Twelfth evening: Brilliant world

5:30 pm

Sunny day today, 70s.  Spent the day with my husband and our kids out on an island off our coast, precious and exhausting time.  Took some rose wine up the tree with me when we got home this afternoon and settled in.  

Earlier sit than usual.  Robins had all kinds of new words to their songs tonight, like they'd been traveling.  Whole new verses I hadn't heard before!  Cricket chirped more rapidly than other evenings.  A crow cawed once.  We see them flying through our yard often, but this is only the first crow I've heard during a sit this year.

Spotted a regular avian visitor of late whom I only ever see the taillights of: long brown tail, brown wings, bigger than a robin, with white under its tail.  Thought I caught a glimpse of green-yellow on the underside of the wings today.  Thought it was a thrasher at first (haven't seen one in years, so my recollection was a bit fuzzy), but they don't have the striking white under the tail that this one has.  Have also heard a single sharp note that I believe was from this new bird.  Will try to memorize it if I hear it again to help with the identification.

Both the beech sapling and the young maple growing at the base of my sit tree have shot up, putting on six, eight new inches since my sits began less than two weeks ago.  It's astonishing to see how quickly they can grow, like life is just exploding within them and that's the only way it can get out.  The sun shone through the branches of the pine as I sat, and every now and then shone brilliantly through, onto the leaves of the little maple.  I had been studying the maple leaves, noting how they are almost full-grown but still as tender as when they were tiny.  When the sun shone brightly on them all of a sudden, their whole appearance changed.  They had gone from being  dimly-lit leaves hovering in the shadows to exquisite specimens of the earth with layers of shadows dancing across them, mingling with the dazzling sunlight, all bright green and sharp-toothed edges.  It reminded me of how, when we pay attention to things in our lives and share our attentiveness with others, we transform the world for one another.