You may want to sit down to read this…
Today, as well as being an ecologist Wagner feels he has taken on a second role – as an elegist for disappearing forms of life.
“I’m an optimist, in the sense that I think we will build a sustainable future,” Wagner says. “But it’s going to take 30 or 40 years, and by then, it’s going to be too late for a lot of the creatures that I love. I want to do what I can with my last decade to chronicle the last days for many of these creatures.”
Here’s the final part of the Northern Birds of South Carolina trilogy. I encounter the Northern Crow, Northern Cardinal, and Northern Mockingbird each day here in the piedmont of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they always have something to teach me.
In the hush just before morning,
he perches above the old creek,
a plain gray cipher, alert in the fog,
summoning every sound the watershed has ever uttered.
He is the weaver of other voices:
the high whistle of the hawk,
the rattle of hub city train tracks,
the hymn fragments that once drifted from clapboard churches,
even the keening of a lost child calling for home.
Here in the Blue Ridge, they say
he was made by the Creator to keep watch,
not just to sing,
but to recall all that is spoken and unspoken,
to give shape to the inarticulate ache of mountains
who know they are ancient but cannot say so themselves.
I once thought of mockery as scorn,
the cheap imitation of what is true.
But he teaches me another meaning:
that to echo is to bear witness,
to catch the echo of what matters and make it linger,
to gather up the lost notes,
the sigh of a dying ash,
the wild laughter of children,
the whispered prayers that never found an altar.
Some say the mockingbird is a trickster,
Hermes with a Southern drawl,
but I see a priest in plain feathers,
administering the liturgy of memory,
baptizing the day with a polyphony
only he can conjure.
What is revelation but the repetition
of what we have forgotten?
Isn’t this the task of the faithful,
not to invent, but to remember,
to sing back the world to itself until
even God might hear it again,
and call it good?
He stands in the half-light,
not red like fire, nor black like the secret,
but a vessel for all colors,
the fullness of sound and shadow.
In his song I hear the crow’s wisdom,
the cardinal’s blaze,
and something more:
the promise that every borrowed voice
can become a prayer
when given with intention.
By dawn, I find myself singing too,
not my own song,
but fragments stitched together
from ancestors, wild earth,
and whatever holy silence
will let me listen.
The mockingbird does not mock,
he remembers.
He calls forth what the world has spoken
and lets it live again
as hope in the air
above a waking world.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the remaining ash trees here in Spartanburg. These quiet giants are now gravely threatened by the emerald ash borer, a small, invasive beetle that’s making its way across our county.
This beetle (first discovered in the US in Detroit in the early ’00s) burrows beneath the bark of ash trees, cutting off their lifelines. It’s a slow-motion crisis, one that’s easy to miss until a favorite tree starts to show signs of stress, such as leaves thinning, bark splitting, a hush settling over a place that once felt vibrant.
But this isn’t just about trees. In my work and study, I keep coming back to the idea that we’re all entangled here… people, trees, insects, the soil under our feet. What happens to the ash tree happens to the creatures and people who live around it. Our ecosystems aren’t just backgrounds; they’re communities, and we’re an integral part of them, just as they are an integral part of us.
So what do we do? For me, the first step is to pay attention. Notice what’s changing in your yard, your local park, or the street where you walk your dog. Talk with your neighbors about what you’re seeing. And when you can, support local efforts to monitor and care for our ecosystems.
Maybe most importantly, let this be a moment for spiritual reflection and a reminder that our call to care for the earth isn’t just about preservation, but about love and connection. The fate of the ash tree is tied up with our own, whether we notice it or not.
Let’s notice. And let’s act with intention (not sure releasing non-native wasps is the way to go, either)…
Invasive Emerald Ash Borer attacks South Carolina ash trees:
“I would argue that the Emerald Ash Borer is the most invasive forest pest of this generation,” Clemson University forestry professor David Coyle said. “It’s on the level of Chestnut blight.”…
“We can expect Ash to be very rare in South Carolina, as it’s becoming a very rare tree in most of the U.S.,” Jenkins said.
Here, they often follow the rivers, which is where most Ash trees are found. That includes Lawson’s Fork Creek, which flows right through the Edwin M. Griffin Nature Preserve…
“That tree’s doomed; there’s no coming back for it,” said Sam Parrott, executive director of SPACE. “I think most of our mature Ash trees are toast, unfortunately.”
He appears, a flash of red
against the gray-branched sorrow of late spring,
not summoned, not prayed for,
but suddenly here, as if the world’s liturgy
required a single, burning presence.
His song is an ordinal, notes rising like incense
through the hush of my morning litany.
I remember how the grandfathers spoke of angels in disguise,
and how every sparrow counts,
but the cardinal is no messenger.
He is the message,
blood-bright and unapologetic
in the ruins of what I thought was ordinary.
I pause, mid-step, boots sinking into mud and leaf mold,
and let my catechism falter:
If every creature is a word of God,
what language does he speak
when he flares his crest, flings his voice
across the ravine of silence between us?
I think of the psalms,
the trees clapping their hands,
the stones crying out,
the heavens declaring, but here
on this cool fence post, it is enough
that red exists, incandescent,
in the waning light.
There is something Eucharistic about him:
how he breaks the dullness open
with his body, how he makes the sacrament
not of bread but of being,
the wild, pulsing glory
of being here,
now,
in this battered world.
I want to confess to him
my small faith,
my brittle hopes,
my longing for resurrection that comes
not as thunder, but as color
in the middle of the woods.
He cocks his head
unconcerned with theology,
yet radiating the kind of grace
that leaves a mark,
that stays in the body like a refrain.
In his departure,
I hear nothing but my own breathing,
a little steadier,
my heart echoing
some silent, ancient amen,
the red in the gray,
the promise of return,
the gospel of this world.
Beautiful post from Guy Sayles here…
A Morning Walk, an Unsettled World, and a Proimise – From The Intersection:
…Both the beauty of the morning and the disturbing news are part of the “real world.” I choose to trust, however falteringly, that the really real world is the world Jesus announced and enacted: a world of justice and peace, of beauty and goodness, of truth and tenderness, of love and mercy. It’s possible that I am naïve. It feels, instead, like I am clinging, desperately and hopefully, to a promise made sure by the resurrection: creation comes from chaos and life from death.
Northern Cardinals, trees, and The Lord…
The more I read Plotinus as a 46-year-old PhD student, the more I want to focus on Plotinus and spiritual ecology (and meld in some Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edith Stein).
Along the margin where the asphalt fails
and wild sumac rises,
the crow walks, black-lit and watchful,
a silhouette feathered by histories I barely remember.
His eyes, polished stones, regard
the world with the patience of a thing
that has already lost so much,
that expects nothing but cold wind
and the promise of old bones beneath the leaves.
He knows the taste of November’s first rot,
the hush of frost just before dawn
when the world holds its breath.
He forages among the offerings;
rusted keys, shattered acorns,
fragments of an unsaid prayer
left behind by children or priests.
I remember something Thomas Berry wrote,
about the necessary darkness,
how death, in the webbed roots of things,
becomes soil, becomes future,
becomes the cry of crow at daybreak.
He is not above or below me,
he is kin in the loosest sense,
stranger and prophet,
who gathers what is broken
and makes it part of his living.
Sometimes, when I walk the boundaries of my own heart,
I feel his shadow pass, a brush of wing,
a reminder that nothing is truly wasted,
not even sorrow, not even longing.
Under a sky bruised by the ache of dusk,
he lifts his voice, not as lament,
but as invitation, a way to say;
Even now, the world is not finished.
Even now, something unnamed and winged
waits to be born from what is left behind.
Emmylou and Ben have their first swim meet tonight. They both rocked their first heat races and Emmylou left them in a trail of bubbles 🏊♂️🏊♀️🫧
I remember sitting in my apartment in New Haven, CT, and watching I Am Trying to Break Your Heart for the first time. I was (am) a fan of Wilco, and the documentary covering the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (and the remaking of Wilco in the face of all sorts of adversity) was powerful. I was a naive 23-year-old grad student at Yale Divinity and full of my own anxieties about what the future might hold and where life might lead, so this particular scene where Jeff is signing (another) record deal to get YHF released shortly after their original label dropped them because of the band’s insistence on putting out what would become the best album of the 21st Century so far seemed like a clarion call to me.
Particularly this song… what was this song, I wondered??
I wish I could go back and tell Young Sam that everything would turn out well despite life’s inevitable ups and downs and my lingering anxieties about the past, present, and future (and social situations). I tried to pass that on to my children and my students in the almost 20 years of classroom teaching as well, and hopefully those seeds will find good soil.
I didn’t give up the pursuit to find “that song” after hearing Wilco perform it live a few times and eventually tracked it down to Bill Fay, who composed and recorded the original version back in the early 70s. I just read this morning that Fay passed away in February of this year. That makes me sad, but also uplifted, because his music, especially this song, has touched so many of us over the years.
Those seeds found good soil in my head canon. I’ve been changing diapers for my children since 2007, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sung this song to them while doing so (including this morning). I have had big moments in meetings, in the classroom, before a speech, after a business call, etc., and this song is what I’d call my mantra for centering myself when those anxieties creep in and try to steal the moment. I can’t remember preaching a sermon when I didn’t at least hum the tune while getting my robe on before service.
I’d like to think that most of us have something like this song in our lives that brings us back to ourselves in moments of fear, doubt, loathing, or anxiety. I’m not sure if it’s cognitively the best long-term fix, but it has worked for me in the last 23 years since originally hearing Tweedy strum the tune while surrounded by tired and exhausted bandmates.
Thank you, Bill Fay. Thank you, Jeff Tweedy.
