Glimpses of the Past and Being Present to the Present in these Times of Covid

Little Willow was just dozing off for the night when we heard the low throaty “Hoo Hoo...Hoo Hoo” and then a response, “Hoo..Hoo..Hoo..Hoo”, of owl calls closer than I have ever heard them in the 15+ years we have lived here on unceded Ohlone land.

I’ve been noticing the eerie silence of the skies since the airports have severely limited air travel in the past few weeks. It makes sense that these quieter skies may have bestowed a greater sense of safety for the owls and other birds.

In the book The Ohlone Way, author Margolin hauntingly depicts the SF Bay Area skies of the late 1800’s as being filled with birds of such magnitude and biodiversity it was absolutely breathtaking. He speaks of the skies darkening at times when the birds took flight en-mass.

We live in the wake of the profound poverty of the loss of that biodiversity, that life, our beautiful bird ancestors. It’s a loss we can hardly begin to grasp because we don’t know what we are missing. This occurs also with the slow death we notice daily on the roadside as we drive through our neighborhoods and towns.

The “Hoo Hoo...” echoing through the night was made all the more precious, all the more magical tugging at the Source of my soul to do whatever it is I can do to be a voice for the Earth in the ways I am able to especially in these precarious times when so much is at stake and we don’t know where all of this is going.

As nourishment for our tattered hearts I recall a poem by Wendell Berry called “The Peace of Wild Things”

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~

May we all rest in the grace of the world.

May we all be free.

May it be so.