MY BACKYARD

THE MORE THAN HUMAN COMMUNITY IN MY BACKYARD

Humans are social animals.  This means both that we need our kind, but it also means that we need other beings to whom we are connected in the web of life—that’s why there are so many “pets” or “animal companions.”

I’m blessed to have a little strip of woods in my backyard that leads to the right of way granted to the local power company when the farm was sold and the subdivision built back in the 1980’s. I realized today that I have a whole community in that little woods and the valley. 

There’s the deer, of course, one of the species that has hugely benefitted from human interference in our ecosystem.  To use a variant on what Michael Pollan says about the human relationship to corn, it’s as if the deer have domesticated suburban humans. I had the privilege last year of seeing a fawn nurse and I routinely see the deer looking at me when I sit on my bench in the woods and do my morning practice. We have a funny relationship because they know in their bones that I should be a predator of theirs so they are scared of me, but I know the only aggressive action I am going to take against them is to fence them out of my garden.

There are the squirrels.  There’s a whole family who live in a hole in the dead standing tulip tree.  I witnessed the transition when the squirrels discovered the hole and kicked out the family of small birds (tufted titmouse?) who had made a nest there.  I hear the squirrels regularly running over the dead leaves on the floor of the woods, scrambling up trees and chittering at each other as they play chase, a game I don’t pretend to understand.

There are myriad birds.  I suck at visual processing, so I can’t tell you what kind they are for the most part (I know I have woodpeckers, robins, bluejays, cat birds,  morning doves, but there are many, many others).  I listen to them chattering away, sometimes raising an alarm when something threatens them, most times flying around from tree to bush to the ground in a pattern that makes sense to them and not to me.

There are trees—hickory, beech, oak, tulip seem to be the main ones. They are in full leaf now; just a few short months ago they were naked against the sky. I don’t understand trees either.  I wouldn’t know a healthy woods from an unhealthy one and there’s of course this odd human interference that makes the trees end at the lawn where I mow and the power line right of way the power company maintains.

Then there are the billions of microscopic beings that are in the soil, an entire world I can’t even imagine. The web of life is this incredibly complex miracle that we attempt to explain scientifically because we think we can. I don’t think we can.

I am blessed to have this community, and I express my gratitude every morning as part of my prayers. May you be blessed to find some place in the more than human world in which you feel at least a bit at home.