Category Archives: Wildlife

Hummingbird or Collarbone Hollow (36)

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I dream I am in a small walled patio. Large swaths of sheer fabric in green and black billow from a concrete slab overhang. There’s a young woman in her thirties with me. She has dark hair and lots of bangles on her wrist. I watch as a hummingbird flies to her and cuddles on her shoulder in the crook of her neck. I am in awe. Then another one comes to me and settles in. I hold very still. I can tell the little bird is poking around the way they do, comfortable, preening, setting things to right. After, in the dream, I’m trying to describe it to people, and I keep starting over. As I try to tell the story, I keep rubbing the indentation between my collarbone and shoulder where he nestled. Half awake later, I check in the mirror to see if the indentation is there, but it doesn’t look or feel as large as the hollow in my dream. But, oh! To have a hummingbird nestle in like that. Such sweetness. Standing in front of the mirror, I can still feel his soft weight against my skin.

Beside Me (34)

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In November I am gone for three days. When I’m home again, I’m afraid my male hummingbird might not visit me after my absence. But he’s still here! I greet him, and I cry. Twice this morning he comes to my face. I close my eyes but don’t flinch, though the second time he startles me, and my heart does a funny flutter in my chest. Still, having him sit and visit on the back of the chair nearby fills me with a welling joy. I love him. I love these visits. I tell him he makes me feel like my cats made me feel, like I’m the luckiest woman in the world. Bar none. I sit beside him in my courtyard and feel the joy, the tenderness, well up and seep out of me, feel that ache and that fine seesaw line between our 10,000 joys and our 10,000 sorrows. For a moment, I wonder if there is something wrong with me, that I’m wired wrong, that maybe joy should be undiluted. Maybe that humbling awe, that sense of the hugeness of the gifts beyond deserving comes from some faulty circuitry in me. Then I think it is native to our human condition, to being embodied on this planet, to the fleeting nature of things. And then I wonder, how can we not feel unequal to the gifts bestowed, to the marvels of our world? How can we not feel humbled and grateful when we stand beside a mountain, watch a bird stretch her wings, take in the bougainvillea in full bloom? Or by the gift of morning companionship in the tiny form of a hummingbird? Thank you, little one. I’m so glad you’re still here, still making these visits. I’m glad I’m still here, too.

May He Be Safe (33)

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I wait outside for Ian to pick me up before the daylong MBSR retreat. I’m standing on the sidewalk, and I glance back down my little road. I stop a coyote in his tracks. For a moment, we are both still, just looking at each other. He’s so thin it hurts me, and he hasn’t groomed himself. He is starving to death, I think. My neighbor Joel is heading toward me with his two little dogs, so I turn around to warn him about the coyote on our road. When I look again, he is gone. He haunts me, though. Two months later, I can still picture him, his dear, unkempt, emaciated form. And the look in his eyes. He looked beyond exhausted. Despairing, I think, barely able to go on. Looking back, I imagine I even saw a flicker of hope in his eyes when I spoke to him. I’ve sent up prayer after prayer for him. I dream of buying dog food in case I see him again. Was he sick? Are all our coyotes starving now? How can I possibly begin to feed coyotes? (My neighbors would flip.) I wish there’d been time and quiet to just be with him that morning. I loved him in that first moment, but there was no time to cherish him, to know him even for a little while. May he be safe and free from harm. May he have all he needs to heal and thrive. May he live with ease and well being for as long as he wants to. May he die a quiet, easy death whenever he is ready.

Christmas 2017 (30)

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As soon as I string the Christmas lights across a section of the bougainvillea, the little Costa’s hummingbird alights, claiming one loop for his new perch, a good spot to spy on his feeder. For two weeks in November he came to sit on the back of the chair beside me each morning. When I spoke to him, he swiveled his head, studied me, considering my words, the sound of my voice. He darted off to chase someone away, then perched near me again. It surprised me how moved I was to have him there beside me. I’d talk to him, go back to reading the paper, look up again to tell him how glad I was to have him there. Sometimes I’d forget to greet him, need to apologize. Now I have to love him from a distance, unless I’m near the feeder when he drinks, and then I have to stop myself from reaching out to run my index finger along his back. I don’t know where he sleeps, but maybe near that strand of lights in the bougainvillea. They keep me company when I wake up in the night. The lights have always been my favorite part of this season. When I hang the two strands outside the gate, I walk out three times to see them. I stand in the middle of the road and let myself feed on them. They’re like magic to me, fed by the sun, coming alive when the light leaves the day. They awaken a longing in me, too, a kind of nostalgia, decades of Christmas lights in all my homes, in all my places. But I think what calls to me, what feeds me, is a kind of hope. Might we all know brightness and beauty. Might we always have light in the darkness like this, quiet, steady, full of peace.

Away, Too (18)

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The morning after the last of my fever, I feel like something sat on me all night pushing my bones into the earth of our campsite. I head toward the meadow to do my qi gong, but I stop inside the pines. I don’t want the sun, don’t know why. I study the pine needle ground and choose my spot. I face west. Maybe because I am already slow, creaky and sore, I move through all the movements without a hint of rushing, without becoming lost in the habit of it. Halfway through I hear a tinkling passing back and forth among the trees nearest me, like hummingbirds but not, like bells, like the shimmer of light on water if it were a sound. I think of Tinkerbell, sprinklings of fairy dust. I don’t even feel goofy for it; it feels like my soundest reference, in fact. Unseen bird or invisible beings in this grove? Whoever they are, it feels like a visitation. They don’t stay long. After, I press my palms together before my chest, quiet awe and gratitude seeping out of my skin, chasing away the last taste of fever. Thank you, all.

Away (17)

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I do my qi gong in Clive’s back yard. I face east, the direction of the liver in traditional Chinese medicine. I stand before the climbing vines and blackberries, the wonderful vegetable garden, old growth, parts untamed, calls to me. I lean forward from my waist, head hanging, arms loose to the ground. I like the looks of me, this upside down view, my feet’s tan lines darker than ever from all my walking this week, the blues and thin-lined purples of my plaid pants, my stones dangling from my throat, the aqua aura bluer today against the blue of my thin shirt, the red yarn still tied to my left wrist, and that little rush of recognition, of familiarity, of fondness for myself. This is me.

Gladness (13)

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I live in the palo verde in the woman’s courtyard. I have waited seven years to be up in this green tree, high above the moist earth that was my home. I sing to summer, cicada sounds in me. Summer serenade, stealthy buzz, begin and end, sudden, sultry, magic. I am a magic cicada. I can turn summer into fall, drive humans from their beds, angry shouts in the night, the slamming of windows. So now I like to stay where I am wanted. This palo verde likes me in her arms, rocks me in the breeze. I am more than a little in love with her. Serena, the woman calls her. She says it like a word in Spanish. She asked the tree’s name when she planted her and saw the word in her head, scrap of paper in her mind, words from an old typewriter like letters from her father when she was a little girl, the name Serena popping out. I didn’t think I’d ever love a tree like this, much less a human. But the woman likes me. She really likes me. And after all those angry windows closed against me in the dark, it is like heaven, like cotton candy, like marbles in the moonlight to feel the woman’s pleasure when I begin to sing. Ah, cicada. I hear her whisper, feel her cherishing my song. If she saw my bug body, I don’t know if she would be able to embrace me as wholly as she does my music. But I know she would honor me still, protect me in every way she can, bug body and all. It makes me want to cry, sitting in Serena in the early dusk, so lucky here in the warm desert sky, feeling the woman’s gladness as I begin to sing.

[Editor’s note: This is a slightly revised version of an 11-minute writing in response to a Natalie Goldberg prompt to write a “waking daydream” that I wrote downtown with Stef on Wednesday in the late morning with the misters on.]