Birds and fear-it's comforting eventually, I promise!
Birds, Linda Gregg, Winter Squash, Ginger & White Bean Soup
My mom was deathly afraid of birds.
Our house is styled a bit like a farmhouse even though it’s in the middle of Bar Harbor, across the street from the YMCA’s back, dirt parking lot, secure behind a row of tall, cedar bushes that hide our porch, our windows, our selves.
There is a deep urge in me sometimes to just hermit myself and just do the work, to write, to cook, to paint, to help others make stories, and I’ll occasionally freeze in terror when someone knocks on the door or calls on the phone, or whenever anyone shocks me out of the realization that I am not alone.
“You are a bit elusive,” one of my friends told me when we were walking through town together, past the storefronts full of t-shirts and mugs, the ice cream shops and restaurants, the big mailbox full of free masks.
I said, “Oh. I don’t mean to be elusive. I’m just scared.”
The day was scented with salty ocean air and all the houses and stores that we passed had lights on and the hum of music and videos and laughter.
“Scared of what?” she asked.
I didn’t know.
But I did know that I didn’t want to be controlled by those fears, that I wanted to sit out on the front porch and talk to people as they passed by rather than hunkering in my backyard.
In our backyard, we have a couple of bird feeders that Shaun (my husband) put up and is in charge of. My parents divorced when I was three or so, and my mom was horribly afraid of birds—all birds, even cartoon birds. So, we never had bird feeders at her house. And the crows cawing in the trees, the jays making the feeders rock with their weight, the graceful hovering of hummingbirds, and the tiny steps of finches thrill me like they are magic, forbidden magic.
My mother would not be able to go in our Bar Harbor backyard.
All my life, I’ve wanted to have a bird land on my hand. I’m not sure where that urge came from. A passing romanticism? A proof that my soul was good enough for a bird to trust? A way to convince myself that I was linked to something bigger and more profound than I was?
Sometimes when I go out into our backyard, the birds startle and rush into flight and I coo to them, “No. I’m not a threat. I’m not a threat. I’m just here. . . . Um, we gave you the food in the bird feeders. Friendsies?”
The pigeons are usually the boldest and they’ll just watch me from the eaves of our house and sometimes they’ll coo back. A tiny trickle of adrenaline will rush through me and I’ll whisper, “Yes.”
Sometimes, I think that the backyard birds are elusive, but they probably just want to be safe like I do.
But sometimes in that urge for safety we miss opportunities. We are stuck wondering: What is it to be whole?
It’s so much easier to answer: What is it to be broken?
When I was little, after my stepfather died, I would go out into the woods and flop in the tall ferns, smell the New Hampshire soil above the hard granite and stay absolutely still.
Waiting.
If I was still enough, I hoped, a bird would think I was just part of nature, that my corduroy pants were dirt and my K-Mart shirts were flowers or stones. If I was still enough, I was sure, a bird would come and land on me. We’d be—connected.
The world would go on all around me. Squirrels would hop from pine tree to spruce to oak to maple. Chipmunks would scurry along the ground. Birds would alight and gather. Deer would tiptoe by.
And I’d be waiting. Hoping a bird would come along, land in my small, upturned palm and claim me as part of it all—connected.
But I already was. I just didn’t realize it. A deer smelled my hair. A chipmunk scurried across my stomach. A squirrel would drop acorns near my feet. My spine rested against the ferns, the moss, the soil and for hours would feel the rustlings of a world beneath me, rooting. Connected.
Sometimes, my mom would come and find me and yell, “What are you doing out here? You’re going to make yourself sick.”
She’d hurry me back home, complaining of the dirt on my legs, the flicks of moss, the ferns that had somehow twined themselves into my hair. “Look at your fingernails, Carrie! What am I going to do with you?”
I’d be ordered into the bath or shower, to clean my nails, wash my hair, and be just myself again.
To be whole is to be afraid, to long for safety, but also to stretch beyond it. To be an artist or a writer or even a person is to remember that we are not just individuals, scared all by ourselves, acting all elusive even when our hearts pine for connections. Mortality is terrifying sometimes. Pain? Not so fun. Fear and rejection and ridicule sucks.
Like the birds often fear us for our predatory natures, we can really fear each other, fear exposure to trolls, to negative-nellies, to grumpy people in restaurants, shops, or even our own Facebook, Twitter or TikTok pages and definitely be afraid of those bigger villains who do unspeakable things.
When we try to connect, we can be admonished by people who love us and look after us, people like my sweet, fearful mom who worried about the dirt I was collecting, the potential bugs, ants, ticks, predators.
But we’re bigger than those fears. We’re more than our resentments, our pain. We’re more than our flaws and egos. We are part of something huge and connected and divine, connections so massive that it’s hard to comprehend sometimes.
A bird can’t land on our hands unless we show them our palms.
We can’t heal or help or love other people unless they step outside.
One weekend, I went on the hammock in the backyard to read a book for work and less than a minute after I flopped down there, a sparrow alighted on my shoulder. She was barely on me for five seconds and her wings fluttered and beat the whole time.
But she was there.
It’s okay to be elusive sometimes, even fearful sometimes; it can help protect us, but we don’t want our fear to become our prison. We are bigger than that, our whole nature is bigger than that. We just have to reach out our hand and let the bird land in it and settle for and rejoice in a shoulder perching instead, and we have to be the bird and not always fly off or hide away, building our nests bigger and bigger until we can’t find the way out.
There is a way out if we want. But we have to want it.
A POEM
Let Birds
by Linda Gregg
Eight deer on the slope
in the summer morning mist.
The night sky blue.
Me like a mare let out to pasture.
The Tao does not console me.
I was given the Way
in the milk of childhood.
Breathing it waking and sleeping.
But now there is no amazing smell
of sperm on my thighs,
no spreading it on my stomach
to show pleasure.
I will never give up longing.
I will let my hair stay long.
The rain proclaims these trees,
the trees tell of the sun.
Let birds, let birds.
Let leaf be passion.
Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be
between us. Let joy.
Let entering. Let rage and calm join.
Let quail come.
Let winter impress you. Let spring.
Allow the ocean to wake in you.
Let the mare in the field
in the summer morning mist
make you whinny. Make you come
to the fence and whinny. Let birds.From All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems by Linda Gregg. Copyright © 2009 by Linda Gregg
THE SOUP: Winter Squash, Ginger & White Bean Soup
I mention the Horn of the Moon cookbook a lot because it was super pivotal to me in college when I was in an apartment and not on the college meal plan (too expensive).
Moosewood and Horn of the Moon taught me to cook really, despite my mom and all my aunts. It’s a bit late in the season for this, but I’m going to share it anyway.
Winter Squash, Ginger & White Bean Soup
1 cup dry white beans
2 lbs. winter squash
2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 cup chopped onions
1 cup sliced celery
1 Tbsp. minced fresh ginger
2 tsp. minced fresh garlic
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup minced fresh parsley
Cook the white beans in salted water until tender.
Cook and puree the squash.
In a soup pot, heat the oil, then sauté the onions, celery, ginger, and garlic, stirring occasionally. When tender and beginning to brown, add the squash puree. Add the beans to the pot using a slotted spoon. Add some of the bean cooking liquid, vegetable stock, or water to obtain the desired consistency. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir in the fresh parsley.
THE PHOTO
I walked by these flowers on Monday as I was rushing to a meeting that I was covering for the paper.
Everything was gray. The road. The sky. The granite steps of this house.
And then there were these.
I stopped.
Sometimes it’s good to just stop, you know?
BONUS HAPPINESS
QUICK NOTE
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