Prayer for Autumn
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The golden-crowned sparrows are back for the winter, hopping around my yard and singing their little songs, even though they are not currently breeding and they never breed here, preferring the cooler climates of Canada and Alaska during their breeding season. It is funny; I consider Oregon to be quite north, but to the golden-crowned sparrows, Portland, Oregon, is the “south” for the winter.
We got concord grapes from the farmers market last month, and they were so juicy and delicious. We get one pint a week for just a few weeks in the late summer/early fall, and then we don’t have them again for another year. Our single pint lasts us the whole week mostly because the grapes have seeds, with as many as three seeds per grape. It’s impossible to mindlessly eat these grapes, since you need to root out the seeds and dispose of them. But the grapes are delicious, so the effort is worth it.
An unintended consequence of this is that eating these grapes becomes something like a meditation. You have to be present with each grape to find the seeds, so I taste the flesh bursting from its skin, notice the slight sourness of the skin and the robust flavor of the grape more than I ever would if I were just popping them in my mouth as I would seedless grape. Because it’s an effort, their sweetness is a luxury.
It’s also a luxury to hear the golden-crowned sparrows singing again, slurring their whistles and trying out new variations. We don’t exactly understand why they sing through the winter season: Is it excess hormones? Are they practicing for spring? Are they trying to assert dominance? Still, it’s a pleasure for birds like golden-crowned sparrows to sing throughout the fall and winter.
Annie Dillard has written about bird song and bearing witness to a mockingbird diving from a rooftop. She says that the question isn’t “Why?” but rather, “Why is it beautiful?” The answer, of course, is that is is beautiful simply to be beautiful, that much of these things don’t concern the human world, but gosh, if you pay attention, the world really puts on quite a show. The butterflies flying over my yard, the little yellow spot on the black-throated gray warblers bopping around the woodlands in migration, the perfect purple of a concord grape, the sweet song of the golden-crowned sparrow.
And (after Mary Oliver) what is bird song anyway, if not a prayer? A sound of a future spring, a hope for what may come, a joy in the act of simply doing: What is all of this if not a small prayer of one, for the world, for humanity, for all the little bugs and the trees and birds? May we mindfully eat grapes, listen to bird songs, watch the new season as it washes over us, amen.