Clouds this morning, even a brief but steady rain. Both are more welcome than the chill that has accompanied them. Circumstances have forced me out of the house for the better part of the day, and it’s just that little bit too cold to sit outside and work; I am consigned to the studio doorway, where I can still pick up the wifi signal but the warmth behind me takes the edge off the cold before the open door.
It has been a cold pre-summer so far; every night and every morning, we build a fire in the larger woodstove. Last year, our last internal fire burned some week prior to this point before we cleaned out the woodstoves for the season; this year, we may be well into July before we can afford to do so. If this is to be a repeat of our cold rainy season of a few years ago, we may not do so at all, save for the week next month when they are scheduled for cleaning and maintenance. We always greet the rain happily, but we have all long since tired of the lack of heat.
Days such as these are dangerous, too, for the new life that populated this place at this time of year. We have a nestful of sleepy baby magpies in the squat piñon behind the house, tiny spirits vulnerable to this kind of cold. Their parents, of course, do well by them — indeed, it’s difficult to find harder-working parents among any species than these smaller corvids — but these temperature inversions are beyond their control, and still risky.
It’s probably why the tanagers seem already to have fled, the hummingbirds are vanishingly scarce, and the orioles have not even arrived. It has been two years since the orioles paid us a visit: Last year, it was lack of water; this year, lack of warmth. Their kind require a certain minimum level of heat to raise their young, and it seems, in what is usually by far our hottest month, that we are not to get much this time around.
For survival, emergence requires a certain level of safety.
It also requires a certain instinctive courage — a confidence in oneself, in one’s own, in one’s world. You can argue that it’s unconscious and automatic, but it’s also evolutionary and adaptive, and that doesn’t happen without conditions in place that make survival at least a good bet. The orioles certainly know this, and have apparently elected, now two years running, to give their offspring the benefit of a more amenable environment, one more likely to nurture them to adulthood.
Some experts now predict that within thirty years, all such bets will be off for humankind.
For now, we hope for the day when we are once again granted sight of the tiny orioles, greeting the world from the safety of the orb nest that still hangs high in the stand of aspens behind the house. Realistically, we have to consider the possibility that the image above will prove to be our last such sighting. And if that turns out to be the case, we shall need to reckon with the degree to which our world has altered utterly, and the acceleration of its coming descent into something that may well be unrecognizeable to us, and inhospitable too.
If we are to survive our emergence into this new world, we need to start adapting now. We can start by taking our cues from the little wingéd spirits of the season, greeting the summer with minds and hearts and hands that are ready to work.
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