Filled

 

Filled

I have hobbies that my wife does not understand.  For one, many of my favorite pastimes involve hunting and fishing.  Many people in Wisconsin hunt and fish, but many don’t.  I think a main cause in the difference of opinion is a lack of experience.  In other cases, someone who has tried the outdoors had a bad experience of some sort, usually because they were unprepared, and have decided that they didn’t wish to repeat it.  Those two contributing factors are what I think.  What I believe on the other hand, is that you either see yourself as an observer of Nature, or as part of Nature.  Or, as Aldo Leopold noted, many people are under the impression that food comes from the grocery store.  Some are content to look at the day, and some need to be out in it.

If you see Nature as a participant, then you have been out there to experience the dawn.  You understand that to fully experience dawn, you have to be hunkered down in a turkey blind, or a duck blind, or a deer stand, or even sitting on the ground with your back resting against a tree trunk, when the night sky is still deep and speckled with stars.  Quiet yourself and turn your eyes to the east. 

It is hard to believe that something as vast as dawn is, in itself, silent.  A campfire that is allowed to burn itself out, still occasionally still lets out a snap, a spark, or moisture still sizzles as it escapes the chunk of maple as it settles down into the coals.  But the stars merely dim until extinguished.  The depth of the darkness is lost.  The sky begins to come close.

The day spills over the horizon long before the sun rises.  The woods across the field look like an etching – the trees are still merely a silhouette.  But as the day continues to pour into the sky, the trees become dimensional.  But it takes the sun nearing the edge, so near the edge, until the colors of autumn begin to fill the sky.  Now, the entire eastern horizon is ablaze as the sun burns away at the last of the duskiness.              

I pass by the big pond and I hear the gabbling of the geese begin to fill the morning.  I can’t see them because of the wall of cattails, but I can hear the gabbling build until there is a single honk that triggers a cascade of honking.  I can hear the rush of wings and the stir of the water that just seconds before was still and silent.  Now, the flock, fifty or more, strain forward, climbing into the sky and filling it with music and motion.

No sooner than when the geese have banked hard and have been lost to the eye, three sandhill cranes come from the west.  They are probably twenty feet up, but they seem close enough to touch as they fill my vision.  I spin around as they pass by – I can hear their wingbeats.

A gray phase rough-legged hawk, surprises me as he takes flight from the big oak I am walking past.  If he would have been more patient, or trusting he likely could have perched there without my seeing him at all since there was no sound or movement that betrayed him.  As he climbs up into the thermals he lets out one piercing scream.  It took an entire flock of geese calling back and for the to fill the sky, but the hawk fills it with just one scream. 

I look down and notice a single blue chicory flower unfolding into this morning.  That single flower completely fills the space of a single flower.

Dawn has filled the sky.

His Peace <><

Deacon Dan