I was holding my iphone aloft, Merlin Bird ID recording songs and calls in the foggy pre-dawn air, bird names unspooling as the app identified them : Violet-green Swallow, Red-shouldered Hawk, Black Phoebe, Allen’s Hummingbird, Hutton’s Vireo, Cassin’s Vireo, Purple Finch, Spotted Towhee, Townsend’s Warbler, Rufous Hummingbird, Wrentit, Western Warbling Vireo, Steller’s Jay, Hermit Thrush, Cedar Waxing. American Robin.
Now Birdsong is beautiful whether or not you have a clue to the identity of bird you are hearing ; I remember thinking it seemed an impressively long list, a fine start to spring. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology app even provides you with a photograph of each bird you are hearing and on this morning the menagerie around me proved to be beautiful, small, distinct, emerald colored. I could only identify three little fellows dive bombing the hedges, careening across the sky. So much life above and, come to think of it, below me. How dumb I was to almost all of it.
And that’s when it happened. I was standing at the edge of a meadow where our farm meets the forest. Turned off the app, put the phone down, closed my eyes. Just listening, sightless, to all the life lifting off and landing. And I just ‘stepped off’ as gentle as you please, one instant listening to all the beautiful fluttering life, the next just …being… in it.
Small word ‘in.’ Ranges from ‘in the market looking for tomatoes,’ to ’in the throes of death.’ We are always, ‘in’ life, doing something or looking for something to do. But in that fragment of time before I opened my eyes I went from being a participant in life - woman who needed a coffee, Woman who needed to start harvesting flowers for the restaurant before the sun came up, old Woman with aching back, remanent of an Ada Limon poem stuck in her head, to something else. Something I could not name, but felt, deeply. It was as if the line between my body and the world wavered and then, for an instant, dissolved. Reality slipped a sprocket, and in that space a pure kind of consciousness and a fantastical sense of … belonging. When I opened my eyes the sensation disappeared, but the intricate beauty of everything around me remained. I must tell you the way it all flowed together was astounding. Nature is astounding.
Down in Healdsburg the next day I dropped into Levin & Co and bought Michael Pollan’s new book ‘A World Appears.’ Pollen is a wonderful writer. For his entire career he has been grasciously circling notions of what makes us tick, how we think about and moderate the world to suit us as humans, what may just lay beyond those fragile connections. I’ve yet to get to the part which might help explain where I landed that morning with the birds, more to the point, what drives the need we all have to feel true belonging. Irreligious all my life, I’m crap at meditation - my moment with the birds was not casting my eyes to Heaven in search of a spiritual connection nor going deep within, peace through the abdication of self.
Engagement is not the same thing as belonging. In this technologically driven moment it may seem to be the most valuable thing about us as humans - but it’s not. It’s our ability to connect, to truly belong to the living world, to this Earth, emphatically, warily, with curiousity and, eventually, with love.
Happy Earth Day. We hope you have the desire and freedom to get out there into it, let enfold you. Don’t ‘pay attention‘ or ruminate on anything other than the breath in your lungs, the sweet smell of flowering branch, color that doesn’t need adjusting. Spring has come on fast and furious. This one is a pip.
Images above, and Below, CC Jil Hales, were all shot in the last week up here on the ridge: flowering Cherry and Apple trees, Daffodils, Wild scapes, Hellebores, Lilic, Roses, Ceanothus, Ixia, Hyacinth, Iris, Bowl toothed Iris, Peonies, Quince, FavaBean, yarrow, redwood sorrel, poppies, euphorbia, snowballs, tulips, crocus, blue-eyed grass, scabosia - and that’s just a shortlist I can identify. Would that Dan was here right now.
Good news: he’s coming!
For those of you who don’t know Daniel Carlson, He’s Lukka’s Partner in life and travel, also Barndiva Farm whisperer, helping design our garden programs for over a decade. We are incredibly proud of the name he is making for himself in the UK - thrilled he will now be able to divide his time with us in Northern California going forward. Daniel has had two wonderful mentions this spring in illustrious gardening magazines: Gardens Illustrated and House & Garden, UK. Instrumental assisting Jonny Bruce on the concept, design and labor helping launch Jonny’s The Field Nursery in the Cotswolds, Dan’s quote in the March issue of GI says it all: “We need to act in partnership with plants and ecology, and not assert dominance over our plots.”
In the UK House and Garden we hope you can read about Jonny’s remarkable career at Great Dixter where the Dan/Jonny connection ignited. Jonny is also the guardian of Derek Jarman’s infinitely interesting Prospect Cottage in Kent. It was his experience at the pioneering nursery De Hessenhof which has shaped The Field Nursery. He is not alone in hoping it will be emblematic of where ‘commercial’ garden centers may be heading. More and more gardeners are leaning in to designing with plants that are climate and water sensitive, habitat friendly. The Field Nursery will propagate the plants it grows and sells- think slow-grown potted plants and bare root perennials - a return to traditional nursery practices before the big trucks of plastic start arrived from miles and often countries away. In addition to reducing the need for plastic, Jonny’s approach has the advantage of growing plants with stronger root systems, reducing the need for excessive fertilizers. Adaptive landscapes that encourage insect life, that grow fro the understanding that as precious as your sweet plot may be to you, what lies just over the fence or in the next field or meadow is part of the worlds - landscape as well.
Throughout history Nature has provided us with food, and solace. She has provided energy, and shelter. Being Human, even before we ‘learned’ to be civilized, depended upon cooperation, a working together that was not built on profit margins so much as shared goals, focused one thing: survival. But What does it mean to survive right now? What can it mean - and for anyone with children this is the essential question- to thrive? Conversations Worth Having returns in August. Stay tuned!
It’s not too late!
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