Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

The Song of the Canyon Wren

m 49 The Song of the Canyon Wren The love of beauty is a longing for the homeland of the soul. —Plotinus The song of the canyon wren is the sound of falling water. Its bright tones drop off the canyon rim and fall from ledge to ledge a step at a time, sliding down a pour-off bouncing onto a sandstone shelf, then dropping to the next layer of stone and down again—a falling scale, eight tones, a liquid octave of birdsong in the hard, sun-cut canyon. I lift my binoculars to search the rocks, but I don’t find the wren, which won’t surprise you, since you know wrens. Sometimes sounds turn me almost inside out with longing. The song of the canyon wren, the faraway voices of my children, and the watery sound of cottonwoods—these are on my mind today. But the sound of rain on sandstone will do it too, water hissing at the side of the lost sea, and the soft breathing of silver fishes caught between grains in this shelf of stone. I hear singing, and I don’t know what to do. I want everyone in the world to hear it. Then I want no one in the world to hear it but me. Then I want to gather Frank and the children and listen together. Then what hits me is a flood of sadness, washing the stones out from under my feet and making me stumble. Does this happen to other people? It isn’t just sounds. It can be a smell, or a glimpse of something in the distance. The silhouette of pinyon pines on lavender sunrise sky, or a mountain range under 50 m Holdfast rain clouds, each row of mountains softer and dimmer than the row before, or two black ravens stroking in unison across the red face of a cliff—any of these can hit me a body blow that leaves me gasping. This unnerves me and makes me feel ungrateful. I am blessed by beauty beyond anything I deserve; the gift should make me quiet and glad and at peace, but instead it makes me feel hollow inside. I tell you this, I trust you with this secret, because I think sometimes you feel it too. At first I thought it was loneliness, and maybe that is it. My daughter would love the ravens, I say to myself. Or, if only my son could be here. The beauty is too much for me alone; it opens an empty space that I need to share with someone else, and the absence of the people I love fills me with regret. And maybe it’s a vastly deeper loneliness, knowing that even if my daughter were here, or my son, they would never see it the same way. Even Frank, the person closest to me in all the world, sees the land through eyes far different from mine. So I will always be alone in my seeing, fundamentally alone. Or maybe it’s the sadness of unsatisfied greed. I want this for myself and I want it forever. I am greedy for falling water. Grasping after ravens. Gluttonous, when it comes to cottonwoods. The thought that the sky will dim, that the ravens will land and dive their heads into carrion, that the mountains will disappear into deep night, that the moment—never to be replaced—will be lost to me forever, is more than my greedy little emotional center can support. So maybe this is it: Knowing that the moment cannot be captured and held, I mourn the moment as it passes. Or maybe what I want is to be a raven, to merge with the sunrise, to lose myself in the layers of mountains—but I doubt it. So far as I can tell, water falling through sunshine doesn’t feel itself falling, doesn’t rejoice at the brightness of the light, doesn’t know joy or sorrow. If that’s true, then to be one with nature would be a pleasure unfelt, which wouldn’t be much of a pleasure at all. The Song of the Canyon Wren m 51 m A few hours after sunset, the sky glows above the cliff where the moon will rise. Already spires across the canyon are shining white. Bats career over the water, listening for the echoes of insects. Then the face of...