Writing

Secretive Nature

I want to upcycle Congress into an old-growth forest.

My bird name would be the beaver-toothed ruminator.

I’m pretty sure the geese don’t call this place Kansas.

Starlings perch on power lines above the trainyard.

I just read about a type of sparrow that has a “secretive nature.” Intriguing.

One squirrel munches on an acorn while the others kuk and quaa over a Cooper’s hawk.

The great horned owl is out hunting on our street today. Between him and the Cooper’s hawk, the crows and blue jays are raising a racket.

Today, I saw the sparrow described as having a “secretive nature.” What a beauty.

I’m just here for the beauty.

No killdeer across the street. For now, the new development has won.

The recycling truck’s brakes sing like a forlorn bird.

One of the functions of language is to facilitate the creation of memories. Once we have memory, we have a past and a presumed future.

Language is not how we experience the world. It’s how we editorialize about our experiences.

As soon as I say “hawk,” I am no longer experiencing the hawk.

There’s a lot of goose poo on my shoe. I don’t know what to do.

Yesterday, I followed a kestrel through a small field.

Talk about theories all you like, but when it rains, go outside.

In place of leaves, red-winged blackbirds.

The pied-billed grebe’s white stomach shimmers like an ostrich egg.

Erratics

I love the maple more because of the cardinal, and I love the cardinal more because of the maple.

Black cattle rise from the ground like basalt erratics in a limestone world.

You do feel alive. You just don’t like how that feels.

What is an extra hour in sky-time?

It’s as if the entire red maple has become the female cardinal, a form of reverse camouflage.

Dropping conditioning is, in itself, a form of conditioning.

Shhh. The squirrels are napping.

Water that reflects the sky is full of sky.

The juncos are wonderful company this time of year.

My love of birds started years ago when I released a starling from my father’s trap.

I came home to a Cooper’s hawk perched on my fence.

I think it was a sharp-shinned hawk. And I think a blue jay imitated the alarm cry of a Cooper’s hawk when the sharp-shinned hawk arrived. (Update: This accipiter was later identified as a very young female Cooper’s hawk, so the blue jay used the right call after all.)

Two great horned owls appear to be competing for territory in our neighborhood.

These days with birds are magical.

I woke to ice in the birdbath and a mantle of apricot leaves in the still-green lawn.

I topped the birdbath off with water that wasn’t frozen. Within minutes, dozens of birds came to get a drink or take a bath.

I live between two flyways, so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on here birdwise.

I just saw a yellow-bellied sapsucker in our backyard. A downy woodpecker and a red-bellied woodpecker were back there, too.

I’m ready for my arms to serve as branches.

My neighbor is walking down the street with a large shamanic drum.

Every night, the sky turns into a stigmatic, bleeding from sudden wounds.

The birds have entered my dreams, pale and wandering.

Red Birds

Church bells, and two mourning doves flying toward them.

These birds are using me for my birdbath.

A blue jay flew up to my kitchen window and looked at me as if to say, Do you want your life to be wild, or do you want it to be precious?

I am a screen for the shadows of birds.

The birds are the sky’s shadow puppets.

Now a butterfly is at my window. And a stink bug.

On Nextdoor, my neighbors are trying to pair monarch caterpillars with the milkweed plants they need to survive.

Today is a long drive behind a garbage truck.

I am thankful for trees, which provide homes for so many animals.

On the water, twisted leaves look like origami swans.

Fall: An American white pelican circles a small lake in Kansas.

Nostalgia: missing the bald eagles I saw yesterday.

My fingers are still purple from cutting fresh beets.

I love a red bird on a brown fence.

It’s enough to hear the songbird. I don’t turn my head.

Earlier, I saw an old man carrying a large stuffed dog. I like your dog, I said. Don’t touch him, he replied.

Suffering is a dwelling with a large doorway but very little interior space.

The female cardinal is the color of the red maple’s turning leaves.

Wings and Air

Leaves from our red oak appliqué the lawn. The fall-blooming plants have lost their flowers, save for two azaleas. Butterflies and moths have been visiting the azaleas since the butterfly bushes started dying back. Above, I see woodpeckers from time to time. They dance up and down the trunks of our sweet gums. I’ve seen a slate-colored junco on two occasions. Both times, he was sneaking over the fence to take a dip in one of our birdbaths.

We have three birdbaths. Before we moved to this house, I never paid attention to birds, at least not close attention. The birdbaths came with the home, a gift of sorts from the previous owner. The birds who visit our yard regularly were also a gift. Shortly after moving here, I decided it was time to do something about my long-held desire to identify the birds I saw. I got my wish when I was given a set of bird flashcards and a pair of binoculars. The View-Master effect of the binoculars made the whole world pop to life. I couldn’t believe such wonder existed right outside my door. I’ve spent countless hours not only watching birds but also examining trees, the sky, squirrels, the texture of all manner of surfaces, the shrubs at the back of the property that lean into each other like old friends, and so on.

One of my favorite birds is the junco. I remember them from when we lived here years ago, before we moved away (and subsequently moved back). They frequented the yard at our first house. I remember that time fondly. My trauma was about half what it is now, though those earlier traumas were closer to me, more deeply imprinted, less smoothed by time, effort and consideration. Now, the most recent traumas are the jagged ones. They jar me from sleep at night and intrude on my waking hours.

I’ve been fighting for a long time, for myself and for others. For the most part, I feel unheard and unseen. I am frustrated by the lack of literacy around trauma, oppression, discrimination, and other issues that profoundly affect people’s health and well-being. I am frustrated that neurotypicality is imposed on all levels and that social constructs are mistaken for truths.

The birds help. Immensely. They don’t give me answers, and that’s the whole point of paying attention to them. They allow me to stay on a little island called here and now, unaffected by what’s happened in my past and unburdened by the extremely difficult work of being heard above the din of prevailing beliefs and values.

In these small slices of time, there is nothing wrong, nothing at all. The world is wings and air, and I am part of it.

Ordinary Birds

I am fascinated by ordinary birds.

All afternoon, two downy woodpeckers danced up and down the sweet gum tree.

Sprinklers have dressed the trees in dark skirts.

Jealousy: when the red-bellied woodpecker is in my neighbor’s yard, not mine.

Killdeers alight between two partially constructed mansions. For now, this land is still theirs.

Like the blind raccoon, I am afraid of wind, high grass, birds, and snow.

As I turned toward it, the light seemed to be a solid.

A squirrel and I startle one another.

I’ll watch the birds you ignore.

An American kestrel sits alone on a power line. It begins to rain.

Symmetry: six mourning doves evenly spaced on a neighbor’s cable line.

Dirt is my personal stylist.

Grebes float on the man-made lake as the sky drifts into night.

We all have to love something. Why not the cecropia moth?

Overhead, birds break like pool balls.

Poor vision turns fall leaves into cardinals.

Above, the turkey vulture looks like a scalloped black slip.

Sewage Creek

I came home to a downy woodpecker, a chipmunk, and a baby bunny. They were all in the yard together.

Walking leaf, you don’t look like the trees in these parts.

Praying mantis, I see you’ve come to my window again tonight.

I was offered a gondola ride on sewage creek. I said no.

Weeds teach me about the wind.

Daylily, how many fragile ribs guard your seeds?

Fall: Leaves flutter in our sentences.

Rain has turned the sweetgum bark tobacco brown.

My friend is standing in a field painting animals.

That perfect time in the garden when everything is dying but nothing is dead.

Lawn moths are the angels of this abandoned prayer labyrinth.

At the old golf course, two kestrels hunt for grasshoppers.

October: The old crabapple’s leaves are dipped in red wine.

Little blue heron, the lake has made a shimmering replica of you.

Night: We move toads off the road so they won’t get run over.

Beneath the harvest moon, the syncopated call of a great horned owl.

In their appliquéd ballgowns, late-blooming azaleas wait for suitors who never arrive.

Pollinators

Atop his favorite granite stone, my dearest chipmunk surveys his territory. There’s time to take it all in before the rain falls.

The rain is loosening the leaves from my red maple. What will I shed today?

I’m a fool like all the others: I follow the light.

Mine is also a life of enchantment.

Together, we are a different organism.

We stand looking at this root, and this root is fire.

The squirrel who has been nursing eats an acorn on my hammock.

A chipmunk uses railroad ties as a superhighway.

A shower of acorns. Look up! Two squirrels roughhouse in the old oak tree.

I am not alone. The cricket is here. The praying mantis is here. The chipmunk. The woodpecker. Two hummingbirds. And more. And more.

Moths are pollinators, too.

Someday, I will learn how to live. Until then, I will learn about life from the plants and animals in my backyard.

Did you know plants have memories? They learn how to not be afraid. They retain that information. If the Mimosa pudica can do it, so can I.

Mimosa pudica is also known as the sensitive plant, the shy plant, the touch-me-not plant. We could learn a lot from each other.

I saw the hawk flying low today, then high, a shadow traversing my neighbor’s roof.

Moon-Suns

The air is screaming, Hawk! Hawk! Hawk!

Hay bales settle into the shorn field.

I’ve been lost in a world of tiny mushrooms and painted lady butterflies.

Stained glass insect. Little windows in the air.

I want words to be smaller. I want to see the sky.

The sun, obscured by the moon, took on the shape of a moon. A confetti of moon-suns fell at my feet.

I will remember what I heard more than what I saw: hundreds of cicadas flexing their tymbals in the false-dark day.

And the one dying at my feet as we entered near totality.

I will remember silent streets and still air, charcoaled sky, the amber of streetlights.

I will remember any or all of this. Or none of it.

That old question surfaced: What matters?

I still don’t know. But here I am, with eyes.

Who am I without the barn swallows?

Tack Coat

The tack coat of dawn gives way to the scumble of morning.

Dawn. Hot pink rubbed over midnight blue. Sudden lightning. My dog in my arms, trembling.

A rabbit appears out of nowhere like a lost thought. I think of an old friend.

Some folks decorate their porches but never sit on them.

Little man down there putting away your grill, come out of your garage and look up.

Some people kill birds. Others put out bird feeders.

Tonight’s sunset turned the sky into a cauldron. Below, a thrasher the color of depleted soil foraged quietly beneath a sapling.

Birds define the air.

How do you see the air without the bird? Assume there are no trees.

In the sky, a great heron goes unnoticed by lovers on a picnic.

A tender young boy watches a pair of red-winged blackbirds as his friends taunt him.

A scissor-tailed flycatcher perches on a stop sign until I get too close with my camera.

The verses are in the land, in the trees before they became paper, in our hearts before they were rewritten by language.

I just saw a man texting while driving a tractor down a major thoroughfare.

I might be getting too involved with the animals who live in my yard.

The Loneliness of Recovery

I used to think to be not alone meant / never having to walk through the high wheat / or struggle in the water.

— Allison Seay

I am standing in the high wheat. Field with Sheafs, by August Haake (1911–1914), oil on cardboard. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

When I was a teenager, my mother’s best friend came over one night after a long absence from the weekly happy hour my mother hosted. When she arrived, the friend was serious, even somber. She stayed just long enough to tell my mother and their mutual friends that she wasn’t coming back to the group because she had quit drinking.

Couldn’t you just come and not drink, someone asked, flummoxed by the surprise announcement.

No, she said. And I can’t be around any of you again, not while you’re still drinking.

She explained that being around people who drank would jeopardize her recovery. She couldn’t be in that physical or psychological space anymore. My mother didn’t understand, or maybe she understood but didn’t accept her friend’s decision. This was, after all, the woman who had been there through everything with my mom. They’d known each other for more than thirty years. This woman even picked out something for my mother to wear to my father’s funeral. I remember her bringing a selection of outfits home for my mother to try on.

Nothing black, my mother had insisted. I hate it when widows wear black at funerals.

Her friend complied. She fanned out half a dozen wool and satin pieces in beryl blue, emerald green, and ruby red—the rich colors of a painted landscape. My mother sat slumped on the edge of her bed, barely present.

Get up and try these on, her friend coaxed.

Her concern for my mother was evident. It was one of those defining moments in a friendship. Through death, they had become even closer—friends for life, or at least that’s what everyone thought at the time.

After her announcement, my mother’s friend rose and walked purposefully through our paneled den, the one with the mirrored wet bar my father built before his death. She reached the thick cedar door and let herself out.

Empty Space

There are many differences between the alcohol recovery model and the mental health recovery movement. Still, situating myself within the recovery movement feels similar to leaving everyone and everything I’ve known, the way my mother’s best friend had to all those years ago. For one thing, there isn’t a recovery-oriented support group in my area. I don’t feel comfortable at local support groups that follow the disease model, suppress or dismiss research that challenges that model, treat the DSM as authoritative, teach people that medications are the best and often only option for managing their assigned illness, accept funding from pharmaceutical companies, and act as mouthpieces for those companies.

I’ve tried to take part in those groups—to create a space for myself and my view there—and I’ve been met with everything from dismissiveness to outright disdain. For me, they are not places where healing can occur. Rather, they are culdesacs that lead to feeling, and learning to be, what Lewis Mehl-Madrona describes as “forever ill.” In Coyote Wisdom, he writes:

On the down side [sic], support groups for particular illnesses sometimes encourage stories that keep people sick and support them in seeing themselves as ill. People who absorb these stories can come to define themselves as forever ill. A healing story needs to challenge their membership in the community of sufferers.

In my experience, label-specific support groups don’t tell healing stories or encourage peers to create those types of stories for themselves. Instead, I’ve heard group leaders refer to their own mental health labels as “awful,” “terrible” and “horrible.” I’ve seen peers internalize that language and mindset. This does an incredible disservice to the community and is, in my opinion, contemptible. I won’t set foot in those groups anymore because of the culture of self-loathing they cultivate.

Recently, I ran into someone from a group I used to attend. Though it was wonderful to see him, I wasn’t sure how to pick up where we left off more than a year ago. My DSM diagnosis has changed since I attended that group, but that information isn’t important because the DSM isn’t an accurate or helpful classification system. Whatever label I do or don’t have is just that: a label. My thyroid disease has also been addressed, but explaining how that affects my well-being is taxing for even the most attentive listener. So a silence opened in the conversation, like a crevasse in brittle ice. I stood on one side, he on the other. I care about him. I also care about myself and need to do what’s best for me, which includes walking purposefully on my own path, the one that leads to healing. Now I understand how space forms between people, like it did between my mother and her best friend.

Hello, Out There?

There are like-minded people in my area, and I’ve had a difficult time connecting with them. Often, when I reach out, I don’t get a response. I know survivors experience frustration, exhaustion, burnout, and a host of other issues related to trying to have their voices heard while also caring for themselves. Nobody in the recovery movement owes me anything, and I don’t want to take time or energy away from their important work. At the same time, it’s hard to go it alone when I know there are others in town who feel the same way as me. I like to imagine us coming together in friendship and shared purpose. (That’s my internal idealist talking. I’m trying to find my internal realist, but so far she’s eluded capture.)

I’ve had difficulty with recovery-oriented online support groups as well. Members seem to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with one another, suppressing individual voices, and creating caustic environments in other ways. It’s exhausting to take part in those groups. I often come out feeling worse than when I went in. Online groups also tend to share a great deal of misinformation about mental health, most of which goes unchecked. There are perspectives and opinions, certainly, and those should be respected. But sharing inaccurate information doesn’t help anyone.

Whether in person or online, it probably doesn’t help that, in addition to being an idealist, I’m sensitive, introverted, and have a low threshold for interpersonal strife—either experienced or witnessed. Still, I’m here. I want to speak, write, and act in accordance with what I value, which is a model that promotes well-being over ill-being, individual approaches over generalized protocols, and healing over harm.

I’m over here in the high wheat, in the water. I will stay here even if nobody joins me.


Aside: Reaching Across the Crevasse

One way the mental health recovery movement differs from the alcohol recovery model is that there’s really no room for leaving anyone behind. That silence I felt when talking with my friend recently? I decided to try to connect with him to the best of my ability. He’s my people. Everyone with lived experience is my people, and I am their people. I can’t forget that. While I do need to distance myself from the disease model and the “therapeutic” frameworks that fall out of it, I don’t need to distance myself from anyone who’s open to where I am coming from, even if they remain on the other side of the crevasse.

In part, I told my friend that I am looking at well-being as opposed to ill-being these days, and at a mental health model that supports everyone (regardless of DSM label or lack thereof) having the tools and supports to live meaningful lives. I added that I believe we can all heal from trauma, adversity, and distress—which comes in many forms and touches most of our lives in one way or another. Finally, I said that I don’t think the medical system (physical or mental) goes far enough in not just treating illness and ill-being but in showing us ways that we can thrive and experience well-being.

I guess that’s my new elevator pitch, though it’s a little long. I’ll work on it.