AT THE BEGINNING of 2025, I felt braced for impact. A sudden loss in my extended family, the widespread fires and evacuations in my city, Los Angeles, and the onslaught of unjust actions from the Trump administration had contorted my posture into a prayer: Please nothing next. I spent less time outside and more time preoccupied with contemplating how cruel everything seemed. Then, one morning I woke at 4 o’clock to a surprising sound that soothed me — two owls calling back and forth to each other over and over again.
As Mary Oliver underscores, the work of attention is devotional.
Lines from Mary Oliver’s “The Owl Who Comes” arose: We must “hope the world / keeps its balance.” I softened, remembering how beauty endures even after devastation. To support my continued softening, I turned to Oliver and the environmental writer Margaret Renkl for guidance in paying close attention to and loving the world. Immersed in their words and the mysteries they behold, I felt less alone and afraid.
Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year begins with an invitation: “[The natural world] will always take your breath away. We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.”
Read the Full Article
