ABC News reported that there were 215,000 Chicagoans without power this morning. I’ll tell you how we spent our evening. We’re one of the suburbs just west of Chicago. It was a very quiet night. With no electricity, there wasn’t the hum of the fridge or the roar of central air. I came inside and my husband had lit all the candles and wall sconces he could find in our teeny brick bungalow. It struck me…I’m so used to the noises inside my house — the whir of the laptops — it’s sort of a relief to hear the quiet in our home.

I pulled our boy outside with his harp thinking that our neighborhood might enjoy a little home-made music. So he sat in his jammies jammin on his harp. *lol* Our awesome next-door-neighbors came over and B. played his silver trumpet. A duet of trumpet and harp, two boys adding peace to the ragged edges of the storm. They played a little “Paruparong Bukid” (Filipino folk song), “Star Wars”, “A Whole New World”, and did a sweet duet of “Twinkle-twinkle Little Star”.

It was nice to hang out with our neighbors on our front stoop, enjoying our boys, and their music. Don’t get me wrong. I did worry about whether the lack of our sump-pump would flood our basement or if the food in the fridge would all go bad and whether the the temperatures would soar the next day leaving us trapped in an pressure-cooker of a house.

But the aftermath of the storm brought its pleasures, too. The quiet of the night. The boys’ music. Conversation with neighbors. A certain relaxed pace. I fell asleep to the voices of the men next door trying to figure out if they could get the garage door up and working.

Best line I heard yesterday, hands down, came from two boys cruising our hood on foot to take in the devastation:

Boy #1: “Whoooaaa! Look at that!” (He points to our neighbor’s house engulfed in tree limbs.)

Boy #2: “Told you. It’s better’n'cable!”

See what can happen when we’re unplugged?

~ MGB

But it was one mean storm. When we arrived home, ten minutes later, here is what we saw:

Two major trees fell on our street

Transformer knocked out by a fallen branch

A branch shatters our neighbor's window

This used to be a streetlamp - top knocked off

Our neighbor's house engulfed by a fallen tree

On our street, everyone is okay. It’s amazing what 10 minutes of nature’s power can unleash. One neighbor had heard that the winds downtown were going at 75 m.p.h. Some saw the transformer spark and explode in our alley. The power is out for several blocks around us — but not in our house or the one next door. (So I have to post this fast before ComEd closes the lines completely to get them back up.) Another friend down the street saw branches flying through the air and heard the sound of trees ripping in half. (Poor trees!)

The beautiful thing is that everyone came outside to check on each other. I love the Midwest for its neighborliness and kindness. It’s good to see that everyone is okay. There’s a bulldozer outside, and police lines & officers guarding to keep people away from the live wires. That’s it for now…hoping everyone is home and cozy…

p.s.

My boy was worried about “our babies”, the seedlings in the veg garden. Gotta love it. Yes, the “babies” are okay. I checked.

It’s been a full & sometimes hectic 2 weeks since my boy has been out of school. I haven’t had as much time to just melt into nature as usual…so the last couple of weeks have felt off-balance. This morning, I went for a bike ride and stopped off at this small park in the northwest corner of town. There’s a beautiful, quiet strand of oak, maple, and elm trees that tower some 60 feet in the air. It isn’t huge, but when you need oxygen, it’s enough. Sunshine streamed through the trees. The balmy summer air kissed my skin.

My head has been full of travel plans, essays, articles, political rants about Sarah Palin, questions about feminism and motherhood, grief over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the transitions of dear friends moving, the excitement of weddings and births…the fullness and busyness of life. But, at some point, the thinking has to stop and the connecting with the deeper cosmos has to begin. Our bodies are lightning rods for experience.

So, 9 minutes for nature. (And if the experience goes longer than 9 minutes…? Awesome.) Try this:

1. Open the window, a door. Feel the sunshine on your face.

2. Listen for a bird. Who is it? How do they sound? Can you whistle that? Will they whistle back?

3. Touch a summer leaf. Feel the veins, the edges.

4. Rub the leaves of a tomato plant. Smell the sharp scent on your fingers.

5. Lie down on the grass, rest your weight upon the earth.

6. Go surfing. (This one’s for you, Sis.)

7. Sit on a park bench. Be still. Feel the world swirl past you. Be still. Hear the silence beneath the noise. *Breathe*

8. Take a walk around the block. Notice flower boxes. Notice gardens in your neighborhood.

9. Look up. At the sky. At clouds. At the moon that lingers in the morning. At the sparrows or sea gulls or hawks or June bugs. Feel the air thrumming with life.

Nature calls…even in small doses…

~ MGB

the way the Great Blue Heron

stands tall when she hunts, head snaking,

spindle-legs plunk silently?

But when she spots

the silver darting fish,

she crouches low,

a ball of feathers,

an arrow focused on one intent —-> B R E A K F A S T !

~ MGB

6/15/10

I wrote this Sunday morning at Thatcher. Communing in nature has become one of my spiritual practices :

Koan #7

Frozen River

Silence in the glen
Winter stillness
The rare peep of an unseen bird
Clumps of snow drip
from bare gray branches,
soft thuds onto the ground.
Blue glitter,
a million prisms of light
bless the banks, decay of logs
the ground sculpted into rounds and slopes
by hours of wind and river tongue lashings.
The DesPlaines has frozen –
Time in hibernation,
Spring arrested and Summer’s bubbly frolic
soothed into a cold lullaby
beneath blankets of fleecy white powder.
Delicious hush, how healing you are!

I want to show my son
the land the way it really is,
naked beauty, precious pale sunlight,
the deep sacred silences
no hand-made temple or church can surpass –
this is the open sky, the vault of heaven
the original cathedral.
Too many cars drive past,
one every minute,
speeding to brunches or Sunday services,
rushing on the frozen crunch of road.
But I don’t mind –
more silence for me,
unashamed of my greed,
drinking beauty like a dying woman
as the feathered tips of treetops
brush the morning chill.

Koan # 8

Hint of egret wingspan flapping
behind the tangled jumble
of gray winter branches.

Koan #9

Rush

I hate the rush of days,
man-made hours,
boxes I am trapped inside.
I push against the walls
only to break through
to another box.
Schedules, deadlines,
start times, end times,
school bells, radio alarms,
buzzers, timers, beepers,
cell phones, online bids –
Enough!

Where is the deep time?
The sun moving westward in the sky?
Shadows of trees growing longer?
The moment suspended,
like a dust mote hanging in sunlight,
the slow growing of grass seedlings?
The halted flow of river
beneath the ice?

Where is the joy
of climbing snow heaps
falling, rolling, tumbling
until the laughter and ice streak
your face and there is nothing left
but the pleasure of returning
inside to a hot mug of cocoa
and damp socks drying on the radiator?

I rail against the boxes
we have made
and claw the pages of every schedule
and run, a free woman, to the frozen Palos hills
where time is kept in drips and ice crystals
forming in the winter sun.

- M.G.B.

-MGB

Look out your window. Better yet, GO OUTSIDE. Unplug. Live a little. Above all…Love.

Summer in Chicago is also a jazz riff, a pulse of throbbing beats, bodies crushed out onto the street block parties, in festivals, at parks, chowing down on smokey barbecue (or veggie skewers), hitting the Lake, scouting the dunes and just getting out there into thronging life. ‘Cause winter’s brutal. And when the Sun comes to stay, you party.

But this summer’s been markedly different. Cool. And I don’t mean in a hip lounge, sipping-absinthe-at-the-Violet-Hour kind of way. I mean cool. Cold. Chilly. The kind of chilly that’s like San Francisco in the summer. As in,”The coldest winter is a summer I spent in San Francisco.” (<– This, btw, was not said by Mark Twain.) It’s been cool enough that neighbors and friends and all sorts of folks in my community have asked off and on all summer, “Is it global warming?” Except, of course, that sounds lame, right? We don’t have a good catch-all for what’s happening because all these changes in weather patterns will be different in different parts of the world – cold in some, hot in others, drying, melting, rising…CHANGING. We’re a planet in transition, grappling for how to talk about it. The beautiful jazz rhythm of our Chicago summer is losing its beat. (Can the plants keep up? And the animals that depend on them? And we, the two-legged in our four-wheel-drives?)

Okay, not to be a summer bummer or anything. But you gotta wonder right? We Chicagaoans (and, yes, I’ve lived here long enough to count myself among the locals) love to talk about our weather. We practically own weather — the extreme balminess of summer, the frigid winters, the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it falls, and the tender, dewy springs. Weather bonds us. Why else would we be so neighborly?

So this summer, I’m wondering. Was it summer for you? Was it Global Changing? Did your skin feel the summer the same way it always did?

- MGB

Last week, on Earth Day, I took my son’s class on a nature hike. Where? Somewhere remote and pristine? Nope. Right in their own backyards, literally 1 block from their school. We’re near a freeway. We’ve got cars, we’ve got paved streets. And, yes, we’ve got some pollution. We can see the Sears (no, not ready to call it the Willis) Tower from our neighborhood bridge.

But we’ve also got 2 hawks nesting high in a tree-top near the school. I’ve seen loads of kids – grown-ups, too — walk right past the tree and never once look up while the hawks are lining their nest. Perhaps it’s better for the hawks that no one notices them. Certainly, they’d rather be under our radar. But this was also, I felt, a teachable moment. A great chance to teach some very sharp and naturally inquisitive 8-year-olds that there’s a little bit of wilderness in their own neighborhood.

Most everyone in our neighborhood walks to school. And this is a great chance for them to look up every once in a while. Or, while tree branches are still bare in the spring, they can catch a glimpse of the myriad nests — twiggy, feathered, encrusted with mud, abandoned and taken over by squirrels, papery wasps nests, nests in lamp posts. It’s an awesome opportunity.

So that’s what we did. We walked the neighborhood, sat quietly a safe distance away from the “hawk tree”. They managed to glimpse the male hawk swoop from tree to tree. They saw the female ensconced snugly in the nest. I introduced them to field guides and the idea of becoming stewards of the land and the prairie gardens that are springing up in our neighborhood. Kids nowadays hear so much about global warming and the loss of habitat, endangered species, melting polar ice caps, and drowning bears. They need a future they can connect to, care about, something they can see with their own eyes. Otherwise, saving the Earth is one big abstraction. But hawks nesting in their own hood? Yeah,  that’s something they can get with. So here’s what they saw, right where they live:

Hawk guarding nest from across street

Their faces lit up. They began to look at their neighborhood in a whole new way. On the walk back, they were whistling for cardinals, excited (EXCITED!) about the American robins, looking for squirrel tracks in the concrete. In other words, nature didn’t seem so far away.

I took them to their school’s prairie garden, talked to them about how there are plants taller then their tallest teacher. And that the roots can go down 3X as deep as the plant is tall; how lightning and prairie fires actually rejuvenate the land. The ecosystem that’s in their own city — these glorious prairies and savannas and wetlands — are rare and to be treasured. No, we don’t have rainforests. But every ecosystem on Earth is unique, every home special and worth cherishing. At least that’s what I hope they took away from the walk.

Their teacher checked-in with me after school. What did they remember? What did they get out of it? Turns out the thing they liked best was when we whistled like cardinals. Cool. That’s a start.

~ MGB

onto the seams of my field pants,

hiking boots splattered with mud,

hair in pleasant disarray.

The scent of freedom

still clings to me.

Just an hour before,

by watch-time,

by two-legged time,

by analog hands or digital face,

I stood in a place

14,000 years in-the-making,

a glacier’s passing,

strewn with dolomite and limestone

crumbling, soft-edged rocks,

and the whimsy of a universe

where lands stretch, wrinkle,

move in slow motion.

Barbara gave me her tour

of this prairie she nurtures

which belongs to all Chicagoans.

(But really isn’t it clear by now -

all wild places

are God’s first?)

Gray praying mantis cocoon,

pasture rose topped by

a berry-looking ovary,

drooping little blue stem grass;

we met on sacred ground

where she pointed out

how females recreate nature,

how life goes on

through our tenacity.

~ MGB

Inspired by a morning at Ted Stone Preserve and an interview with Barbara Birmingham,

site steward there with her husband George for 14 years.