if you want to sink into the part of you that is wild, maybe this will help. i captured a tiny audio of the call of the sandhill crane for you.

to me, their call sounds ancient, almost prehistoric, as it echoes far and wide.

(i was wondering if they were mating when i captured this; their call was near-constant for a day and a night and a day. every time i went outside, or opened a window, there it was.)

{an irregular series of postcards from our wild friends. this one is from a deer named sam. previous postcards: fred, constance.}

i shed my other antler today. (i shed the first one last week.) i bumped a tree branch on my way through the forest and it fell right off.

i will confess that the falling antler startled me at first. i leaped away out of instinct. but when i came back and sniffed it cautiously, it smelled like me, so i knew it was all right.

my head feels so light now!

(have you ever had antlers? i don’t know if i would recommend them. they really do stick out to the side.)

your friend, sam

two sundays ago, while (not) waiting for me to take a photo, atlas managed to hobble a back paw while wrapping the leash around and around a front paw and felled himself like a tree on some very prickly grasses. he cried. i had to quickly climb up the ledge and rescue him (from himself).

this past sunday, atlas flung himself down on every single patch of green grass in the yard and wriggled around on it with glee.

on monday night, atlas saw ten deer in the three mile drive home from the lake. he has been running in his dreams ever since.

may the birds sing to you.
may the wind walk with you.
may the earth support you.
may the sun, moon & stars shine upon you.

the light in me honors the light in you.

good morning, good morning, good morning.

this past winter, for the first time in decades, lake superior completely (or nearly) froze over.

i live on a peninsula. when the wind arrives, in almost every direction, it has traveled over an icy cold lake to reach us. needless to say, spring comes slowly this year.

on sunday, my sister and i (and pup) set out to find breaking ice.

we found the tobacco river, straining at its banks as it careened around a corner and crashed into lake superior.

we found fishermen, in both the wild mouth of the tobacco and in the calm lake next to it.

we also found ice along the shore in lac la belle. there was no wind that day, so the sheets of ice were quiet and still.

the next day, i packed a picnic supper and we set out again.

this time, we made our way to big traverse bay. the week prior, a strong wind had blown ice floes ashore.

most of the ice shelving was on private property, but the ice that we saw was glorious.

and oh, the absolute stillness of the bay and the colors of sky & water.

perfectly simply completely wondrous.

as philip pullman said, “it’s worth being cold for that.”

sometimes i think i am a totally wrong person to tell you about life near the wild, because i am not at home in the wild.

i like my creature comforts and have gone on exactly one backpacking trip. i once spent an interminably long night in a tent absolutely convinced that a raccoon was outside, about to claw its way into the tent and kill atlas, only to discover in the morning that it was a bird. i have no sense of direction; i can be trusted to go exactly the wrong way when following a map; and compasses confuse me. my dad has a degree in forestry and i have a phenomenal memory and yet i can never remember any of his wisdom about plants + trees. i know very little about animals. i am not quiet on my feet in the woods; i can probably be heard for miles. i tried my hand at wildcrafting last fall, gathering clover to make a steeped tea, only to discover that if i had made + drunk it, i probably would have gotten sick because apparently you can’t use wet clover. i do not like to pee in the woods. i have no interest in hunting. i caught one tiny fish in my life and it wriggled so much that it freaked me out and i had to run upstream, dipping the fish in the water every few steps, to find my brother so he could take the poor fish off the hook for me.

and yet, here i am, where the wild things are.

i love it here. i always have.

last week, i watched fox cubs pounce on one another like puppies.
the week before, i heard wolves howling in the early evening.
today, i watched the white tail of a deer as it bounded away from us.

i want to tell you about the wild because it is full of wisdom and full of wonder. when you’re surrounded by traffic & buildings & busyness & noise, sometimes it’s easy to forget this.

but the wild is our ancestral home, and we all have a wildness within us.

wishing you a moment of magic in which you can see that this is so.

i spent the wee hours of my tuesday morning watching the lunar eclipse.

it was so worth it: captivating + awe-inspiring + magical.

did you see it?

{this adventure comes to you by way of a chickadee named constance. previous adventurers: fred.}

i was having a snack in the lilac bush today when another bird joined me. this bird was black and white too, but it had a distinctive red stripe on its head.

a new friend, i thought. i took one last bite and flew to another branch so my new friend could take a turn at the feeder.

you won’t believe what happened. instead of flying up and nibbling at the seeds, like we chickadees do, this bird began to peck at one of the thickest branches of the lilac bush.

rap-rap-rap. rap-rap-rap. rap-rap-rap.

what was that bird doing?

was it writing a secret message? was it playing music? was it knocking birdseed to the ground?

i watched for a bit, but the bird was so absorbed in its task that i didn’t want to interrupt. i finally flew away, still wondering. i’ve been asking my friends and family, but they don’t know what it was doing either.

maybe one day i will see the bird again and solve this mystery.

(don’t tell anyone, but i tried pecking at a branch myself. i got a tiny dent in my beak and a not-so-tiny headache. maybe you could try and let me know what happens?)

your friend, constance

“When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the sound of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light.”

~ Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water