Paradox, Certainty, Suffering, and the All-Surpassing Omniscience (That is, Love)

August 24, 2020

     The year 2020 must go down as a great humbler. Perhaps this period of time, if viewed in the long landscape, reveals possibilities, particularly opportunities to inspire radical remakings. Reflecting off the craziness of the current political arena, we might channel this turbulence to transform meanings of crucial standpoints. Could the time be ripe for radical change in the prime movers among the complex of Power to Love? How might we engage creative chaos? What if we’ve been tangled in the old, old but failed, mythos of the hero? And what if this heroic sense of self (which necessarily generates blame as well as hubris) is incommensurate with our divine guidance? Can we risk surrender to the divine? How can a person let go of the struggle without falling into darkness?

     Perhaps the sense of what to do and what not to do requires a revolution in the feeling of certainty. The Good Books tell us that Knowing belongs to the Omniscient and thus reaches beyond our cognitive grasp (cf. Philippians 4:7, Peace surpasses understanding; Ephesians 3:19, Love surpasses knowledge). So why be surprised when the best we can reach of certainty comes in a sacred texture of bewilderment, being awed, surrendered.* 

The mark that someone knows that the Real’s knowledge encompasses his acts, states, and words is that quaking and dread becomes his watchword, and awe holds up the banner of rulership from his head to his toes. . . Adam was biting the fingers of wonder with the teeth of bewilderment: ‘What’s this? What happened?’” (William Chittick translating Sam’ani, The Repose of the Spirits, pp. 90,103 on al-‘Alim: the Knower)

October 8, 2020

Teachings of Sufism often return into the theme of mystical annihilation (fana) as one approaches the One (see, for example, Stoddard, Sufism, p. 64; Lings, What is Sufism? p. 78; Ernst, Shambhala Guide to Sufism, pp. 61, 115). An outgrown, dysfunctional sense of knowing needs release in order to birth wonder. Why bother about a feeling of ineptitude if we are swept into the ocean? 

      Richard Rohr’s meditation this week comforts me in the reminder that being heroic (my term, not his) is not the only way of acting responsibly in the presence of suffering. He uses the metaphor of a swollen river, sweeping folks off into its flow. The responsible action to today’s crisis comes not just in heroic activism that works toward systemic reform, but also and equally valuable are works of education/healing and those of hands-on help for persons in distress. In Mark Wallace’s writings, the caring attention extends to all of creation, trees to butterflies. 

“As the breath of God who animates all life, the Spirit becomes present in the spaces opened up between persons who risk themselves for the other. . . The Spirit is not a static entity but a potential modality of divine presence that becomes actual in the co-partnerships of persons with one another and other life forms” (pp. 10-11, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation).

August 1, 2020

     Even so and always, the work zone flows from the interior and, of course, the Source. Blame and anger transform into constructive fire for healing and loving. The only effective agent, God.

*Previous blogs elaborating the theme of Bewilderment include:

August 18, 2019 When Bewilderment Tracks the Mystery

May 13, 2020 Recognition on the Pathway

September 7, 2018 Living with Bewilderment

August 24, 2019 Bewildered by God

November 16, 2019 Longing into Certainty

March 23, 2019 Rumi, Radical Love, & I/You (part A) 

August 18, 2018 Transcendent Power

February 10, 2018 Tracking on the Path of Attraction

December 16, 2017 “and He is with you”

November 14, 2017 Sure Good?

Eyes of Nature

Nov 19. frosty view just pre-dawn

Well, Duh! There’s a connection between the vision coming through the camera lens (edited with openness for revelations of Beauty) and with the selection of text moving past the eyes, particularly with submissiveness to the heart, and with all bowing to the spirit. 

Why be surprised when reading from sacred writings, from reflections of mystics, that the eyes are directed to light emanating from nature, to the lines that dance, shimmering between still forms.

Sam’ani says it: 

“O dervish, you will not see Him tomorrow until He sees Himself through you. By God the tremendous, if tomorrow you want to see, you must have pure vision. Pure vision is that He sees Himself through you.”...

     “Those who step into the road do not do so for any cause, only for love. . . Expecting compensation for obedient acts is a fatal poison. . . If you were to walk on this road for a thousand years and your obedience was not accepted and then it occurred to your mind that it should have been accepted, you will have been a status-seeker, not a road-seeker. You will not be a realizer in this road until you abandon your status with both the Real and the creatures.” 

(pp. 18, 29, emphasis in original; Ahmad Sam’ani, trans by William Chittick. The Repose of the Spirits: A Sufi Commentary on the Divine Names.)

fallen log fashioned into a viewing station

          Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation for today includes a quotation from Lisa Sharon Harper:

 “Evidence of the presence of the Kingdom of God is thick wherever and whenever people stand on the promise of God that there is more to this world—more to this life—than what we see. There is more than the getting over, getting by, or getting mine. There is more than the brokenness, the destruction, and the despair that threaten to wash over us like the waters of the deep. There is a vision of a world where God cuts through the chaos, where God speaks and there is light. There is a vision where there is protection and where love is binding every relationship together. (p. 205; Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right. Cited by Rohr, “Jesus and the Reign of God," Nov 19, 2020. 

November 11, 2020

Winter Promises

Most years the advent of winter has evoked dread. Or, if and when approached in a spirit of surrender, it's inspired sighs, even commitment to long-suffering, a reluctant dedication to further the very important virtue of patience, to carry the hope of spring-coming. Yet often the chill in the air makes breathing out in those steam puffs. Perhaps they’re little smoke-signals asking permission to join the bears—how about hibernating until the world turns alive again? 

      But then this week late autumn’s falling, mostly fallen, leaves are sprinkling wonder. Today, as shown above, the woods’ opening increased witness of dawn’s beauty. And turning to the opposite western sky, a double rainbow arched to land both north and south, even before the rains arrive.

Yesterday the sun-lit woods, more bared to essence, showed a redbud reduced to a few leaves, looking like heart-shaped jewels were tracing out the bowing limbs in lines as graceful as ballerinas, almost weightless, defying gravity. Alongside it a young maple echoed the dance, yellow light against the dimmed exuberance of spring, the background of fallen leaves turning bronze and disappearing as if the superficial gives way, releasing the eternal.

      Instead of dreading winter, this year there’s an exciting sense of winter tracks wanting to be followed, the ones leading further into the “True Self.” 

Recent reading of Richard Rohr has prepared the way to welcome the closed-in season because it’s a time especially fitting for contemplation. In his book on the second half of life, Rohr explains how summer’s “loyal soldier” builds the container for a person’s winter work and how the soldier has to be thanked and dismissed.

“Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God. If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority figures. His or her ability to offer shame, guilt, warnings, boundaries, and self-doubt is the gift that never stops giving. Remember, it can be a feminine voice too; but it is not the ‘still, small voice’ of God (I Kings 19:13) that gives us our power instead of always taking our power.

The loyal soldier cannot get you to the second half of life. He does not even understand it. He has not been there. He can help you ‘get through hell,’ with the early decisions that demand black-and-white thinking; but then you have to say good-bye when you move into the subtlety of midlife and later life. . .

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of ‘common sense,’ of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful ‘Beatrice.’ The true faith journey only begins at this point…we have a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life, which is always filled with contradictions and adventures and immense challenges. Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. (pp. 46, 48. Falling Upward; emphasis in original)

The passage invites return and deeper engagement in the resources such as the Mystical Languages of Unsaying  and to the Beloved, the stories of Layla… and forward into The Cloud of Unknowing and others.  Also, Rohr points particularly to Thomas Merton for guidance, especially to his New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton also reveals tracks on the pathway including those of St. John of the Cross and in his translation/versions of portions of Chuang Tzu. In his introduction, Merton writes: 

“The key to Chuang Tzu’s thought is the complementarity of opposites, and this can be seen only when one grasps the central ‘pivot’ of Tao which passes squarely through both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ ‘I’ and ‘Not-I’ (p. 30). A sample appropriate to the forced inactivity of winter:

“… No one seems to know

how useful it is to be useless.”

The Way of Chuang Tzu, p. 59

These guides join others who teach and inspire in the way to the Beloved, the pathway home. This winter promises opportunity to re-trace ground turned years before, intent on deeper reflection. For example, these lines noted in last year’s autumn are calling:

“When the servant comes to know himself, thereby knowing God, he does not know God in Himself. Rather, he knows Him as his own Lord. This is the God who discloses Himself to the soul, and the self-disclosure is different from that experienced by any other soul. The God that I come to know through knowing myself is the God of my own belief, the water which has assumed the color of my cup.” William Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, p. 344 (cited in Light Enough, Sept 24, 2019). 

Faith: Light Seen by Heart

“… faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” 

 Thomas Merton is simply a treasure, speaking profoundly to timeless questions and now particularly into the immediate moment with our nation endangered by hatred. This season, the next few days especially, cry for compassion toward persons caught, unconsciously or not, in the terrible web of hate. Merton points out how our perception of haters also usually reflects darkness in the beholder. 

 “It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves” (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 112). 

     Cleaning the mirror and “seeing into the mystery at the heart of life," then, marks an essential work of a person who hopes to pray, to contemplate, to draw nearer to the Divine. What a time this is! 

      I was drawn to his New Seeds of Contemplation because Richard Rohr and others reference it as a primary text in discerning the “False Self” and the “True Self.” The book has so many gems. Today I’m touched by his teaching on the nature of faith. Faith needed, perhaps most of all, in a darkened time. 

“Too often our notion of faith is falsified by our emphasis on the statements about God which faith believes, and by our forgetfulness of the fact that faith is a communion with God’s own light and truth… But, above all, faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” (pp. 128, 130, New Seeds of Contemplation). 

     It’s a good season to listen for, to look for, and to soak up the special light, so manifest in the yellows of leaves, in the spaces created by fallen leaves, by the break in clouds and in the glistening given by stormy skies.

The Secret in Woodlands

“the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds over all the world” (from Merton’s Dancing in the Waters of Life, quoted on p. 23 in Thomas Merton, Writings on Nature: When the Trees Say Nothing, edited by Kathleen Deignan, Sorin Books, 2003).

     I’m absorbed further into Merton’s vision in a morning like today (shown above, looking toward the sunrise amid the woods below our home; and again, just below, viewed over our mailbox, westward into the beyond).  

     In a few moments, I’ll walk among baby chestnut oaks and other white and red oaks, too young to name. I’ll feel within a joy coming up because these sprouts are reclaiming spaces where they’ve been missed, after being crowded out by invasive vines, and worse, by human insensitivity, greed. . .  Their absence marks a terrible, unfortunate alienation from the secret heart.

      A couple of years ago, I talked about this God-given project that had been offered fifteen-years earlier when we moved to this property. Parts of the land could even have hidden Sleeping Beauty’s castle due to the tangled thicket of invasive undergrowth that had gradually taken over after the native forest had been cut. Somehow, even then, I was called into reclamation and began building awareness of how these

semi-conscious engagements with nature sustained me during the time from leaving the family farm for college in 1965 for forty years until the move from D.C. suburbs to our West Virginia 4.5 acre sanctuary. By 2005, my being was pretty desperate for the solace of nature, and my consciousness had awakened enough to push for significant and difficult commitments to the natural world. 

         Our new homeland already featured several organic gardens, but it also presented woodlands that were infested with thickets of invasive plants choking out the native oaks and maples. As we stewarded these grounds, nature more than equivocated by tending our souls.

     Looking back at “Transforming Sanctuary of Nature,” (the blog of Oct 28, 2018), I see how the work of clearing underbrush was complemented by the library on sacred texts. A slow articulation was coming forward toward and into the secret:

Almost certainly, the particular lines from Rumi struck me because of the reading I’d been doing in Nasr’s Religion and the Order of Nature. As mentioned in the “The World Turning Gold,” Nasr’s text widens the window of nature as it informs the way humans have been cut off from feeling God’s presence in nature. Although I have long sensed my need to commune in the natural world, I’d been veiled from opening my heart to the treasure. Imagine the revelation made increasingly possible when we enter the holy place trusting that it’s “a living creature with soul and intellect.” 

Nicholson’s elaboration in the commentary focuses on attaining knowledge of God (p. 83) and adds “the physical heart has an immaterial soul (jani rubani), which, when purified and illumined by love, develops another heart, viz. the spiritual organ that perceives the Unseen.”

      Kathleen Deignan notes an interesting moment in Thomas Merton’s experience in the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky that developed about ten years after he entered there:

“But in 1951 in response to Merton’s request for greater solitude, Abbot Dom James nominated him ‘forester’ which entailed restoring the woodlands that had been stripped a decade earlier. The job radicalized his experience of solitude, no longer perceived as privacy for intellectual pursuits, but an opportunity for embodied engagement with a whole community of wisdom in silent participation in the vitality of living things.” (p. 31)

Com-posing Comm-Union

 

8:05:52AM, October 14, 2020

     Imagine being drawn by the invitation of Truth into the composing of beauty in nature. It’s an open doorway any moment to play with and into recognition from the inner eye that joys as the form comes into focus, into being, the liminal reality that evinces invisible lines of universal connection, that lifts off the physical plane into the radiance of pure light. This participation in the Divine nurtures the soul; without this devotion, without dedicating creative belief and love, the inner spirit languishes.This ever-present Eternity awaits even when veiled by impurities ashen over the heart.

     About the time of my conception, three-quarters of a century ago, Aldous Huxley called it

“… the one divine Reality substantial to the material world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit” (The Perennial Philosophy, p. viii).

Beauty and Brokenness

At least twice I noticed these dried-up flowers, planned to take them out, and forgot. Old age, memory slip? Or a subtle gift? Getting old pushes further into beauty, loving 

“in a certain sense, between all living things. Life is attracted to life. Beauty is attracted to both beauty and brokenness—which is a good description of all that lives./ Life is fragmented and finite and yet part of a larger and attractive whole. We long to be with this wholeness” (Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, p. 33). 

This third time noticing the flowers, not just dried-up, but broken-beauty breaks through shuttered sight. Having read the passage and taken it in, I'm taken out, camera in hand, as an opening allows a certain further sense, a searching, even longing, toward the sense of beautiful brokenness, a window for wholeness--

Transformation of Consciousness

“…now it is just a matter of time till false power falls apart.” As I’m reading the final chapters of Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ, the possibility of transformed consciousness, like the beauty of butterflies emergent from the dark cocoon, offers a ray of hope in this time darkened by blind hate, these dark nights when brothers and sisters are veiled by superficial differences from celebrating our connection, from living each moment knowing the essence that unites all of God’s creation. If only Love were to break through. Rohr tells of the transformation beyond the blinders of selfishness, fear, and oppression.

“I have witnessed much of this evolution of consciousness in my own small lifetime—toward nonviolence, inclusivity, mysticism, and ever more selfless love, as well as more correct naming of the shadow side of things. This is the gradual ‘second coming of Christ.’ Our present highly partisan politics, angry culture wars, and circling of the wagons around white privilege are just the final gasps of the old, dying paradigm.” (p. 198)

Transformation may be, perhaps always is, hard. Scary. The demanding tone comes through the spiritual teaching: “Die before you die.” 

The creature that only knew caterpillar crawling unbelievably floats on angel wings. 

Old consciousness has to surrender to knowings that had been impossible. Apparent opposites can be contained. “The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness” (Rohr, p. 148). 

Almost impossible, and it would be if one had to do it alone. But the good news is that the Way is Love and Love is never alone. This transformed consciousness unites with the Creator in the creation. The Way demands that we love, that we love more deeply. Passion.

“In the practical order of life, if we have never loved deeply or suffered deeply, we are unable to understand spiritual things at any depth. . . They are [God’s] primary tools for human transformation.” (p. 207)

Recognition on the Pathway

Friendship with morning sun & hummingbirds, May 13, 2020

“Jesus loves me. This I know. For the Bible tells me so.” Good old Vacation Bible School children’s song. And then there’s growing up. Getting old. And knowledge from any book, from any preacher, from any external source, sometimes just isn’t enough.

Because humans thirst for truth. It’s the divine implant calling, like a tracking device, that burns through books and that cries for direct personal experience. Even when it hurts. For holy fire purifies. Still unsatisfied, and broken-hearted as well, the yearning yet insistently pulls, thank God, further into the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” This, the trail, the trial, of living in mystery, ever searching.

A vital key to tracking the unseen can be found in the familiar notion of recognition. It’s that thrilling and unsettling feel when a person or place seems both strange and also previously known, a sort of deja vu. William Chittick invites us to go further into the word: “re-cognize”:

“that is, to come once again to see what one already knows. . . recognition is discovered within oneself, but learning is acquired from outside…One comes to see face-to-face what was only known by hearsay and following authority.”

And he connects this with the classic line, replacing “knows” with “recognizes”: “He who recognizes himself (or “his soul”) recognizes his Lord.” [Translator’s Introduction, Unveiling of the Mysteries, Fons Vitae, 2015, p. xi.]

Sufis, as well as other trackers on the spiritual pathway, say bewilderment (of a certain sort) doesn’t mean a person is lost, but instead signals higher reaches on the way toward the divine. “Bewilderment is beyond all the stations” writes Sam’ani in Repose of the Spirits in “his chapter on the divine name wali, the Friend” (translated by William Chittick, Divine Love, pp. 293-4).

In order to re-cognize, perhaps it’s necessary to get befuddled and to let go of indoctrination, and to surrender flat levels of knowing, over and again, in order to climb higher, especially in relation to the greatest guide. For love is the great mystery, not meant to be defined, “inexplicable” concludes Chittick: “Anyone can be a lover, but no one can explain love” (p. 293). 

That’s comforting. Yes it is—for someone who admits the truth of bewilderment about it—especially when it comes to approaching God. And recognize that love, most especially Divine Love, pulls past the reaches of human knowledge and opens a door, one of those hidden in plain sight.  Like the one just mentioned above, it’s so easy to wander past, barely—if at all—aware it’s been missed. Perhaps it doesn’t look big enough or bright enough when up against the great name of Love. 

It’s simply friendship. It’s an experience that’s still hard to nail down in words, but perhaps it’s more comfortable in the sense of knowing where it is, when it happens, how it feels. And it’s easier to feel sure we’ve offered friendship and can still return to the glow of it.

And yet, to presume friendship with God? Still a bit scary. But the glow we know of human friendship radiates in the God-given sunshine after rain, and in the rain, too. Even the thunderstorm, particularly having witnessed rainbows and well-watered flowers. Trees. 

Chittick adds Maybudi to Sam’ani:

“How could the traveler not be delighted that friendship is the nearest way station to the Protector? The tree that produces only the fruit of joy is friendship, the soil that grows nothing but the flowers of intimacy is friendship, the cloud that rains nothing but light is friendship, the drink whose poison turns into honey is friendship, the road whose dust is musk and ambergris is friendship… Friendship’s field has the width of the heart, and the kingdom of paradise is one branch of friendship’s tree. Those who drink friendship’s wine are promised vision.” (Divine Love, p. 298) 

Raindrops, oak leaves, spring flowers: re-cognizing divine friendship

God, First and Last

The pileated woodpecker backlit in morning sun blazes with remembrance of the majesty of God. All manifestations, even unto Paradise, surrender before the Transcendent. In the chapter on “The Fall of Adam” (Sufism, pp. 141-177), William Chittick translates portions of The Refreshment of the Spirits by Ahmad Sam’ani (d. 1140). Adam is revealed as the paradigm for choosing God above all else:

“‘Adam’s unharnessed aspiration placed him like a sultan on the horse of love. He took the arrow of solitude from the quiver of detachment and stretched the bow to its limit. He shot the beautiful peacock of paradise, which was strutting in the garden of the Abode. He knew that this was the path of the detached, the work of those with high aspiration, the court of those brought near to God. Time, space, entities, traces, vestiges, shapes, existent things, and objects of knowledge must be erased completely from in front of you. If any of these clings to your skirt, the name of freedom will not stick to you. As long as the name free does not sit on you, you can never be a true servant of God.’” (Sufism, p. 155; Chittick translating Sam’ani’s Refreshment of the Spirits, p. 120)

In this chapter, Chittick articulates the gift of Adam, especially in leading us toward the secret of Love and into grasping the essential value of free choice.

“If human beings are to aspire to God, they need to be able to differentiate between God and all else. The key to human love and perfection is a discerning heart, one that sees God in the midst of the confusing multiplicity of creation. Adam provides the model for lovers.” (Sufism, p. 156)

Adam disobeyed God at God’s instigation, because God knew that without disobedience Adam would not realize the attributes of distance that allow him to become a lover. The essence of love is yearning and heartache. ” (Sufism, p. 152-3)

Fire

Civilization and its institutions of culture guide fire, at their best, channeling wisely our human passions, maturely directing these forces into constructive production, or at a minimum into non-destructive venting. We dare not attempt to extinguish passion. Without fire, the inner and outer worlds die due to lack of heat and light. Religion, education, and the arts should serve the function of tending fire. When these institutions fail to provide sufficient guidance, humanity and our environment burn up or freeze.

Last night, we viewed a 2017 PBS program on Yosemite.  Even three years ago, climate change was shown to threaten this incredible ecosystem. The warning emphasized rising temperature, drought, and the risk of excessive wildfire, but the program also noted the necessity of fire in the life cycle of the giant sequoias (e.g., to release the seeds from the cone and to open space for seedlings to get sunlight). Of course, without water the entire natural wonderland is doomed. Overheating of the environment threatens the imminence of this catastrophe. Fire, water, earth, and air are all needed in proper balancing.

  A similar threat to the natural world can be seen in the human ecosystem with the reduction of impulse control. Persons in positions of leadership in politics and in the media fail to exercise sufficient reflection on words prior to making them public. Irresponsible mediation results in fake news, distortion (intended or not), and divisions that prompt violence and harm especially toward vulnerable sub-populations. Of course, as voters and consumers we fuel the wildfire when we are not turning our passion into the force of love, when we allow hostile emotions to reside within our hearts, even in those impulses to feel the other as a fool.

A civilized society channels fire into constructive work as well as re-creational activity. For example, competitive sports contribute a vital venue for guiding youth into responsible self-management of power, learning to direct combustive energy that is capable of driving achievement; but violence from players and addictive engagement from the culture prove the failure from coaching and from the wider arena of fans, parents, and sponsors. Each person needs an outlet for passionate engagement that creates and nurtures.

The coronavirus pandemic relates to the overheating. The consequent stoppage of “March Madness” (in the broad sense extending way beyond basketball) offers an opportunity for reflection and reform. Time and space have now been set to ask important questions: 

• What is most essential? 
• How do we live into the depths of love? 
• How can we individually and collectively dedicate ourselves to attending the highest values, including our capacity for tending the human spirit tuned to the divine inheritance?

“And now

for other news…” 

Wednesday, March 18. 

Out here in West Virginia, signs of spring look to be a couple of weeks ahead of the past few years. Bloodroot and forsythia blooms already are bringing their early cheer. 

          Looking back two years these were opening further on into April

Forsythia in sunset, April 1, 2019

Bloodroot in full bloom, April 12, 2018

         We can also anticipate sooner than usual some other markers of special interest. These include the first migrants, especially the towhee, brown thrasher, and hummingbird. 

April 30, 2018

May 1, 2018

 In recent years, it’s been May Day when we’ve welcomed their arrivals, but perhaps for 2020 the red-flowered feeders should be in place by mid-April.

          And that coincides pretty closely with the time to start bringing in the sunflower-seed feeders each night so that the morning doesn’t show them splashed onto the grounds…

special visitor 2019