blackbird flew up and dived bomb it. Personal a miracle might be, but also strangely universal, and I looked around in vain for someone to call over. To witness the wonder too. The falcon took the punch but didn’t move until a few minutes later when I began to walk again. Then it alighted over the drainage pond, to be pummeled by the same red-wing as it sought shelter in the trees on its far side. How strange to see so fierce a bird bullied by a creature so much smaller than it.

How sweet to be allowed to see it.