summer_jackel

OK, it's not quite a whole month late.

I want to remember the cricket who sang this summer in the loose tangle of semi-intentional garden outside my bedroom. For the warm and shortening nights I would listen to its song through my open door, and let it calm me into sleep.

Twice I saw the creature, unexpectedly in the middle of the day. A lovely little thing, fleet and brown, its carapace sturdy and beetle-ish, its antennae charmingly long; I do not think I appreciate insects enough. I dared to hold the pretty, delicate creature briefly on my finger before it leapt away.

October is soon, and by then the crickets will be done. I do not know how much longer it will sing, but that final night is imminent. It was a beautiful thing that I was able to enjoy briefly and will, I think, love always. I want to remember.

*

The roadkill saddened me more than usual today. A mother raccoon and three half-grown young, a mangled jackrabbit a few miles down the road, all on a clean and warm September morning. Driving past, I observed my usual brief respects for lives given and appreciated the beauty of these things, even in death. Or perhaps the ending only heightens them: the softness of a gray pelt, the long and exquisitely clean length of bone of the hare’s light foreleg.

Why should we tend to feel a deeper sorrow for the death of the young? It is the nature of growth to be difficult, for the wild to be hard. Young things often make the best food and are the most easily lost; for a wild animal to see maturity is a real accomplishment.

We should never take survival into adulthood for granted, survival at all. I think that it is in the human’s future-thinking mind to grieve the loss of potential, something that might have been and isn’t now, but really we are dying every moment and to live with this is less comfortable than to mourn an abstraction.

That fine length of bone, the softness in a dead animal’s coat, the pang of longing I feel that seems as vivid as the memory of blood on pavement in the rain---they are now, they are all that is, all that will become in this breath, this ending.

*

The season changed today. I went to bed last night and it was summer; when I awoke, autumn had arrived. What is this feeling, how do I know? The flavor in the air, perhaps, the leaves gone yellow and the morning cold, everywhere the taste of joyful endings.

*

I have never touched the land of the Midwest, but high above it I found myself in the midst of unexpected wonder. I had heard of the great storms, and seen the pictures with their endless flat vistas cut through with lighting in searing pink and hot blue. Now I was just to the side of one and, glued to my scratched little airplane window and suspended far from earth, could see the hugeness of the storm all around and above and dizzyingly far below, all of everywhere. I could see in patches, at any rate. The plane's lights dimmed and its passage turbulent, the world outside was sullen, opaque black. Then lightning would cut across the sky, and again and again in great, searing branches, everywhere at once until the whole sky was illuminated into an alien terrain.

I stared mutely, shocked and unprepared for this level of beauty. In thrall to a wonder that reduced me to unthinking awareness, focused wholly on the image of this moment, I tried to witness as openly as I could, to drink of this overflowing wonder as deeply as I could manage. Its lights would arc on for their few seconds, and the opaque clouds would become deep, swirling corridors, tunnels and vortices. Was this real, I wondered, transported with frightened joy. Could it be true that I have the privilege and the luck to be here and to see this by utter chance?

Other, more contained and intentional fires in the sky witnessed later in this journey invoke emotions less raw, but more compelling than I'd prefer to admit. I do not believe that my fondest dreams will come true if I only work hard and want them badly enough, no matter how lovely a fantasy it makes and no matter how sweet it is to pretend it might be real. The satisfactions in life, the sudden, wrenching bounties of danger and wonder are rarely expected or intended. Small and huge, they fill our lives with passing magnificence, little bites of perfection. The great holinesses, the suspensions within lightning, serve to remind. See there, the shapes the wind makes in the dry silver grass of the clearings in my home forest, the fascinating verdance of a tropical place touched briefly, the odd pang of joy that comes sometimes from the mere presence of one I love: they surround constantly. Whether or not my dreams come true is immaterial.

*

And now I am transported to a deliciously alien place, a tropic I have never seen. I find it more inviting than I expected, full of lizards and moisture and greenness; best of all, ponds are everywhere, swampy and inviting, choked with lilies. I resist the urge to immerse myself in muck, to roll in it.

Watching from a moving car, a brief encounter: there is something in this small pond. There it rises, dark and indistinct, moving the weeds, rippling a surface of sweet dark water that keeps its secrets.
Catfish? Alligator? It is only a slippery darkness and it has some size. There is no way of knowing, and I am a stranger to this place. I cannot even guess.

These things, then, I learn in the mysterious movement of some creature beneath still water, from the immensity of sky and the line of a jackrabbit’s foreleg, from the even, sleeping breathing of my beloved and the emotion it invokes and the song of a doomed cricket: not to know. To desire without expectation. To love without attachment. To live, and have that be enough.