This female Black-headed Grosbeak was staying deep in the foliage of a maple tree, watching but calling no attention to herself.

The raptors at the top of the food chain, Red-tailed Hawks or Bald Eagles, like to perch high and visible so they can see the terrain around them. But many birds understand that though they may be predators they are also prey. Today, their caution and discretion seems admirable.

We live in an expressive society, based more on therapeutic myths than any established wisdom from philosophy or religion, full of people driven by the strange hope that baring their souls to strangers will lead to connection and healing that they sense they need. It can be costly, needing to be noticed and admired, wanting the be the prettiest bird on the highest branch whose song is heard everywhere.

Other birds at any particular moment are more intent on seeing than on being seen. It takes patience and effort to see them at all. Catching a glimpse of a Marsh Wren or a Yellow Warbler always reminds me of how much of reality we normally don’t see. The Divine characteristically hides itself, and some revelation is available only to those whose desire leads them to effort and endurance. The highest knowledge, Socrates suggested, is always a gift from the divine, a tanager that appears suddenly on a blue spruce bough after hours of looking. It should not be profaned by disclosure to the unworthy. Besides, they can’t receive it. It is foolishness to them. It’s not really a secret. It’s sacred.

“The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit.”
—George Elliot
Plums and grapes and apples ripen in a world aglow. Mornings are golden with mists. The light is failing, and trees turn gorgeous colors—orange, gold, amber, red—warm hues merging with the smell of fire while nights come sooner and faster. I see hostas with brown scars of frost damage and corn stalks, dry and sterile, whitened with hoar-frost. Sunflowers that yesterday faced upward, thrusting at the sun, now bend toward the ground like old men with worn-out spines.

We feel the change, exhilarating and ominous. The loss of the warm easy—long days, shorts and sandals, swimming, midnight sunsets, warm nights. After long drought, torrents of rain whipped by rough wind, and when the clouds clear: blue mountains topped with white snow.

Summer dissipates like morning reverie the moment I get up from breakfast and turn to work, and back at school I wear long jeans and socks and shirts with buttons. Nights have become chilly. Young girls have sorted through their closets, coming out pretty in their woolen scarves, puffy vests, sweaters and boots. Everyone becomes prettier or more handsome—without sweat and bad hair, imperfect flesh enhanced with layered beauty, and the younger ones exuberant about something they can’t quite find.

Pumpkins continue getting heavier; hard green pears turn slightly gold, softening. The rules are shifting.

A feeling flits in and out of me, like bats through a cavern—a hollowing sense that it’s all slipping away. I remember when the world was darker and colder than this, the relentless winter, the simple knowledge that nature is deadly wild, always, even when it seems to let up in March and April. Now, again, gentle summer has gone. Fire becomes important—we remember a need for warmth and light. We plan an autumn bonfire, light the furnace.

And we enjoy the earthy joys—apples turning sweet and red, heavy clusters of elderberries and grapes just in time for neotropical birds, flitting and feeding, building energy to migrate away. Bears come down from the high country, a lumbering hunger drawn to the ripening fruit.

The Milky Way is always there, but most often, blinded by the lesser light of our sun, a minor star, we cannot see it. Watching the sunset fade into darkness, an invisible cosmos coming into view, offering a majestic intimation of a vastness and mystery we cannot fathom, one would need to be somewhat simple to think that all that science cannot yet see must not exist.

I’ve been reminded of all that while doing night photography–setting up on a hillside overlooking the Mission Mountains, and being outside, watching and waiting, as the day fades. The vast, slow changes of light permeate the soul with a sense of beauty. We are never alone in the presence of a created world on the brink of something so majestic and alive our words fail.

The sky darkens and the pink fades through orange and blue toward the unspeakable depth of night. And yet, there is more. The moonless sky doesn’t stay dark. Our vision begins to twinkle, a star here and there. Then more. And more.

Before long we are immersed in a cosmic fire of such scale and beauty that we could not have imagined it if we had not seen it. And seeing such a spectacle emerge where before we had stared at an apparent void, we are assured that what we do not know and cannot see is as vast and wonderful as we dare to hope. And more.