This morning before our native star clears the eastern mountains my dogs and I roam on a spring day offering us a remembrance of winter. While moving from the eastern fields to the woods in the west, old blind Duncan and older deaf Bella begin their play fighting in their reliable everyday way at the same reliable everyday spot near the spring-fed creek filled with water forget-me-nots almost on the verge of their reliable blue dazzle. But the snow promising pewter skies and knife-edged winds lull them back into other memories–for a while.
Every step I take here feels like a gift. And I know it may not be shaped as a gift, especially not offered for me, I'm acquainted with my insignificance; know I'm not being chosen to receive such a gift and know I am neither deserving nor undeserving of such a gift. I know it's the earth and sky doing their thing and I happen to be here doing mine. But still every part of being here feels like a gift and so I receive it gratefully as such, knowing that it is so undeniably more generous, vast and replete with significant goodness and nourishment than I could ever return, not with the entirety of this life or many lives.
And it is then where, from the hills to the northwest, I hear the faint sound of the honking wild geese. I know these are not passersby. These are the geese that return every year to the pond here, returned just a few weeks ago, this same couple who have been returning for at least 10 years, taking up the same nesting site on the pond island and usually with a younger straggler goose or two who stay a while when they first return but then eventually fly off to elsewhere while the couple stays to breed and hatch their eggs.
This morning they circle above my head 3 1/2 times and each circling is such a wordless thrill that opens a threshold to such a sense belonging. And with the pond as their destination, on their last circuit they are so close I feel the gust of air from the loud beating of wings and the disturbed pressure of the currents above me and the reliable sensations of excited awe that come over me humble my bones. And then as they so quickly and startling land on the pond with their harsh cries and striking wings I hear the splashing, surging water as their great bodies beat and rush through it and then I erupt in wide smiles then laughter until my body bends over and tears of something that feels like grief hit the cold soil under my feet although I don't really know if it's grief or something I can't name, but it's always there when I feel my greatest joy. And like a movie spinning through my mind at a dizzying speed the layered atrocities also occurring in the world flow through my body and inner vision. What I do with this sense and vision happens in ways, realms and time incomprehensible to me. And I recognize this is a reliable offering too, this gift of being able to feel and feel all of it, not selective, not opinionated, not choosing or denying, just being here with all of it; either up close or at a distance, wherever I happen to land. There is nothing aphoristic here, no conclusions being drawn.
Just the endless beauty of wind and water, dogs and me, and the cyclical return of a few very beloved wild geese.