divinations and apparitions
of pileated woodpeckers and fig trees
Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.
Maggie Smith, Rain, New Year’s Eve
I’ve left the screen porch doors open to the outside, because the cat I live with likes to stalk the cardinals in the side garden in the afternoon.
Two bees have meandered into the porch and are resting on the screen together. They look like they’re having an affair away from the busy hive. I wonder if creatures, celebrated for their communal efforts, get tired of always swarming with everyone else. Happy to provide a small hermitage to bee lovers or bee rebels, whoever they may be.
A small Carolina wren flies in and checks out the view from one of the wrought-iron deck chairs. She doesn’t seem to notice me, at the window above the kitchen sink. She chirps, testing out different perches, and then flies out the door that leads to the deck. On the deck, the jessamine plant (Carolina’s state flower) has burst open into full yellow star-shaped flowers. I walk out to chase away the red-bellied woodpecker who has been drilling away at the corner of the house.
From the deck, I have the chance to inspect the fig tree, whose little buds have erupted into the promised, pad-like leaves. My mother and I composted most of the canned figs we found in the refrigerator, which she estimated were four years old at least. I saved a few jars for when I’m feeling brave enough to taste or turn into something edible. In August, my grandmother told us the story of her multiple efforts to transplant a tree in her yard. Third time was the charm, in this case. And I wonder if she told me so I would have some sense of the effort and care that went into the fig tree and carry the weight of it myself. Not a burdensome weight, but a weight like jewelry. Something precious doesn’t sit lightly in your hand.
I will wait until Thursday,1 since the internet bickers about how often and how long to water figs in Carolina, and it will have been somewhere between seven and ten days since our last rain on Thursday, cutting an average of all the voices and opinions that sprout up when you ask google gardening questions.
The fig tree reminds me of Galilee, Banias specifically, where they can grow so large you can walk underneath their arching branches. It is funny to see plants from Jerusalem outside of Jerusalem. I wonder what we are trying to hold onto, as we carry fig trees with us across the globe. It could be a testament to our perverse insistence on transplanting and disruption of habitats. Which we do, for sure, but perhaps we are strange, creative pollinators for Creation. We often get it (disastrously) wrong, but sometimes we bring a fitting fruit to a climate it is suited for but would have never found without us. Not even human pin-headedness can always foil grace.
all of these look to you to give them their food in due season.
you give it, they gather it up: you open your hand, they have their fill
There’s a cardinal now at the very crown of the fig tree. He is unbelievably scarlet. In a world of survival by camouflage, he’s playing a different game.
The fig tree reminds me that the trappings of the holy—the geographical or topographical accidents—hound us just like the divine. Perhaps we’re not as far away from the center of earth’s sacredness as we think.
Til we have built Jerusalem on England’s green and pleasant land, William Blake writes. Which is a silly sentiment, on the face of it.
What is it we are so eager to recreate? I wonder. What lightning from Jerusalem did Blake know that he was so keen to bottle up and transfer to England?
Human beings cannot bear too much reality, says T.S. Eliot, but I think what he meant is that T.S. Eliot cannot bear too much reality. Speak for yourself, Eliot, I often feel like saying to him. Don’t hide behind generalizations. But that’s often difficult for theologians and poets who aren’t saints to do. I’ve found the meaning of everything they think. But isn’t everything always just beyond your reach? And if it isn’t, you have probably stopped living and are dead now. Perhaps you have just found the meaning of yourself. And that seems a grand enough achievement.
Humanity, in general, is chasing reality down—trying to get to the thinnest membrane between our sphere of living and the thing we feel that’s just beyond or above or beneath it. The whirling galaxies outside our atmosphere, the kingdom of the dead we have shoveled all our loved ones down into, the world just beyond a trick of the eyes that’s made of meaning and truth rather than the more daily concerns of market share and subsistence living.
Jerusalem is a shorthand for this—right? The place where God dwells. A place where, finally, things can be seen for what they are.
I suppose what’s magic about human history is that Jerusalem is there. We did actually build a city around the presence of God, and that city, is, like all human cities, heartbreakingly evil and cruel, merciful and beautiful. Wonderful and mundane. The miracle of our divinity is written inside its ordinary criminals and injustice.
A squirrel scrambles down the roof and stops in his tracks when he sees the cat. The cat freezes, mid-drink, watching the squirrel for what feels like an eternity between breaths.
A pileated woodpecker, his black wings spread like a cape, his brilliant red crest like a fire alarm in the middle of the wet green trees, flies into the scene. I was always taught to gasp when I spot a pileated woodpecker and to treat the visitation with reverence. They are birds that were once almost lost through the mad deforestation of American colonization. But, they have, steadily, been making a resurgence. Pileated woodpeckers are the largest woodpeckers in North America, with the one exception of the ivory-billed woodpecker, whose image I would meditate on for a long time in the birdwatching book Da Jane gave me. The ivory-billed woodpecker has most likely gone extinct. The last sighting was in 1944. But it is not listed as extinct. Not yet.
The ornithologists at the Audobon Society don’t have an explanation for how the pileated woodpecker has survived and started to thrive again. The ways of woodpeckers and wild things defy easy diagnosis, most days. What is 80 years to the earth and her birds? A second, I suppose, if you are a glacier. Eons, if you are a housefly. The full measure of one’s days, if you are a human being.
you take back your spirit, they die;
you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the earth.
In the woods, a pileated woodpecker sighting is like a shark at a coral reef—a sign that something in this ecosystem, despite all odds, is working. All is not lost, even after 80 years of never being found.
I couldn’t. I ended up watering it last night because the air was hot and heavy. The cat and I were parched, so I figured the tree must be too. And then a storm came through at 3 am.