The YouTube algorithm regularly serves me up a dose of embracing the season of life you’re currently in. Fifteen years ago it started as Jake: A Mom’s Opinion. Two years later it was Jake & Nake: A Mom’s Opinion. And then at some point Nake became Nate and it evolved into No It All. There is no set time frame. No specific logic. Sometimes you just paint your toenails “The Thrill of Brazil” and retitle your blog.
One of the seasons of my life where my brain grew the most was the year I lived in Spain. The constant barrage of words and experiences literally made my brain hurt by dinnertime. And while it was challenging, it was also a quantum leap. You’d think I mostly learned Spanish that year, but au contraire. Apparently I learned a smidge of French. More importantly, I learned a lot about English. I was under a Spanish roommate microscope and found myself representing the entire English language and expected to explain its countless quirks. Why do we get onto buses and into cars? How do you explain the differences between “put in, put on, and put out”? You don’t appreciate the meaning of things you’ve rattled off your entire life until you’re attempting to explain and translate them into a foreign language.
The past two years have been another one of those my-brain-hurts seasons. Knocking me into the deep end of the grief pool where nobody knows much of anything and rarely talks about it. At some point, I was struck by the word “breathtaking.” It takes on a different meaning when the ever-present rise and fall of his breath is taken.
Another one is wildlife. Wild life. This life is wild. In every sense of the word. We’ve been surrounded by both, the wild life and the wildlife.
One day I watched from upstairs as a gray fox ran along the deck of the new house and straight into the kitchen.
There was the afternoon a bobcat napped on the patio while Nate played video games.
The time I was sitting on the bench with my eyes closed and when I opened them, a brown eagle flew past, almost at eye level.
There were the weeks of trying to outsmart a baby skunk. The two blond newborn bambis. And the series of days where the turkeys ran to me on the road. They knew me. And followed me until I turned up the hill.
During one of my walks, a coyote ran at top speed across the field. And then we were visited by a solo turkey hen we named Heidi. Every day she followed me around the house. She craned her neck to look at me from the top of the wall by the kitchen sink. She spent her afternoons near the living room, and her evenings just outside by the dining room table. When I returned from a work trip, her flock had come for her and swept her off to bigger and better things.
This is the season of our wild life.
…I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
— Mary Oliver