These are the words of the bees: build, build, build. What interest have they in a white-veiled minion from another world who puffs smoke at them questioningly before scraping, scraping away their work as it rises to touch the inner cover? She is a Breaker, they think. She does not understand.
The chickens escaped last night at dusk from their makeshift pen. My one, my girl, my Henny Penny crouched dutifully as I approached. She had taken out the front of my garlic bed and found the sandy loam a thrill to scatter, vastly superior to the clayed crabgrass and nettle that I allow her to graze. She lifted her wings and bent her knees as I reached down for her, sure that somehow my fate was inevitably intertwined with her own. One liquid amber eye gazed quietly into mine, unabashed. She believes that this orchestra of feeding, fluffing and laying somehow centers around my peripheral presence. She knows me as the Gatekeeper. This is the mythology of chickens.
Death is all around me this week. People, animals, and even trees I love are dying, inexorably silhouetted at the threshold of another world. I am flooded with emotion -- care for their comfort, love and appreciation for the gift of their presence in my life, sadness to imagine their departure. I question my attachment, the hunger that I feel, the desire to sink myself into another being, seeking attunement. Am I looking to escape?
Walking in the cemetery with the children this afternoon, I find peace in breathing through the inner storm I weather. This is compost, I think. My heart is full of decay -- a celebration of life in the face of letting go. I am heating up, I think, getting up to temperature. This is what it feels like in the middle of the pile. Transition, fruition, life pulsing into form. I am the spiral filled with light, swinging arms outward into darkest space. One in a million.
The boys have stopped by some vinca vines. "Mom! Come here!" they say.
They are watching a gray squirrel. It does not run away, and this is odd. I tie up the dog and come to see.
The tiny squirrel moves back and forth beside them for some time, and finally I reach out to pet its soft silver fur. The squirrel's response is almost immediate. Within minutes, it is hiding beneath our still, squatted forms then dashing out again to look up at us expectantly. It is young, I surmise, too young to have fallen from the nest. How young, not even my iphone will tell me with exactitude.
And that is what one needs when considering what to do with a squirrel sitting on your shoulder. One needs clarity about its age, its circumstance. I had to decide whether or how to detach its path from our own. Then, what peace could be made in whether it was served in that deliberation?
We take the squirrel home. A local wildlife rehab center did not respond to our calls, and we pack it along with us in hopes of reaching them by evening. More internet research points to the likelihood that this little fellow is just on the edge of weaned independence and could, perhaps, be rescued yet by his own mother. We take him back.
Peacemaking again with our emotions -- worry, disappointment, gratitude for the crossing of paths. Then I receive a call from the wildlife rehab worker who assures us that our instincts are correct, the squirrel is probably starving and orphaned.
We meet the volunteer back at the cemetery, find the squirrel where we'd left it (we had to bolt when we first returned it and were followed even so), then we send the tiny shaking creature on its way in seasoned hands.
This is the way of interspecies communion, the unwords of all kinds who, in desperation seek to give and receive.
Attuned, I am, even if the pitch shakes me at such a vibration that I think to lose myself. The world is dying, dying, living all around and here is my honored place at the crossroads.
Such is my mythology.
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