Informal ornithology and casual spirituality

There’s something about this life that compels you to imbue everything with narrative. A storm is never just a storm. A bird is never just a bird. Absent any social structure, you look to the natural world for rhythm. Absent any human support, you attach to whatever you can.

Earlier this spring, or actually at the end of winter if we’re marking seasons by the absence or presence of snow, as is natural in this climate, I hung a suet feeder outside the cabin for the various birds I routinely see in the vicinity and over the ensuing weeks observed the results from the kitchen window.

I had the following to say at the time:

A hierarchy has emerged wherein one downy woodpecker (the smallest variety of woodpecker in North America, but nevertheless a bully) holds dominion over the other birds due to both its relative size and the adeptness of its beak at pecking things harder than suet. This is a job for which it is overtrained. It gets a turn at the feeder whenever it likes, and as a result has taken more than its fair share of profit. Only a particularly bold black-capped chickadee has dared challenge the woodpecker on occasion, and has seemingly succeeded only in making itself annoying. The tufted titmice get along well with the black-capped chickadees and the two will happily peck side by side. The dark-eyed juncos, with their little snow-dipped bellies, stick mainly to the ground where they collect seeds that have been cast carelessly to the snow by the woodpecker, for whom such losses are trivial.

Only glancingly implicated in this report is my particular affinity for the dark-eyed juncos. In addition to feeling a kindred identification with their combination of shrewdness and laziness that might be termed efficiency, I favor the juncos because they did me the honor of having their babies in my woodshed last spring. This year they, or those babies, have returned. I noticed one morning last May that nestled between a lamp and a rafter, constructed from moss and pine needles and human hair, presumably my own, was a little nest. It was too high up for me to see inside, but I balanced carefully on an upturned log, afraid to breathe, reached my phone high enough to take a picture, and there they were: five perfect eggs.

I checked on them daily. The nervous parents (male juncos are involved fathers) who were always close by seemed to accept over time that no harm would come from me. I felt chosen, or at least not avoided, and we anticipated together the day the eggs would hatch. Unfortunately it was market day when it finally happened, so I missed the whole event, but I found them there afterwards, a precious mass of fluff and beaks and unopened eyes. All five had made it.

I continued to visit them every day. They would open their beaks when I spoke to them. They grew quickly and became more and more bird-shaped over the course of two weeks, until finally the nest was too cramped for the five of them, and upon my visit one day they all flew out at once. I never saw them return to the nest again. In an instant they had shot out of infancy and joined the perilous world, apparently unafraid, a sudden burst through an invisible barrier that could never be unburst. I wondered if my presence had interfered with their natural timing and precipitated their departure, but I think they were just ready and it took little for them to realize it.

You would probably imagine that loneliness would be my biggest emotional hurdle out here; witness my intense investment in a family of birds. At times I’ve been tempted to run with this tidy narrative myself—I’m alone, I’m lonely, boo hoo—although it’s usually impeded by a certain nonresonance I’ve always felt with the word “lonely,” both because I think to use it would be to admit defeat and because I can’t identify in specific what lonely actually feels like, therefore I must not be. Upon more recent reflection, it occurred to me that a fish probably doesn’t know it’s wet. It’s hard to name what you’ve never not known.

I’m talking here about the pervasive loneliness of being alone in one’s own mind, the singularity of being known only to oneself, which isn’t assuaged by the mere presence of others nor worsened by their non-presence, and which moving to the woods didn’t originate in me. The woods did, though, make objective my subjective sense of isolation, physicalizing an internal state as an external reality in an attempt to force myself to contend with it. If being alone is my fate, I reasoned, then let me light out to the middle of the forest and really be alone; if these are the waters I must always navigate, then let me dive straight to the bottom and learn to live in that pressurized darkness. Then it can never hurt me again.

In the process of contending with “it,” the deep lake in the dark wood, an unexpected consequence was that I began, perhaps out of necessity, to semi-believe in the semi-magical.

I do not consider myself a spiritual person¹ and in fact have expressly denounced the entire concept on multiple occasions—I simply find more sense in a natural explanation for the world around us, including us—but since moving to rural New England, I’ve come to better understand the impulse. At certain times of evening in certain seasons, when the sun falls below the treeline and bare branches and burnt out stumps cast shadows sharp as a needle that stretch out morbidly until they cloak it all, you can understand how people came up with witches. Equally, you can understand how people came up with gods.

Solitude compels you to cast around for supernatural support. I see the full moon and think of transformation; I hear a raven and think of protection. In my most depleted moments, something as usual as the wind passing through the pines seems to command an ancient and almighty authority that I hope, and usually assume, is on my side. An unvoiced plea emerges from the far bottom of me: Please. I need help. Please.

Spirituality is ultimately a countermeasure to loneliness. We look for evidence that we were not walked out on, that the same force that created us holds us still. In the sunrise we find a daily reiteration of presence: first light’s proof that overnight we were not abandoned, a simple reassurance all but guaranteed to come through every time. What the scientifically minded and spiritually inclined have in common is a turning of eyes skyward, searching for a sign we’re not alone. Many of us want a sense that our lives are being co-authored, if not fully ghostwritten. It is all, simply, less lonely.

It doesn’t matter to me that I don’t believe in this author existentially, because I believe in it symbolically. There’s power even in this half-belief, in halfway giving yourself over to something that can do more than you can, because it will in turn reflect its power back to you and suffuse you with the strength to do more than you could before. What we usually refer to as a higher power is more like a mirror on the ceiling.

By taking my life off-path, at least for some interval of time, I’ve broken a certain social agreement, the one that says we will participate in society, we will be employed by a company, we will keep up with the news and shake our heads about it, we will “hit the gym,” we will “grab a coffee,” we will check out the cool bars, we will keep houseplants, that this is the stuff of life. To violate these terms requires a profound degree of faith in oneself and also in a more primal definition of living. A great bolster to this faith is the rational understanding that it does me more good to imagine that I am in some ethereal way not alone than it does to imagine that by abandoning society, some collective spirit of humanity has abandoned me too, that some abiding source of goodness will no longer abide me.

We look for a witness to our lives. That has never been clearer to me than now, having disenrolled myself from being seen in the usual ways, yet has always been exceptionally clear to the part of me that has mostly gone unseen.

I suppose you would like me to wrap up here with the conclusion that sure, I may be alone, but at least I have the juncos, and that’s enough. In this matter, and doubtless in many matters forthcoming, I must disappoint you. Being minimally tolerated by a family of birds is simply not a sufficient answer to the longings of the human heart.² But to feel the lightest acknowledgement—they’re not afraid of me—to be part of a cycle, even as a witness, has the vital effect of reminding me not to forget how much more there is to long for.

The upshot of all this magical thinking is that I at some point began to believe that being alone is not, in fact, my fate, not if I decide it isn’t. Whether by strength of will or tragic delusion, but certainly through the sheer conviction of my own imagination, I developed the nerve to notice that I have made seemingly impossible things happen and to regard their realness as evidence that I will make other seemingly impossible things happen. I will not live with it; I will not consign myself to a choice between alone and lonely; I’ll keep looking for door number three.

In the half-light of last night’s sunset, I paced around outside as I worked my way through mentally untangling one or another of the above paragraphs when suddenly I heard above me: cheep cheep. The tiniest declaration of dependence, an invocation of supreme vulnerability familiar to my ear but known even more intimately to my heart. The next generation of juncos had been born.

1. I arrive at this heretical self-description by simple virtue of not believing in spirits; if I presume that the soul is inextricable from the mortal body, and rather a psychological conception of the self, then I see no need to make the distinction.

2. It’s not that I thought it would be, so much as I thought those longings would die down, but more on that in a future installment.