This was in my inbox this morning, from Brooklyn Backyard naturalist extraordinaire, Matthew Wills. Matthew took the cranky wind right out of my sails, as I had been working up another jeremiad, but one glance at that impossibly delightful creature turned me inside out, or, as Robert Frost so eloquently expressed it in his poem “Dust of Snow”:
The way a crow shook down on me
The dust of snow from a hemlock tree,
Has given my heart a change of mood,
And saved some part of a day I had rued.
Anyone who has witnessed the gyroscopic mating ritual antics of the American Woodcock will know that a timberdoodle’s aerial dance makes a crow’s lifting off from a branch downright prosaic, but Frost’s image reminds us how capricious is our inner mood, how eternally open it is to being turned inside out and upside down. Such transformative movements are at the heart of what it is to be human, and they come most graciously from observing the easy wisdom of the natural world.
While the New York Times gushes one-year retrospectives, and the wide world, in another moment of eager and innocent anticipation of a savior – not from the grim reaper of the pandemic, but the cynical grimmer reaper of the pandemic profiteers –
embraces a scientific whistleblower’s warning, my Tuesday timberdoodle wants to sing from the top of my vernal flight:
The true silver bullet for what ails humanity right now is COURAGE, in the pursuit of TRUTH. And while you are making that exhausting but essential search, take time to laugh, to witness the woodcock’s vernal extravagance, and maybe even make – or vicariously take – a madcap pilgrimage.