The Sermon of the Blue Heron

I walked out of the house early yesterday morning and saw a blue heron preaching from the roof peak of the little hut at the waterfall next to the dam. I feigned disinterest and sauntered quietly down the hill towards a new garden bed, hoping the heron wouldn’t fly away. It turned its head 180 degrees, but didn’t fly off.

This garden was planted last week, watered well, but not since—and we’ve had no rain. We’ve had no rain all summer, not a full day of soaking down wetness, not since too much rain in early May when we lost half our apple crop from poor pollination. We water the crop plants and the fruit trees and a few gardens pumping water from the pond, but much else is dry, parched, and crunches underfoot. 

We’re lost without water, like we’re lost without a road map. Plants genetically receive all kinds of direction. Grow towards the sun, make your leaves larger because you are in the shade and need more photosynthesis, switch to ‘dry’ mode and pull in so that you can survive this drought. I think about where my inner direction comes from, how can I be sure I am hearing it. Sometimes my deepest yearnings feel like quicksand, holding me in inactivity without a guiding star. I was relieved to see the garden was alive, the transplants had survived the hot week.

I walked back up the hill and over to my studio. A few minutes later, I was upstairs at my desk with my morning tea when the heron flew by and landed near the pond. I thought it might be preaching to turtles, water snakes, maybe even the water lilies opening from their tightly closed night to better hear the heron’s wisdom. Herons know water; for they are fishermen and spend long hours watching water. 

The heron, however, surely didn’t know it was standing halfway between the summer solstice and the fall equinox, on the pagan holiday, Lughnasad. This holiday is celebrated on the first of August and marks the beginning of the wheat harvest and the sun’s slow descent towards winter. For us at the farm, early August is when we harvest the first tree fruits, peaches, plums, and early season apples. It’s also the last time to get seeds into the ground for late fall crops. In the midst of a global pandemic, while areas of the world suffer extreme drought and other places experience massive and destructive floods, the heron stands at the boundary of earth and water with equipoise, catching its food, a guardian of the old ways.

As we shift to this new season, maybe it’s a time for us to reassess our ways. Make some choices of what we are carrying into the next phase. Spring flowers are a distant memory, while yarrow is in bloom, Queen Anne’s lace is at its peak, and goldenrod is opening to yellow. The night insects have begun their incantations. What to take with us and what to let go?

What do you want to put energy into? Energy flows where intention goes. What’s driving you? What brings you joy? We can’t do it all, not in one season. But we can be part of it all.

At the farm we now have fewer bluebirds, the orioles have migrated, and only one pair of barn swallows are still sitting on eggs. But the heron remains—majestic, otherworldly, its squawks coming from deep in the earth, a wisdom that calls out, “Take heed. What are you doing with this one precious life?”

Lost Wax

It’s crazy how a nose from one direction can look perfectly fine, and viewed from 180 degrees, it’s too close to the eye. When I work on small wax figures, I turn them continuously around in my hands, making sure, for example, the left elbow doesn’t extend below the hip while I carve the right side of the torso. Working on a larger piece, I circle continuously; this partner dance assures everything works from all perspectives. 

Refuge, 2020, in wax in my studio. The endangered sea turtle and giraffe are rescuing the humans.

Our planet faces a ferocious loss of habitat, fifty percent of the species on the earth have disappeared in the last forty to fifty years. We’re a destructive species causing the acidifying of the ocean, the loss of precious topsoil, and the poisoning of the very air we breathe. The animals haven’t caused this harm—we have. But I like to think, despite our recklessness and selfishness, they would choose to save us.

I delivered Refuge to the foundry in early January, needing to cut off the giraffe’s legs to fit in my car. 

The turtle arrives at the foundry.

Not a problem for Zach Gabbard, owner and sole fabricator at Mission Foundry in Hyde Park. He will be taking it further apart—flippers, turtle shell, giraffe head, giraffe tail, turtle tail, and each individual person to make rubber molds.

Once he has the rubber molds, he will pour casting wax into them—the small figures solid, the large shapes like the giraffe body receive a thin layer so they can be hollow. When Zach has these wax pieces complete, he will attach the small ones together and build a funnel above each one—the constructions, intriguing modern mobiles.

The next step is to create the molds to receive the molten bronze. Each of these wax mobiles are dipped into a silica slurry nine times to slowly building up the mold. They are dipped, then coated with sand, and hung to dry for at least a day between dips.

At the pour, the funnel on top of each mold receives the liquid bronze, the wax melts out, lost wax, and the bronze hardens. These hard shells are then hammered and broken to free them from the bronze inside.  

There are still days of work ahead for Zach. He has to cut off the sprues and funnels. He has to sandblast each piece to get the specks of hard shell out of every crevice. Then the individual pieces will be welded together. Zach has to know how to replicate the textures I sculpt in my wax sculpture, and he has to do it in metal so the welded seams disappear. He has to care about the subtleties of the texture, with the deliberateness of a poet choosing words to describe the grooved furrows of an oak trunk.

I returned to the foundry a few weeks ago to position each of the the small bronze figures on the backs of the giraffe and turtle. Zach welded each one in place.

Then Refuge received its final patina and wax polish. It’s a long process. This piece is signed and numbered 1/5. Though my original waxes have disappeared, I have the molds to make four more copies. But always, for each one, we have to first make a new wax model, then cast it into bronze. After five copies, we’ll destroy the molds. 

Lost wax is an apt metaphor for these times: The only way to create something new is to lose something.  While we are collectively facing tremendous loss, it is good to reflect on the space that allows for something new to arise. The loss is real—people’s lives, habitat, species, jobs, freedom. I am alarmed, but I dearly want to believe that we can turn things around. We need humility. We need respect for every living being on the planet. Then the turtle and the giraffe, the heron and the wasp, the oak, the waterlily, and even the gnat will all be helping because we are all interconnected.

Refuge would have been outdoors at the Fuller Museum this summer, but Covid has delayed the opening of the New England Sculptors Exhibit until spring 2021. It sits on a chunk of bedrock outside my studio. I’d love to send more casting work Zach’s way, so if you would be interested in a copy of Refuge for your own garden, let’s talk. 

Refuge, bronze, 2020

Refuge is a hopeful piece. The determined, young giraffe and the tireless turtle are unconcerned with the enormity of their mission. They echo the world’s need for us to engage, to bring our gifts, and to offer help in this time of great loss. It’s a collective dance we can’t do alone.

Catalpa: The Hugging Tree

In full white flowering, a trillion frilly night moths perch on stems, sending out sweet scents of rose and bergamot. These clutches of flowers, each the size of a newborn child, balance at the end of every leaf cluster. The leaves, heart-shaped and lime green, lay open to the sky, each one positioned for the best photosynthesis. Catalpas reach peak bloom near the summer solstice, late for most trees in our climate. Summer is too hot for delicate blossoms.

Everything about this tree is large, embracing, and opulent. The wood, uprising from the ground, a trio of trunks, holds so much weight its steep ascent is inconceivable. It must be in the third octave of its life. Such a magnum opus. The tree dwarfs the building behind, my studio.

From the studio loft window I have watched a pair of swallows sit together, then fly off, soaring, and mating. Their brood began life in the bird box a few paces away. Red-winged blackbirds often sit on a branch and squawk, while nuthatches pace up and down the trunk. These tiny birds peck at bugs in the bark, quietly though, not like the red-hatted pileated woodpecker’s incessant jackhammering.

A few years back we had a tree company put two cables into the tree, worried about losing one of the trunks in a storm. This trinity of trunks now supports each other. One large branch broke two years ago. The branch dove to the ground and shattered, the wound along it—an accordion of frayed wood. But I wanted to leave it, not remove it, to see if it would heal. Now, buttressed by earth, new branches grow, flower, and bear fruit.

The tree grows twenty yards from the pond. I imagine it drinks heartily with every meal. Big tankards of H2O. Its size is quite out of scale for our small farm, but the Catalpa’s nature is to keep growing—water the source of its ecstasy.

The Catalpa makes its own shade, its own ecosystem, its own refuge. But now the bloom is over. The flowers are faded and brown, the scent has turned musky. It’s been such a presence in my life for the last ten days, I took my meditation cushion outside to sit near its trunk. That’s when I started using the pronoun “she” and “her” when I referred to the Catalpa. Her branches, her blossoms. She became more than tree to me. She became protector and guide.

While writing about her, I remembered that in my dream last night. I met an Indian woman, dressed in a drab brown and gray sari, with drab-colored brown and gray hair in a bun, and I knew it was Amaa, the hugging saint. I’ve never met her, but I’ve heard friends tell of their experiences, the process of waiting in a long line sometimes for hours, for the few seconds or minute it takes to receive her hug-blessing. In my meeting with Amaa, she cupped my shoulders with her hands, and then bowed my head so we lost eye contact but our foreheads joined. We were sisters, or mother and daughter, or some connected ancestor. She said, “Baruch Shalom” three times. Baruch is the beginning word of many Jewish prayers and means blessed. Shalom means peace.

The Catalpa tree became Amaa, became the carrier of this message of peace, strength, and resiliency. She communicated that we have untapped powers within us we are not aware of. The passing away of the blossoms became the rising of another voice, a steadfast and calming voice, reaching out to meet us. Inviting us into her embrace, always with open arms, the hugging tree, offering refuge.

Catalpa Tree, July 4, 2020

Blow on the Embers

Fire is sacred. Fire burns. Fire transforms.

The poet, Rumi, says:

            Love is the fire and we are the wood.

Blase, my partner, adds:

            And therein lies our freedom.

On Wednesday our fire blazed. Our household quintet, Blase, my partner, Ariel, my daughter, Ethan, her boyfriend, and Holly our housemate gathered, and burned heaps of apple prunings.

The prunings fall from the orchard trees in February. They’re lopped, snipped, and sawn off the trees over two weeks. We prune to vitalize the trees, direct their shape, remove dead and diseased wood, and most importantly, to let in light. We open up windows for sunlight to penetrate the tree, making sure all branches have a sky view. When one them doesn’t get enough light, they start to shrivel, even more shaded, become smaller, until they die back.

The pruned apple branches winter on the ground under the trees, providing healthy food for voles and mice who chew the bark. Then, when the snow is gone, and the small creatures have plenty of other foodstuff, we collect all the prunings and burn them. Fire blight, a bacterial infection is dormant in winter, and hides in the branches. Burning all the pruned wood help keep fire blight out of the orchard.

Holly and I gathered the tools, throwing them in the back of Blase’s old pickup truck—rakes, a shovel, a box of newspaper, kindling, matches, a portable gas water pump, and long hose. We also grabbed the canister of kerosene. Ariel and Ethan hopped into the bed of the truck. 

Around this mountain of prunings we made small fires with newspaper and kindling. We had a Christmas tree dropped off by a friend. Ariel jammed it into the pile above my small fire. It took. Whoomm! Whoosh!

Ethan and Ariel lighting the fire.

The flames licked through the tree, disappearing the needles and small branches. Then there was quiet. We tried to whisper our small fires into blaze until Blase arrived. He took the container of kerosene and started pouring throughout. With his blazing instincts, the fire caught.

The apple wood is green so you need a hot fire to really get them to take. But they did and the fire burned. More wood caught, whirring and snapping, and the flames grew. Menorahs of little flames on sticks, candles on an altar, a pyre. Fire warming our hearts.

With the forks attached to the bucket of the tractor, I rumbled along the apple rows. Our bonfire contained only a small portion of the orchard prunings. Holly had piled the rest at the end of each row. I teased the forks under a pile at the far end of the orchard, lifted, and scooped, held the massive tangle high up in the air and drove back to the fire. Blase and Ethan were tending with pitchforks. Putting the tractor in low gear, I pulled as close to the flames as I dared. With the bucket held high, Blase signaled, and the bucket dumped. Flames leapt, Blase and Ethan teased out the caught stragglers, and I reversed, to circle back to the next row for another pile pick up.

Meanwhile Holly and Ariel gathered blueberry prunings and white pine branches from across the road in the berry patch. We had little traffic jams on the cart road, but everyone has more patience these days: we’re in no hurry, we’re just here.

In only a few hours, we managed to burn what we needed to. As the fire ebbed, we listened to the last cracklings, and stared into the black sea of charred wood. Some embers transformed into white ash. With the breath of wind, snowflakes rose and fell.

In the final lines in Archibald MacLeish’s play, JB, his retelling of the story of Job, Sarah says to her husband,

Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling,
It’s all the light now.
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in the churches are out.
The lights have gone out of the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by . . .

Strength, even in darkest times, can be found in a whisper. The dark and the light, the suffering and joy, have always been and will always be the human condition. We can choose to kindle the fires, to breathe love through it all. The photo below is from a women’s Full Moon Fire we had on March 7, 2020. It’s hard to believe our world has changed so much in less than a month. When we can be physically close to each other again, we will celebrate with a great bonfire. You are all invited!