On a Lark

The rewards of re-ordering my agenda

It was nearing the end of a busy day, a running-to-and-fro-without-stopping sort of day, when I started to feel an uncomfortable dis-ease jumping around inside me. The sun wasn’t down, but would be, soon. My to-do list, still incomplete, felt suddenly overwhelming. At the bottom, I had scrawled “meadowlarks?” to remind myself that I was really hoping to record them that day. They’re easy to find around Missoula right now, singing their beautiful heads off in all of the public lands circling the city every morning and evening, and quite a bit of the time in between, too. In fact there are so many meadowlarks, singing so loudly and often, that it’s easy to forget what a gift it is to hear them. I didn’t want to do that; I didn’t want to let my day become nothing but me and my agenda, my tasks and goals and self-imposed stresses. But now here it was, almost the end, and that’s what had happened. Meadowlarks? Nope, too late now, and too much left to do.

I stepped out into the yard to tackle another job on the list, and heard the robins starting to sing their evening songs. The vague discomfort I was feeling suddenly sharpened into something more fierce, something like a wild animal kicking my brain case from the inside. Then it came clear. No more task-ing. No more rushing around. Time to go listen to meadowlarks.

I grabbed my sound gear and walked to the car, knowing I was heading to one of my many beloved Missoula-area haunts, even though I didn’t know which one yet. Just making that choice softened my edges a little. Ten minutes later I was on a trail, walking through a grove of Montana’s state tree (ponderosa pine) and starting to hear the voices of Montana’s state bird in the distance. As I approached an open meadow their songs got louder, and when an osprey flew silently overhead I decided it was a good time to stop and plug in the microphone. After just a few minutes of kneeling in the grass, a western meadowlark flew in and landed on the top of a young tree maybe 50 feet away from me, and let loose its song:

I want to say it’s like liquid gold, but that’s not quite right. No comparison can really do it justice. Meadowlark song is its own substance, its own singular, precious thing. And it’s in conversation! Taking turns with another of its kind a little further away, and with red-winged blackbirds, robins, and other singers chiming in as well. Yes, there’s road noise in there too, and a passing airplane — the nearly inescapable sound of our anxious species, hustling, striving, rushing around as we (very much including me) are so prone to do. What a relief it was, to have dropped out of that mode, even for a few minutes; to make holding still and listening my priority. What a reward this meadowlark gave me.

If you listened to Hark, the latest season of Threshold, you’ve heard me try to explain the power of listening to our planet-mates like this. The whole season is centered around the idea that it does something to us, this listening — changes us, opens us, shifts something in the human psyche that desperately needs shifting. I believe this is true in a general way, but of course the only experience I can speak about with full authority is my own. So what did this brief moment with a meadowlark change in me? What good did it do? Why did it feel like something worth dropping everything for?

Maybe it can’t be fully named, but I think it has something to do with a combination of otherness and togetherness. This life form, this bird-being, is my neighbor, my fellow traveler through this open field. But it is also a dinosaur. We both know this place well, but we’ve come to know it within very different bodies, with different ways of moving, different life-ways and concerns, different sensory systems attuned to different types of information. We’re together, and we’re also Other to each other.

And yet, there’s so much that is familiar, too. I also know what it’s like to sing out across the Missoula valley, to build a nest here, to find community and help create it, to fly in and out of this place, seeking, wandering, reuniting, resting.

I feel a sort of magic in this otherness and togetherness, and in the way they are inextricably mixed together. It’s quite simple and unfathomably complex, all at once: among all the creatures that have ever lived, in all the times and all the possible places, somehow we are here, together, in our shared home.

A year from now, or ten, I won’t remember much from this day. But I think I’ll remember this brief encounter, not only because I have a recording of it, but because I was fully present for it. I didn’t arrive at that presence through my own self-discipline and effort, it was gifted to me by this bird, its companions, and this place. I needed these others to help me find my own center, or maybe let go of it — to relax my grip on one version of reality and let other stories float in.

Meadowlarks? Yes, meadowlarks.

A little later that evening…