May 17 - May 21 Hummingbirds Return

2010-Actually it’s a week or two past their arrival.  J hung his feeder out two weeks ago and said he saw them. T said she saw them the other night out back.  I heard one close by in the front yard when I was hacking back the forsythias in the afternoon, but I couldn’t find it.  Then I sat for an hour last night waiting while I ate dinner, but none came. What if the hummingbirds were to disappear--the peepers?  I can say I couldn’t bear it, but experience seems to indicate I would.  No heartbreak or tragedy is ever great enough to just make it stop.  No matter what, we plod on, muttering to ourselves that we must.  Life, our little life, goes on.
In the Gulf of Mexico, an unprecedented oil spill continues to occur in spite of all efforts to contain it.  Thousands and thousands of gallons drifting across the Gulf have reached the delicate marshes of Louisiana.  A naturalist on the radio broke into tears when he described it. I saw a video of a dragonfly pathetically trying to clean itself.
Then we tried to rationalize, reasoning that oil is a ‘natural’ material and no doubt an undersea earthquake could release  a similar spill.  Nature must have her way to deal with it.  All around me ravishing beauty undermined by this intrinsic suffering.
How is non-attachment different from not caring?  I want to feel, but when I do, it feels like my heart is breaking.
2012-A few days of just ‘perfect’ weather-cool air and warm sun. I’m tempted to put the tomatoes in but the night temps are still a little cool. A bunny is getting in the garden somewhere and biting the tops off the peas (totally gone), broccoli and kale. It’s always something isn’t it? A mouse dead in the trap last night in the kitchen, a tick squashed under my nail-still battling with nature. I read a section in a vegan cookbook that described the necessity of thinking of that diet not in terms of what one can’t eat but what one is embracing; a new relationship with other living things, one without harm or bondage.
2013-The pumpkin plants I put out too early look not quite completely dead. Will that spark be enough to save them?

Tiny gold birch leaf
Nestled in fragrant leaf mold,
Spring-born just to fall.