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The House of Birds

The House of Birds: In search of a new world

I went to the field of grass to find the house of birds, because the road was covered with snow and the dreams were full of smoke. I waited quiet on the old stone covered in runes, the distant drumming in my ears and they came in their great murmuration filling the sky and they fell around me in a dark hush, in the shape of an ancient hive, like the old huts of stone, only this one alive and warm with moving wings and the subtle calls that fell silent as they settled.

All around me in the dim silence I heard only the rustle of wings arching above me, a low fire burned at the center. I waited. I asked Who will come show me the way forward? Who will show me how to dream of a new world?

I felt her more than saw her, the old woman from another life, this ancestor woman from another line, another lineage. I heard her move slowly and sigh as she sat, barely a flicker by my left shoulder. I saw her push a stick into the small flames sending sparks flying. A subtle warmth filled the space now. And then she began to speak:

Child, a great sorrow fills the world, even the stones are aching, the seas turning as in a slow labor. The old trees who have held the story for thousands of years are trembling in their roots. Something is dying. A story that has held humans for thousands of years is collapsing. With this story humans have held the earth, the land, the seas and all the animals in a vicious grasp for thousands of years. They have, we have set ourselves above it all and enslaved it all to our greed and hunger to be as God. It is breaking. And it must. Now we see humans dying off, as we have seen the great auk, the mammoth, the cave bear, the clouds of birds we hunted for vanity. Thru it all the earth has held us, fed us, sustained us thru our explosion, the festering blister of our wars, our extractions, our greed and contempt for life. Some things will survive: ancient schools of mystery, cermonies that serve earth or the Great Soul of Time, wisdoms that have been distorted and darkened or long hidden will emerge again to guide the way.

As she spoke these words I heard the birds twitter and turn shifting the house that surrounded us. It rippled in a dark wave.

She went on: Now you who are still living today are in the throes of a great undoing. The old monuments we worshipped will fall, the familiar structures of economies and princedoms and collective life will dissolve like dust. There will be great suffering across the earth as the people with their hands on the cords of power will fight to hold on, will wage war on people and on the earth as they writhe in their death agony. But they will die. And their systems will die with them.

A silence fell around us then and held us in a great and holy Stillness.

Mark me, Child, it will take a while. And the suffering will be long before the new vision and the new voices rise up out of the rubble. We can’t see it now because the time is not yet to see it. We cannot summon a vision that is beyond the smoke of dreams. But trust me, the new world is taking shape in the collective heart. Even now it gestates and grows. We must wait, we must care for those we can, we must grow big hearts full of kindness and courage and skills for the making of whatever it takes. We must teach the children well how to be merciful and generous. We must care gently for the old and the dying. We are with you, all the ancestors with you. We grieve the suffering we have been part of in serving the old ways. We weep with you. And we will walk with you over the nameless plains, the roadless ways ahead, until the new generation finds their way. Trust this, the earth is full of life, her heart is steady and resilient. She has many ways and will survive this. Remember the days of Lichen. Remember the stones are slow and singing.

She fell into a deep quiet then. I was shaken, salt tears burned as I listened. How do we survive it? I asked.

After a long moment, she sighed again: Ahh, my one, give up the need to survive it. Give up the need for your children to survive it. This is too big for our small stories, precious as they are to us. Her voice was not unkind. She reached out her warm hand and touched mine. And know this, she went on, there will come a day when we all will know our place in this great Unfolding. There will come a day when we understand a little but not now. For now it is not for you to know. For now, love who is closest to you, serve who you can. In that way you will let the great hum of the universe move thru you that tends the embryo of what is to come.

The truth she spoke fell over me like a cloak. I sat in the Stillness, the fire glowing at my feet. Her thickness in shadow next to me.

One last question rose off my tongue: I’m old and I don’t have much time left. How do I trust?

She poked the fire again and waited as the sparks rose and disappeared into the dim air above us.

Remember, everything is alive. Everything has spirit. Everything is watching. Remember there is a great beneficence that dwells at the heart of things, nameless, fathomless. We aren’t sure but some say Its language is Silence. Let this have more space in you, let it grow fertile and wild, let it be the wind you breathe. Call in the House of Birds when you feel afraid or alone. We will come.

And then she was gone. A subtle wind blew the flames as I watched the dark birds move and spread their wings and lift into the winter sky. They looped and vanished in a far cloud over the snow clad fields. I waited. In the deep silence I could hear something humming.

-wgs

The Dogs of the Apocalypse

“Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse asleep in the shade of your future”

Barbara Kingsolver, from Hope, An Owners Manual*

The dogs of the apocalypse** have roused. They howl and drool. They gnaw at their chains, loosing their vengeance on the sleeping world. This is not myth or fiction, barely metaphor. Even in the small towns we knew by the scent of blood on the wind.

There was no time left. There was food enough. There was money for gas. Money to keep the lights on. The banks were open. But over head the heavy clouds blew over the dawn. The light rose thin, gray. The men woke in terrors they couldn’t explain. We didn’t see a sunrise for weeks. It was deep winter and we were beginning to be afraid. As I stood on the back step in the wary day, I learned to sniff like a cat before stepping onto the grass.

For a long time we kept going, kept ordinary life going, went about our jobs, our routines, our daily chores. We ate and watched tv and shopped as always. The children went to school while the shooting drills and ICE drills, and enforced prayers took up more and more of the day. With the banned books and banned courses teaching became almost impossible. They woke crying at night for fear of being stolen by masked men. How does a mother pray thru that? How do you pretend all is well?

Slowly it dawned on us that we too were prey. First they took the others, the brown skinned people, shipped them off to the 3rd world. We were safe we thought, born citizens, white skinned, with names they could pronounce. But then they started shooting us too when we got in their way. They hauled us out of cars and houses and beat us and jailed us, tossed us back. Those who still dared to protest in the streets, to speak out agains the government, took their lives in their hands. Soon they too were disappearing. Armies of thugs that roamed our streets, armed, faceless. Those dogs in power now tore down the structures we’d known all our lives, the pillars of society, the laws, the norms, the agreements, the constitutions, the freedoms we had trusted. They were ravenous in their un-doing. They wrecked their madness across the world in violence and war. There was nothing they wouldn’t own or destroy if it served their greed and lust for power.

It was then the women began gathering. Quietly, slowly, in small groups, a handful or two at first. Gathering in someones’ home or in the deep woods or open fields. At first we railed and wept and drummed our outrage, our rage, our grief and our terror, our pleas to some distant god. As our blood stilled and our hearts settled in the steadiness of our sister’s company, our prayers became quiet as tho some deeper wisdom began to take hold of us. Some prayed to the Dark Goddess, some to the Old God, some to the Trees themselves. The drums were our voice and they calmed us.

Over time the circles of women grew and spread. We rooted ourselves like trees and linked up our roots in wisdom, in truth and each other. When trust failed one place, we pulled on life giving nutrients from another. We knew that taking on the system in the old ways was doomed, fruitless. We had no vision for the future, only a deeply felt need to sustain some Goodness, to make space for something larger than our failed ideologies, for the sake of the children and our achingly beautiful planet. Sister reminded sister of the deep well of Silence, a spaciousness that gives room for Truth, for Something Holy to find a home in us and among us.

Over time the underground fungal networks spread like threads of light in the dark soil. In time seeds of a new Thing sprouted in the fields of the world, a new kind of light glistened in the eyes of the women. Soon the children came too and then, a few at a time, the men. They didn’t speak. They stood in the background and listened. It was then things began to change. In time, a hard thing, something jagged, calcified, started to soften. No one had illusions. It would take a long time. Listen, you can hear the drumming even now.

WGS –

**”Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.” Bible: The New International Version, Revelation 22:15.

*Hope; An Owner’s Manual

Look, you might as well know, this device is going to take endless repair: rubber cement, rubber bands, crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse. Nineteenth century novels. Any of these are useful. Also, feathers.

The ignition is tricky, sometimes you have to stand on an incline, where everything looks possible; or a line you drew yourself. Or in the grocery line, making faces at a toddler secretly, over his mother’s shoulder.

You might have to pop the clutch and run past all the evidence. Past everyone who is praying for you. Passing all previous records is okay, or passing strange. Just not passing it up.

In the worst of times, you will have to pass it off. Park it and fly by the seat of your pants. With nothing in the bank, you’ll still want to take the express. Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping in the shade of your future. Pay at the window. You’ll be surprised. Pass your hope like a bad check. You still have just enough time. That’s the thing. To make it good.

-Barbara Kingsolver

I Burned the Old Prayers

December, Eventide


On my holiday card
I send a photograph
just one from the whole year
that says one day I was here
one day I looked at the light
falling just this way on a tree
tall, ancient, the color of cinnamon
and then I was elsewhere
as you are elsewhere
as this day is elsewhere now
chill, gray, without sunset
all I have is an address, a name
December, Eventide. 

We walked together once,
do you remember?

One Woman’s Thanksgiving

Addendum to the following blog post: After writing the following piece in my imaginal effort to understand what might be going on in the mind of a colonial/settler woman of 1621, I realized I needed to add something from a larger perspective. I understand that the English colonial mindset of the period held an unexamined belief that lands that weren’t occupied by Europeans or English (white people) were free for the taking. Along with the religious beliefs of the Pilgrims about manifest destiny they undoubtedly felt the “wilderness” of the new world was theirs by God’s calling. And this Wilderness they found themselves in was a place to be feared, dominated, tamed or destroyed. Truth is the Wampanoag people had lived in that land of eastern Massachusetts for 12,000 years. They had 67 villages with a possible population of 40,000. They had encountered European colonists in the years before the Mayflower arrived and some had been taken into slavery. Already they had lost whole villages due to diseases brought on thru contact with European ships. Even so, Tisquantum, a Patuxet Wampanoag who had been enslaved, taken to England, had learned English, greeted the Pilgrims in friendship. They are truly responsible for saving the colonists lives in those first few years of settlement. In the spring of 1621 the Plymouth colony and the Wampanoag formed a treaty of peace that lasted almost 50 years until King Philips War when conflicts erupted between the natives and the colonists due to the colonists betraying the treaty. As battles raged across New England, by 1676 most of the Wampanoags and their Narragansett allies were wiped out. This is the history that has been left out of the Pilgrim myth as its come down to us. I want to honor the friendship of the native people’s that saved my ancestors’ lives, as well as the Day of Mourning our Indigenous People call Thanksgiving today.

Mary Wentworth Brewster was the wife of separatist William Brewster, Elder and spiritual pastor of the Mayflower pilgrims, and advisor to William Bradford the first governor of Plymouth Colony. Mary was considered the matriarch of the Mayflower. A year after arriving at Plymouth, Mary was one of 4 women left alive in 1621 who cooked the harvest feast that we think of as the first Thanksgiving. Little is known of Mary, even her maiden name is in doubt. Like all women of the time, Mary’s voice has been left out of the history. She had five children: Jonathan, Patience, Faith, Love and Wrestling. Wondering what a woman’s life was like that first year in a strange and difficult land, this is my imagined letter Mary might have written to a sister. Mary was my 10th great grandmother.

November, 1621, Plymouth Colony

My dear dear sister, darling Mags,

How grateful I am to finally have enough time and paper and ink to write a real letter. We have come thru the harvest finally which was plentiful and for which all our bellies are in profound gratitude to our gracious God for providing here in this promised land.

Oh, Mags, how can I tell you what a year its been. So many of us died in the last dreadful winter but I told you all that in my last letter when the Mayflower sailed home in April. It left us all weakened and so short handed, only four of us women alive to speak of it today. Oh sister, the disease and hunger was terrible, no place for a proper burial the ground so frozen and no time to grieve. We carry the loss daily. But I won’t complain as I must keep my heart joyful in the Lord and keep the spirits up for all. We have welcomed a new life into our little colony and celebrated two weddings. Goodwife Susanna who birthed a child on board ship and then lost her dear husband to disease has wed Edward Winslow. And our precious Pricilla who lost her parents, married John Alden of the ship’s crew who has stayed on with us and are becoming true Saints*. What romance that was. My William works overtime guarding the virtue of these young girls who have lost their parents. I spend much time with them keeping them busy with Christian women’s crafts and guarding them from the savages. Not to mention our own young men. Keeping body and soul together takes every minute of the day.

The men finished the Long House in the spring so we could move off the ship onto the land. I am enormously grateful for this. I thought we might all die at sea anchored in the harbor. That boat was full of pestilence and I was glad to see it sail away tho it meant we had no escape. What emotions rose up in my breast as I watched the ship sail over the horizon. A few of the wood cottages have been finished enough for us to move into. The pine torches the Indians taught us to make have lit two of them afire but we are learning to be careful. Now that the harvest is done the men will have more time to build. A roof of good rush thatch and a warm hearth fire is more blessing than I could ever imagine living in that comfortable Manor house in Scrooby. I can’t tell you how I miss the markets of Leiden with their fresh meats and cheeses.

You can’t imagine my joy when our darling Jonathan arrived last week on The Fortune. We received thirty-five sick and hungry passengers after a terrible crossing that nearly did them in. Its cost us more food and what strength we have to tend them and barely enough beds as it is, but still we welcome them gladly.

I can’t tell you how proud I am of my William. He preaches beautifully and fiercely as always and has nurtured our young Will Bradford – you remember the orphan boy we took in back in Scrooby? – he is turning into a real leader. He’s a thougtful, faithful and disciplined man, and the people like him. All of this a relief to William who has enough on his hands keeping us all on the straight path of the Lord. He was done a wonderful work with the Indians a few of whom have become real friends to us. Especially one we call Squanto who actually has been to London and speaks some English. We’ve heard dreadful stories of English sailers enslaving them. He has taught the men how to hunt the local deer and fish and plant a crop called maize that we plant with ash and fish and grind into flour for a kind of bread. It has saved our lives. It seems many of his people have died of disease in the last few years brought by ships from France and Spain, and they are embroiled in squabbles with other tribes. Its so strange to actually sit with one of these wild people with their painted bodies.and hear they have thoughts and griefs just as we do. They have wonderful laughter and some kind of belief in gods of some sort but not our Jesus which is a great sorrow to us. Truly these people have saved us.

I have to tell you one of the great gifts God has brought us is a woman who I think is Squanto’s wife, if they have marriages like we do. She has been so kind and generous tho we can’t understand a word. She has led me to know the local herbs for seasoning and healing which have been a tremendous help in tending wounds. She has taught me to cook the great wild turkeys that roam freely here. Tomorrow she is coming to help me make a pair of boots from deer hide. And stitch a beaver’s fur onto my jacket. You can’t imagine the winters they have here, and the snow! None of us came with the garments needed to stay warm in it. Thank you so much for the woolen cloth you sent over with Jonathan. It will make new coats for the four of us and new britches for Wrestling who has outgrown everything he came with.

Really, its a revelation to live here in this dreadful wilderness. The forest goes on forever and is full of dangerous animals and unknown savages, and to find it can provide all we need to survive; and the people, if I can call them that, are more like us than I every dreamed. Will keeps referring to them as savages but I think they are more civilized in some strange way. God knows they need the Gospel and we teach them when we can. We are here to worship our God in freedom and simplicity and let others do the same.

We had a wonderful harvest feast a fortnight ago. There were crowds of people. Someone said one hundred and seventy partook and shared food. Fifty-five of us from the Mayflower and the rest from the Wampanoag, Squanto’s people. The women and girls and I all cooked for days over open fires and we knelt in prayers of thanksgiving together as we have lived to see another year. We cooked up yams, squash and beans, wild turkey, venison, lobsters and shrimp from the bay and eel from the near by river. With platters of corn bread sweetened with a syrup Squanto brought they make from tree sap. The tables groaned with wild grapes, luscious red cranberries and other things you’ve never heard of that we’re learning to eat. It was exhausting and glorious and we sang the harvest hymns and were filled with hope for the prospect of this fragile Plymouth Colony. Such plenitude. We are blessed with a sufficient supply of maize and beans for winter.

You must know the Strangers among us have been a task to faith, I’ll tell you. One boy nearly burned down the ship and his parents are a constant strain on William’s patience. That woman is less than useless most of the time. Even some from the Saints are slipping in their faith and will go home as soon as possible. I just pray we survive in this great task for Him who holds us in His hands!

Please, dear Mags know the depth of my gratitude for your care of my girls. I miss Faith and Patience more than you can know and pray they find passage here next year. When we’ve made it thru another winter, I think I’ll feel confident having them come. I’m an old woman now, all of 52, the eldest woman here, and I don’t imagine I have many seasons to hold grandchildren should the Lord bless us. Its a spare and difficult life here and we need the young. Please hug them for me and I know you will continue to guide them in virtue and the arts of a good Christian wife. Our boys sustain us. Love is all grown now and hunts with a bow and arrow like a savage. Wrestling is nearly grown and he worked all summer clearing these God forsaken fields of stones. And now Jonathan is here.

Now I must finish tho writing brings me close to you who I long to see with all my heart. Please give your dear husband my warmest greeting and your fine children. I’m enclosing a list of things I’ll need when the next ship comes in the spring. Darling one, I don’t know what you have left of the funds we left you. I’ll repay you when I can.

Please forgive me but I have to tell you I weep sometimes for the warmth of home. sometimes my hands are raw from washing and digging and I want nothing more than a good bath. Sometimes the smell of death wakes me up at night or children weeping. All these men need our help with their meals and house tending and only 4 of us now to serve them all, sometimes we’re treated like slaves, God save us. The young orphans are a wild bunch and full of night terrors.. And the girls who are coming into their monthlies need our guidance in the ways of women. We are weary to the bone all the time. Of course I can’t tell William, but sometimes, I confess, I rail at Heaven and wonder where our God has gone and how much more He will ask of us. And then the joy of bringing a new babe into the world full voiced breaks my heart with joy. The nights are dark, silent, spread with stars, full of nameless howls from the wilderness.. Everything is pared down and simple now. Everyday we wake up to do what must be done to survive and to pray to our Father who is in Heaven who has called us here and given us this land. We had our first snow yesterday. May the weather be kind, Oh Lord.

with God’s merciful blessing always,

your faithful sister,

Mary

List of Necessities

50 yards fine spun linen

as much thread as you can find and needles

12 lace collars

60 skeins of good yarn and needles for knitting

a few colorful ribbons for the girls, God knows they need something pretty

10 pair men’s good leather shoes – medium size

3 sheep if you can get them on board with hay

12 chickens and grain to feed them on the voyage

The men beg for muskets and shot to trade with the Indians

and if you can, send tulip bulbs. I need flowers in the spring

more paper and ink

Note: from the diaries kept by William Bradford known as Of Plymouth Plantation, we learn that on its return voyage The Fortune was overtaken by a French man-of-war and among the things the captain stole were the letters sent from the colony. We can only assume that Mary’s letter never reached her sister.

*The people of the Mayflower were in three groups: Those known as Saints, the Pilgrims of the radical separatist sect who had rejected the Church of England, who felt called to create a free worshipping congregation based on the teachings of Calvin; and those known as Strangers, who were not of the sect but settlers who came to help build the colony for their own opportunities; and the Crew. 132 souls in all. By November of 1621 only 55 remained alive.

The Big Trees

We drove south out of Santa Barbara, east then north up thru the orchards of the central valley. Miles and acres of citrus, grape, almond. Mile after mile of the fruit basket of America. Bearing north east into the foot hills of the Sierra Nevada that rose up out of the haze and into the little town of Three Rivers. There we found the midcentury California cottage in a grove of Gambrel Oak where we spent the night. Where we watched the almost full Beaver Moon rise fat over a ridge to our east.

In the morning we headed up the road to Sequoia National Park and our pilgrimage to the Great Trees. Both my daughter and my husband had been there before – Brooke when she was in graduate school in Santa Barbara in the 80s, and Jim in the 60s first with buddies hiking deep into the Sierras, and later with his first wife backpacking on their honeymoon. As we made our way up the winding road they told their stories. For me it was the answer to an old dream to walk among the Big Trees. I’d seen them first in Yosemite in the 80s with Brooke. A Brief visit to Mariposa Grove where I was enthralled by their presence, their ancient silence. The sheer scale of those trees in a forest of ordinary firs. You know how life goes, decades passed and finally I was here.

It was the first week of November and the government was in shutdown. The National Park was open but the visitors centers and picnic grounds were closed. Only a handful of faithful Rangers at work keeping an eye on things. Driving up the switchback road deeper and deeper into the park, higher into the mountains there were others stopping at overlooks, all of us with our cell phone cameras out for selfies and long views.

Along one curve in the road going up a Golden Eagle greeted us from the side of the road.

These are the homelands of the Mono (Monache), Yokuts, Tübatulabal, Paiute, and Western Shoshone peoples. In 1890 President Harrison named the territory as the second national park. Now Sequoia and Kings Canyon Parks encompass 1,353 square miles, 97% of which is dedicated wilderness. While the native peoples that have lived here for as long as the trees have been moved on, stripped of their land, the trees remain, the land protected for them. What odd things we humans can be.

At about 6000 feet in elevation we reached The Big Trees Trail, parked and walked over to the closed Giant Forest Museum where a tree named the Sentinel stands guard within its protective log fence. We paid homage with due amazement and wandered on down the trail into the forest. Soon we were passing the massive cinnamon colored trunks of the Sequoia. Here and there we found one close to the trail where we could pause and lean into the thick stringy bark and listen to the tree’s great stillness. Some had great toes that turned at the ground as they reached into the earth, down into their shadowy root system that spread out for yards around as they clung to the roots of other trees. We tried to snap photographs but a camera can’t capture the size, the scale of these giants that reach up into the sky, their heads literally in the clouds. Their base as big as a house. The burn scars are like the great black doors to a church.

Sequoiadendron giganteum a giant name for a giant of a tree. According to Wikipedia: “Giant sequoia specimens are the largest trees on Earth.^[3] They are native to the groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California but have been introduced, planted, and grown around the world.

The Giant Sequoia is listed as an endangered species by the IUCN with fewer than 80,000 remaining in its native California.

The Giant Sequoia grow to an average height of 164–279 ft with trunk diameters ranging from 20–26 ft. Record trees have been measured at 94.8 m (311 ft) tall. “

But facts and statistics don’t capture it either. You stop and look up until your neck hurts. Or you sit on a great brown foot and feel the slight wind whispering, feel the dust falling over you from a great height. Feel the age, the thousands of years its taken for this tree to grow to this girth, the stories it holds of the seasons, the eons. Feeling into how it bides its time for the passing of winter, the passing of western civilization. Feel how tiny we are, how brief. Meanwhile we heat the planet, fires grow more intense, past forest management has allowed smaller firs to fill the forest, and fuel to accumulate under the massive trees. In the last 8 years wild fires have taken up to 15% of the great Sequoias across their range.

These trees that need fire to propagate can’t survive the intensity. Think about this as you sit in the giant shade, as you run your hands over the soot of an old fire scar.

Up the road we stopped with everyone else in the park that day to greet the largest tree in that part of the forest, sadly given the name of a white man, General Sherman in 1879. This tree is 279 ft tall and 102 feet around at the base. Its seed sprouted sometime a few hundred years before the Common Era. While its not the tallest, fattest or oldest tree in the world, it is impressive none the less. In 1886 the land was owned by a utopian community whose economy was based on logging. Noting the pivotal role that Sherman had played in the Indian Wars and his forced relocation of native American tribes, they renamed the tree Karl Marx. When the president dedicated the area as a national park, the name was changed back to General Sherman.

I wonder what the tree thinks with these little ants running around at its feet. If it notices at all. Having I’m sure no idea of ideologies or wars or our little politics. Dreaming its ancient tree dreams. We took our turn with everyone else getting our picture taken with General Sherman impassive behind us. The photo makes it look like General Sherman is leaning away from us. Can’t blame him.

When the Rangers came along to shoo everyone out of the over-full parking lot, we turned the car to the left and headed back down the mountain, past the switchbacks and overlooks as the clouds moved in. We past thru great swaths of old fire, hectares of the trunks of limbless trees and the occasional charred remnants of a once great Sequoia.* We paused once for one long view out over the foothills and called it a day. If I leave one prayer behind for these magnificent beings and their long lives its that they survive us.

-wrensong

foot note: *2020 Castle Fire

Lightning started the Castle Fire on August 19, 2020 in a remote area of Sequoia National Forest, southeast of Sequoia National Park. By the time the fire was contained in December, it had burned 171,000 acres, including over 9,530 acres of giant sequoia groves on U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, State of California, Tulare County, and private lands. This represents one-third of all sequoia grove area across the Sierra Nevada, the only area in the world where giant sequoias occur naturally.

Unprecedented Numbers of Large Sequoias Killed

The Castle Fire killed an estimated 7,500 to 10,600 large sequoias (those with trunk diameters of 4 feet or more ,or >1.2 meters). This is 31 to 42 percent of large sequoias within the Castle Fire, or 10 to 14 percent of all large sequoias across the tree’s natural range in the Sierra Nevada (Stephenson and Brigham DRAFT in press).

Saving What is Good

It was a sunny afternoon near mid September when I stopped in the driveway to chat with my neighbor Steve about his beautiful patch of zinnias, red and yellow and orange nodding happily in the breeze, and all the butterflies that had been feasting there. I’d run out with my camera again and again to catch the Tiger Swallowtail or the Monarch or the Pipevine Swallowtail or the Eastern Black or the little American Lady or the Silver Spotted Skipper. The days had heated up again and we were all looking forward to the Equinox and the coming of cooler days. Steve talked about his planting and said almost in passing, waving his hand at the shrubbery, that he had a bush full of Praying Mantis. He was delighted. I was horrified. I knew immediately what had eaten the Swallowtail eggs.

Some years ago I planted Rue, a savory herb, in a narrow little garden wedged between the asphalt driveway and the house. The Rue was happy there and grew into a robust bush. Around 2018 was the first time I found the bush covered in fat black and green caterpillars. I knew nothing of butterflies then and had to do a little research to discover what kind they were. I learned they were the larva of Eastern Black Swallowtail, a beautiful big butterfly with dark wings marked with white dots or gold with brushes of blue and spots of red. Before the next August arrived and butterfly season, I learned that Yael, a friend of mine, was hand raising these Swallowtails so I decided to give it a try if I found caterpillars again.

I did. And over the next four years I spent much of August and September tending the caterpillars of Eastern Black Swallowtails. Sometime around mid August I would begin finding the tiny yellow eggs laid on the small Rue leaves. Soon these would turn into tiny black caterpillars less than a quarter inch long with a white band around the middle. I would clip a sprig of Rue where the cats were feeding, put the sprig in a glass of water and place it in a mesh cage to protect them as they grew. Over the next couple of weeks these tine creatures would shed one skin after another as they grew into fat juicy green and black caterpillars with small yellow dots. Every couple of days I would clean the cage, emptying out the frass, replenishing the water and the Rue. I put sticks around leaning up against the walls of the cage and in their own mysterious time they would find their way to the right spot on a stick, glue themselves to it at one end and tie themselves to it with a silk thread at the other, slowly shed the green and black skin and become a chrysalis looking for all the world like a prehistoric beetle of some kind or a strange dried leaf. And go to sleep. These butterflies at the end if the season would stay in diapause all winter. I would tuck them away in a cricket box in the garage to keep them out of the weather and in late April I’d bring them out, put them back in their mesh cage and wait.

Its a miracle we have butterflies at all, so many things can happen to them before they ever get wings. They can be parasitized by tachnid flies or wasps who lay their eggs in the caterpillar or the chrysalis; get diseases that make them dissolve in black goo; or get eaten by birds or spiders or the dreaded Praying Mantis; they can fail in chrysalis or come out with deformed wings and are unable to fly. I had it all happen in the four years I raised them and it was heart breaking each time. And each time I was able to release a newly born full winged butterfly into the spring day it was a celebration.

This is what it is to watch a miracle. Inside the tiny yellow egg is a tiny black caterpillar, and inside the tiny caterpillar is a larger caterpillar and then a larger one. At each phase the old skin falls off in a small black wad. Until the caterpillar has reached full size and it strings itself up to a stick and inside it changes its being altogether and becomes a brown husk and unzips the caterpillar skin which falls away. In time, inside the husk the creature changes again and the imaginal cells inside form a butterfly with all the parts and patterns its species requires and when the time is right, it splits open the husk and crawls out. It will hang there by its beautiful, thin, wiry feet while it pumps fluid into its wings stretching them out to become ten times the size of the chrysalis. And after a good long rest it will be ready to fly.

The Chinese Praying Mantis was accidentally introduced into this country in the late 1800s. It, like the little Carolina Mantid which is native to this country, is an alien stick-like insect with wings, a triangular head, large eyes and holds its front limbs in what looks like a praying posture. Thus the name. The Chinese cousin however is over twice as big and is known to eat not only insects but amphibians and even hummingbirds. Its kind of a Godzilla of the insect world. So, the day a few years ago when I peered into my Rue bush and found one there, I was stopped in my tracks.

As I pulled the branch aside the creature had just taken a bite out of a large green Swallowtail caterpillar. Goo ran from its mouth as it swiveled its alien head to look at me. This thing was huge, with a long brown body and stripe of green wing. It did not seem the least perturbed by my presence. its front paws gripping the hapless caterpillar, It looked at me as if to say “Sorry. Get your own”.

I reached in and grabbed it cupping it well in my hand not wanting to crush it. It struggled to get away pushing on my fingers like an animal as I carried it to the fence behind the house and tossed it into another yard. There was no saving that caterpillar.

So this year, a few days after my conversation with Steve, when I began finding the tiny new caterpillars on the Rue bush, knowing shrubs full of praying mantis were only a few yards away, I knew I had to save them if I could. I haven’t raised butterflies in three years, but I pulled out my mesh enclosure, filled glasses of water, cut sprigs of Rue with the baby cats and tucked them away for safety on the front porch as I used to. Now, just two weeks later I have about 30 quickly fattening themselves on little bouquets of Rue safely inside their mesh cage. Soon they will begin to crawl off the Rue, climb the provided sticks and become chrysalids for the winter. I won’t know till Spring how many have survived.

Here’s the thing. There’s so much we cannot save in this world. So much going wrong before our eyes that we’re powerless over. We each have to do what we can with and for what’s before us. A week or so ago Yael texted that she had so many caterpillars she needed Rue. I said, sure, come on over. Yael is Israeli, a firebrand who has fought for the Palestinian cause for decades. She says she’s exhausted. She does not turn away. She does not give up. But her butterflies give her hope, she says. Its something she can do. Me too.

So this isn’t a story of a natural good over a natural evil. I don’t believe any part of the natural world is evil, not even Chinese Praying Mantises. Evil I think is very much a human thing in human hands. Maybe its a story of the good of hope over the evil of despair. Serving life right here in the face of all we cannot do.

From Blossom to Blossom

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

-Li Young Lee, From Blossoms

For weeks the air rippled off the asphalt of the days thick as soup. Air that wrapped my skin like a hot compress. For weeks the garden grew lush and full, the Bee Balm 5 feet tall, the Daisies in prolific masses of white blooms, the Garden Phlox, the Coreopsis, the orange Day Lilies. The Milkweed bloomed its pink balls of perfume. The spread of the variegated Hostess in the shade with their long plumes of purple flowers. In early July the Tiger Lilies bloomed on their long stems under the Hickory by the fence. The orange and white Zinnias came up in the pot on the stump of the old Oak I called Grandfather that fell 4 years ago. The red Petunias gradually faded and gave up in the heat. The purple leafed Beard Tongue in masses under the Scarlet Maple in turn bloomed their delicate pink blossoms.

I’ve felt dry as a bone all summer. Uninspired, unmotivated, languishing in the air-conditioning. Thru the weeks the difficult news of the world continued to pour in around us. Like some low growing Prickly Pear Cactus we bristled with anger, outrage, grief, powerlessness. We tried not to shrivel. I wrote my emails to my Senators and made the occasional phone call. Day by day, most days of the week, I met with my meditation group where we sat together in silence and then spoke, if we spoke, of the state of our hearts in the midst of life’s challenges, the state of our practice, our walk with the Holy, however that is for us. I sat in this zoom circle going from face to face, voice to voice drinking the nectar each brought that nourished my soul. The heat of the world like the heat of the season presses on us and I must push my feet deep into some moist soil to survive it, to even dream of blossoming.

In late July Jim and I made our pilgrimage up to the Columbia Bottoms to see the fields of Sunflowers. We were late again this year and they were mostly gone. But in one field we found them still blooming and got out to walk among them. It was early and the day was already steamy. It had rained in the days before and the fields smelled thick of sweet pollen and deep moist earth. The Red Winged Blackbirds flew back and forth between the fields and the woods, calling. Here and there the blue flash of an Indigo Bunting. And the Bees. Bees and Bees of every size and shape happy and drunk in the broad faces of the Sunflowers. They moved from blossom to blossom lost in a buffet of nectar, covered in yellow pollen. They paid us no mind at all as we moved slowly between the rough stems as tall or taller that we were, and the nodding yellow-petaled heads of the flowers. Jim moved off his way and I moved mine, our cell phone cameras handy. Mostly I inhaled the deep intoxication of the place and listened to the call of the birds, the buzzing song of the bees. The sun rose higher and my skin dampened. The air thick as honey and as golden. I wanted to stay forever, drenched in this abundance. I moved from blossom to blossom clicking photos, wanting to capture a hint of the place, the season, the hour, the pulsing scent and song of it.

Around the first of August the butterflies started arriving. First the yellow Tiger Swallowtail that pupates in my neighbors Tulip Tree arrived. Then on Steve’s bed of multicolored Zinnias the dark winged Eastern Black Swallowtail, and then a Monarch with its orange and black wings like stained glass. These are winged blossoms themselves with such a brief life. And they each bobbed from blossom to blossom suckling the hidden nectar before flying off over the roof tops or beyond the trees.

So the summer is almost over. The Bluebeard Caryopteris is coming into its late season bloom. The pollinators will love this. There are a couple of Surprise Lilies are still blossoming. And look, a bud just beginning to open on its thick stem by the fence! Sadly they are not native to Missouri so the insects don’t recognize them as food. But they’re pretty and give a nice splash of color when so many things have faded.

The seemingly endless heat has been hard on the garden. The purple Phlox is looking tired and even the resilient Rudbeckia is suffering. The Milk Weed is sticky and covered in its orange bugs while the pods slowly dry. Soon they will split and let loose the dusty clouds of seeds. I’m sad to say I haven’t had Monarchs lay eggs here in years. But the Milk Weed’s here if they need it on their journey south.

The pot of peach-colored Begonias on the patio happily blooms on.

I want to cherish the days. “O, to take what we love inside,” Li-Young Lee cries out in another verse of his luscious summer poem. I don’t know what the winter months will bring or what the world will look like next spring. I trust the flowers will bloom again and the bees will emerge from hibernation to feed, to pollinate the greening world and to make honey. I trust my little Ruby Throated Hummingbirds will return. And if I’m here again, I’ll take them inside, I’ll go with them from blossom to blossom.

Gaza – Finding Words

I don’t want to write about this. How do I write about something that is breaking my heart? How do I write about something too massive for any words – occupation, apartheid, impoverishment, oppression, ethnic cleansing, deliberate starvation, bombing, bombing, bombing, genocide? Every word feels flimsy, falls short of the horror, the outrage; falls short of the numberless deaths, the unimaginable coldness of heart perpetrating this holocaust. The destruction of everything living, life-giving. The abomination of a world that does nothing to stop it. The square miles of rubble in a desert where a living was wrenched over decades from the sand, under the terrible heavy hand of Israel homes were built, Mosques, schools, universities, hospitals, libraries, shops and businesses, fields were planted, where even in the enforced poverty of a brutal occupation people thrived, said the old prayers, cooked the food, where they made beauty and gardens, where children played and grew up and married, where the sacred olive trees grew and oil was pressed. There aren’t words large enough to bear the weight of the loss. In a space of 141 square miles, about the size of Detroit, live over 2.3 million people. Since October of 2023, Israel has killed over 53,000 Palestinians. I don’t want to write about this.

I don’t want to write about the politics of it in this country. What is the word, one inadequate word? Heartsick, physically sick to know my country is not just complicit but responsible, funds the war on a people trapped behind walls, a people determined to hold onto their land, the land of their ancestors, a people who love their children the way we love ours, who have no lust for death. I don’t want to even try to write about antisemitism or zionism or how zionist money from Jews and nonJews, has funded a rift as deep as any we’ve known in this country, have taken our 1st Amendment hostage, called the police on peaceful protestors, on students and activists critical of Israel, Jews and nonJews, protesting for the rights and lives of Palestinians, defaming elected officials who have the courage and integrity to speak out.

I don’t want to try to fully understand much less explain the indoctrination of Jewish kids in this country, how they’ve been taught for 80 years to align themselves with Israel, taught that Israel is a God given land for the Jews and must be defended and supported at all cost, who believe this genocide is defensible. The real history of this is deep in the colonialism of England and Europe and the guilt and oil hunger of the United States. The truth that 700 thousand Palestinians lived there in 1948 when the land was given to the Jews is too often ignored, too often subsumed in some belief in the right of eminent domain which white men have used for centuries to justify the taking of land from indigenous people. The story of colonialism is old and as ugly as ever and I don’t want to write about it.

So here is a terrible beauty in the midst of all this. Every year in April, 500 million birds take to the skyways over the war zones of the middle east. They fly from Asia, from as far north as Siberia, from eastern Europe over Syria and Jordan and Israel and the Gaza Strip across Egypt to their breeding grounds in Africa. In October they fly north again. Ducks, herons, storks, cranes, flamingos, waders, raptors, quails, including uncountable small perching and song birds of all kinds. They fly at night pausing during the day to rest and forage and restore themselves for the long flight ahead.

Across the dry, densely populated and over-built Gaza Strip flows the Wadi Gaza, a wetland with lush fertile borders that meanders out of the Negev hills across Gaza to the Mediterranean.. The Wadi and other verdant parts of this desert land have been a resting place for the migrant birds and home to 250 resident species for millennia. Now amid the bombing and the rubble, the Wadi is a running sewer when it runs. Trees destroyed, grassy fields upturned by tanks, wells, once full of sweet fresh water, now full of sand and salt. By this Spring, nearly 80% of the groves of their sacred Olive trees, over three million trees, some hundreds of years old, have been bombed or burned. Under the human disaster of Gaza lies the ecological devastation of a once fertile land.

At the heart of the place is a tiny bird known as the Palestinian Sunbird, Cinnyris osea, meaning Holy. A dark feathered bird that flashes blue like an oil slick in the sunlight, with a long curved beak. Under each wing the male shows a tiny patch of yellow and red like a little flame. He’s only 4 inches long. Similar to our hummingbirds. In 2015 he was named the national bird of Palestine. He feeds on nectar and insects. He needs trees and flowers and grasslands and living water to survive.

I don’t want to write about it. About how we on the other side of the world are asked to bear witness to this, to look and not turn away. I don’t want to find words to name what we are asked to see of humankind: the blindness, the cruelty, the hatred, the ignorance, the failure of will and imagination, the failure of courage, of compassion, of simple decency. What could I say, anyway that hasn’t been said by others with more knowledge or skill or poetry? Words get sucked dry like the Wadi Gaza, from over use or misuse. Words can also dry up from not being used at all.

I want to find words for something else; for the grief and outrage and powerlessness people everywhere are feeling in the face of this. I want to find words for solidarity and compassion and self-sacrifice, that I am witnessing also; for courage and determination and persistence to demand justice and peace and something like mercy. I want to find words for the shining heart of the Palestinian people who are refusing to bow down, to give up, but remain steadfast in their humanity, in their dignity and their love for the land. I want to find words for the sight of millions of birds year after year taking wing at sunset over a fruitful landscape. Sometimes maybe words grow green again when they are watered by tears, when they sprout up from grief, when a tiny bird is allowed to fly out of the broken heart.

One night last week over 3 million birds flew over St Louis on their Spring migration north. Imagine the sound of six million wings. I slept thru it. Did you? This afternoon again I heard the Summer Tanager singing from the Tulip tree.

-wgs

As War Halts, the Environmental Devastation in Gaza Runs Deep

https://e360.yale.edu/features/gaza-war-environment?fbclid=iwzxh0bgnhzw0bmabhzglkaaagin6yrmqbhvqsitegcrkae7_h_t3y__fbkil5p_obemomjgns47ay22m6nz-zjetykg_aem_99b17cfz27xe-elgl6vr3a

Birds of the Gaza Strip:

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=123896

Olive trees especially are a symbol of resilience, but cultivating and regenerating any form of Palestinian agricultural land is rarely, if ever, just about farming. “Our work is not only about trees or land, it is about existence, about dignity and about green resistance against occupation,” Shahin said. Working on the ground with the Million Tree land regeneration campaign to stem Israel’s land confiscation is “a deep responsibility and an undeniable source of hope” (https://sawaidpalestine.com/en/campagins/agriculture/)

”https://news.mongabay.com/2025/03/gaza-and-west-bank-farmers-salvage-olive-harvest-amid-displacement-destruction-and-israeli-settler-violence/

from Gaza’s stolen childhood by By Mohamed A. Hussein and Mohammed Haddad

Published On 26 Mar 2025

Israel kills a child in Gaza every 45 minutes.

That is an average of 30 children killed every day over the past 535 days.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed at least 17,400 children, including 15,600 who have been identified. Many more remain buried under the rubble, most presumed dead.

Many of the surviving children have endured the trauma of multiple wars, and all of them have spent their lives under the oppressive shadow of an Israeli blockade, affecting every aspect of their existence from birth.

“Oh rascal children of Gaza,

You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,

You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,

You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.

Come back,

And scream as you want,

And break all the vases,

Steal all the flowers,

Come back,

Just come back…“

-Khaled Juma, Palestinian poet and playwright

Psalm for the Turning

Today, Holy Saturday in the Christian Church year, is a day out of time, a day of deep quiet in the unfolding story of Holy Week, the day between the Death and the Rising. I was invited recently to write a psalm. Its been many years since I read the Biblical poetry of the psalms but something in these songs of faith and longing still lives in me. It seems that if there was ever a year for a psalm on Holy Saturday it might be this one. So here is my offering on this rainy Spring Saturday, the wild white trillium blooming and the Dogwood, and the terrible news of the world like a river running on.

O Gracious Light, pure glimmer of the spring dawn,
You the sweet scent of Wild Ginger, we seek you
in the hidden places, we reach for You, You
the green fuse inside the green stem, 
You the sunlight and the sugar, You who weave 
our prayers into tangled baskets of grace, You
the Breath of our inmost breathing:

Lo, we have forgotten Your name and our own,
we have lost our way to You, and we have turned 
our teeth against this world and one another. 
Our rivers run toxic with greed and old wars.

Forgive us, Forgive us! 	selah

Turn us, Holy Tide of Seasons and the Moon,
wash us clean again, set us straight to our
green home and to our human kin for we
are torn of mind and heart, and we are lost.

Only You who return and return, return us.
You who rise and rise again, raise us up,
shake off the dust of our despair, give us,
we pray Thee, time, the unfolding of days,
Mercy for our children’s sake and for their 
children that the generations might live
in peace and abundance on our blue earth.

O Gracious Flower, blossom of the sacred Seed,
we have only our grief to offer You, our tears
to water this holy ground, remember us, 
we pray, teach us Your Name again, teach us
who we are that we might wander again
over the greening fields at peace together,
and rest in Your sunlight and Your rain.