great blue heron

Moments

/ Fran Haley / 27 Comments

Lines of an old hymn often play in my head:

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me…

I hear it while I get ready for work each morning, where, of late, there’s a heavy atmosphere of uncertainty and despair.

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me…

I hear it while having to drive through town instead of the scenic route by the pond, where the great blue heron lives, because a bridge is out, I’m told, for maybe a year or more (how can this be?).

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me…

I hear it while noticing and grieving dead animals by the roadside… beaver, groundhog, opossum, squirrel, cottontail rabbit, white-tail deer, dog, cat; a hawk that flew too low at the wrong time, its wide pale wing, patterned in distinctive dark-brown bars, angled up and over its body like a shroud; and so many skunks, their beautiful black-and-white fur rippling in the wind…sluggish from hibernation, they wandered into the road, never to wake again.

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me…

I hear it when I’m running late and traffic in the heart of town is backed up to an absurd degree (of course), making me turn off the main road for a side road, to save a few minutes…

That’s when I see the mural:


An ethereal moment calls for an etheree…

Breathe
deeply.
The moments
are soon passing
from you and from me…
let’s use them, not lose them
for every precious minute
sings unwritten song within it.
Breathe, and appreciate the moment.
Each, in itself, a sign of the divine.

Funny thing…I see the “Breathe” message on a most difficult morning; on the drive home that afternoon, just past the mural, a great blue heron passes overhead, strangely low and close. I have never seen one here before. It looks otherworldly, ancient, sailing along serenely, impossibly, with barely a beat of its wings.

great blue heron glides
on slow wingbeats of wisdom
breathing the moment

Great Blue Heron in Flight – (Ardea herodias). Milazzoyo. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

*******

Composed for Day 14 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Misty reflection

/ Fran Haley / 3 Comments

There’s a scientific explanation
for the mist rising
from the glassy ponds
along my morning commute

then there’s poetry
the perceiving of
elemental transitions
autumnal ghosts rising
from the silver surface

the old heron
is still there by water’s edge
not wading
but watching
in the cool gray
in-betweenness

quite possibly studying me
an unnatural phenomenon
a recurring phantasm
passing through
its world

Lumia Shot: Foggy Waters. Tom Mrazek. CC BY 2.0.

The way of it

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

On the first required workday
before school begins
I drive the familiar backroads
once again

dew-drenched pastures
and old weatherboard barns
defy time
they are
their own world

then to my delight
a patch of tangled sunflowers
on the right
must have been growing here
all summer
I didn’t know
I think of Van Gogh
walking the rustic village
of Arles

up ahead, the pond
I scan it quickly
for the great blue heron
and there it is
at water’s edge
nearest the road
big and gray-blue
like a watercolor rendition
so perfect a pose

I feel light
like these are signs
that all will go well
with the work
lying before me

peace becomes strength
in my spirit
in my bones

on the second workday
I see it all again
even the heron

I can always face
the day ahead
whenever I see
the heron

I am so light
I could soar

then on the third day
without warning
orange signs on white gates
say the road is closed

I must detour

no passing the pond
no seeing heron
standing with elegiac grace
in the still water

although I know
it’s there

so on I fly
day after day
going out of my way
to get to where
I need to be

for now at least
I have the sunflowers

Vincent would say
it’s enough

keep painting the day
and the required work
beautiful
around the barriers
until they are gone

that is
the way of it

Coming home; the pond is just ahead but I can’t see it

Blue season

/ Fran Haley / 6 Comments

Today I am not driving along the backroads and byways to work, for that work is over and done for a season. There are a number of things I will and won’t miss but this morning I am thinking only of the drive. It has taught me much about noticing. And composition. Twenty minutes of travel in the countryside imprints images in my mind; I study them over and over.

For one thing, as I watched the verdant lushness of grass and trees deepen and the crops in the field bursting forth in their furrows, I thought about spring being the season of green. But not only green. Besides the blossoming and blooming of pinks, yellows, and whites, there’s the flash of fiery cardinal red, the dusting of robin-breast orange, the electric pop of the bluebird, the soft, quivering brown of Rabbit. It’s all poetry to me. Stirring a nameless longing. Maybe just for life itself.

Robert Frost comes to mind:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

And then I contemplate how green is really a combination of two colors, yellow and blue. If nothing gold can stay, that leaves…blue.

Which is so utterly fitting, as nearly every morning on my drive to work this spring I’ve been awed by the sight of a great blue heron in a pond. I pass three ponds, actually, and in two there’ve been herons. I have learned to look for them and there they are. Standing tall, serene, peaceful, almost elegiac. Once a pair of them flew across the road ahead of me. Dazzling. Somewhere in the brush I know there’s a nest with baby blue herons. In all my life, I cannot recall even glimpsing great blue herons. This is the birdiest spring I have ever known.

The herons are part of me now, and I think on the layers of meaning. Typically self-reliance, self-determination, progress… these seem surface level, like the color green. There’s more than meets the eye. There’s blue, a color I don’t usually associate with this season. Now I do. As I play with blue in my mind, it carries me to shadows, a time of day when the golden hours are transitioning to evening, and a fleeting memory of youth. A time of preparation, maybe going to dinner, gathering with friends, celebrating… all this, flickering and cool like tree-shadows when the day is nearly done and the blue hour descends. Again, a nameless longing. A heron in a pond.

I have had a hard time writing during these last weeks of school. Partly due to demands on my time. And physical limitations. And my psyche. But none of these are the blue longing.

Nature knows infinitely more than I about creating…and that is the pull, for nothing gold can stay.

Here’s to the blue season.

“Creativity is the Blue Heron within us waiting to fly; through her imagination, all things become possible.”

—Nadia Janice Brown

Photo: Great Blue Heron on the Coast of Texas, McFaddin Beach. Texas State Library and Archives Commission. CC BY 2.0

Shot of strength

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

On this final, frosty February morn, I wasn’t sure I had stamina enough to endure the day. For a short month, February can be so long. Teachers know.

I bundle up. I get in the car. I sigh. Could I manage to take half a day? Is it worth it? Probably not. A moment at a time, a moment at a time…

I drive. The empty fields seem sugarcoated with ice. I look for hawks. I am always looking for hawks. I don’t know why they lift my spirits so. They just do.

No hawks. No plump little goats in the goat pen by the stop sign, either. But something different in the glassy pond…

A great blue heron.

Symbol of self-determination, paragon of peace, harbinger of spring. Stoic, tall, unflinching. Stunning.

Just the shot of strength needed for the day.

Photo: Great Blue Heron at Sunset. Maxinux40k. CC BY-NC-SA

I stopped to take a picture of my beautiful heron but it’s not clear enough to post. I have to content myself with sharing this one instead; mine looked so like this.