“Tangible paradise depends on beginner’s mind, on a broken heart, and on the living earth on which we stand.”

– Wendy Johnson, in Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World

It was a clear November day on Hawk Hill…just enough wind to keep the hawks moving through as we identified and counted them. We were being treated to gorgeous views of lots of adult Red-tailed Hawks in beautiful light. I was standing on the north platform, the best vantage for catching the birds as they materialized in front of us, circling and gaining height on the thermals before heading south over the Golden Gate. It was a good day; not many visitors to the hill, so it was quiet, and I could listen in on the conversation between the guru hawk watchers who practically live on the north platform during the fall migration season.

We’d spotted a set of three hawks riding the thermals and getting closer; two red-taileds and something strange (which always gets hearts racing on hawk hill). The strange shape turned out to be another Red-tailed Hawk after all, but it had a broken wing. I don’t know how it could still fly, but it did, flapping more frequently than the other hawks to keep itself aloft and on track.

All three birds approached, close in to the hill. My memory is of watching the hawk with the broken wing for a long time in my binoculars, and that the usual expert chatter on the north platform died away. I remember feeling very reverent about something very big that felt very tangible. All over the planet, numberless animals were moving south on the great energy of migration. And this hawk with a broken wing moved with it, too; it was perfectly at place in the world. Its struggle did not seem like a struggle at all; it was life.

It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Wendy Johnson spoke at Stone Creek a few weeks ago; I brought her book to have her sign, and I thought about what I might ask her if I had the chance. In a section of the book called “Beauty Counts”, she lovingly relates a story of a woman consumed by grief, and that quote about “tangible paradise” appears at the end of that story. I didn’t know what my question was, but I wanted to ask something about that quote. I think I wanted to resist…”But WHY? Why does tangible paradise have to require a broken heart?” Because I don’t want to have a broken heart any more. I’m tired of feeling broken altogether. I’m tired of feeling like mush inside, mush surrounding a giant gaping hole of pain and want. I’m weary of every good mood being followed by a broken-winged crash.

It turns out that her talk (available as an MP3 here) included that very story of the woman in grief. I still don’t know why we need to be broken, but I realize that it is a deep truth. Lately I feel that my biggest problem is simply surrendering to what is. I am not in control. Migration season does not stop for a broken wing. Nor are we any less a part of life for our brokeness.

Wendy closed her talk by telling us, “Leave the wind to the wind and the flowers to the flowers. And be yourself. Be a fully alive, awake, ready, broken human being.”

What else can we be?

During the week, I had a thing to write for Sunday, and was obsessing over it way too much, especially during chores. So I tried adding a reminder to my boots.

I don’t think it helped a lot.

I like what writing does for me; I’m happy to have this way of expressing myself privately or publicly. But I don’t need to be doing it in my head the whole damn time!

Spring is continuing its crescendo over our ridge. Everywhere I look, things are blooming. Some flowers are sudden and spectacular, like the California Poppies that are suddenly there, open in the sun. Others have a more subtle entrance, like the Calla Lilies that quietly turn from green to white, until they, too, demand to be noticed, bold and graceful, luminous in the moonlight. And scores of wildflowers bloom over the landscape; the closer I look, the more I realize that everything blooms.

The garden and pasture are alive with frogs, lizards, snakes. One must drive slowly up the road at night, because the deer and foxes are on the move and seemingly distracted.

Even the wind has new energy. On Tuesday, I was feeding the goats when I heard a harsh cry, and ran from the pens to look to the sky…a Peregrine Falcon, circling above the tall trees. Our pair of Red-Tailed Hawks noticed, too, and dove on the falcon with their own cries. A few minutes later, I noticed an Osprey soaring high over the pasture. I wondered if they might be harbingers of another storm coming in from the coast, and five minutes later I smiled when the big wind blew through.

That pair of Red-tailed Hawks have been putting on their own show this spring, hovering on the wind, screaming and diving on each other, rolling in the air. If I watch them long enough, I can feel the lift and swoops and the wind rippling through my own feathers.

Here it becomes clear why the great god of spring, Pan, takes the form of a goat. The bucks battle in the pasture, Don Juan and Emilio rearing up and smashing heads, Leroy Brown pacing the fence line and looking at us with disdain…it is only a matter of time before he is over the fence and back with the girls again. And all these baby boy goats…they dance on top of their overturned feed buckets, have their own battles and hump their sisters and each other at every opportunity, wielding their obscene bodies with glee.

I had been warned that the ranch could be affecting in spring. And now I know why. We’re living in the middle of a vast orgy.

Sometimes I feel like an old crone…happy to be in that energy but somewhat removed, the rekindling of that feeling with the tang of pain that renders it so poignant.

In the winter, feeling miserable and even guilty for any pleasure I had in life, I dreamed of being invited to the dance. I held back, unsure if the invitation was really for me even though I was told it was.

Paying attention to my dreams has been one of the biggest gifts of therapy. It has given me a profound connection to something bigger than myself, something I realize I’ve been aware of all my life and yet unable to form a neat rational explanation of. Jungians call it the collective unconscious. When I look back at the dreams I’ve written down, I feel like they are like a mystical snake…partly coiled around the past, and partly coiled around the future. I start to sense the power of this something-bigger, and I know instinctively that it is not something separate from this big interconnected infinite-cycle-woven world of Nature. I could be carried away with how the dreams loop back and forward in time, but my feet on the earth (and goat manure) ground me. A voice in me says: honor that it is meaningful, but do not fix a meaning to it.

Now in the spring, my dream life changes; I am less the observer, more a participant. Released from the stranglehold of my rational mind, my dreams do not escape Pan’s influence. Who am I kidding? My conscious life does not escape it, either. It is not so simple to join the dance, yet I am happy to bask in it, to surrender to this…yes, to this higher power. To let my spirit have its feathers ruffled by the wind, and to let it do its jig on top of the overturned feed bucket.