Just before 2023 gave way to 2024, my husband and I drove down a mountain, talking about how to manage election-year anxiety. Specifically, my election-year anxiety. We had just spent a few days in a cottage in the woods, and we were jazzed on silence and stillness and the obligation to do nothing but walk together among the trees. To listen to the wind in the trees.
We weren’t making New Year’s resolutions, exactly. We were feeling for ways to carry those days of calm into a troubling new year. I was proposing things like eating by candlelight every night or reading only poems after 5 p.m. My husband was proposing things like hiding my phone.
For most of 2023 I managed to avoid poll-related panic by reminding myself that the election was still more than a year away. There were plenty of other calamities to worry about in the meantime — climate, biodiversity, war, gun violence, racism, health care access and the persecution of my L.G.B.T.Q. neighbors, just for starters. But lurking beneath it all was an understanding of how very much worse such troubles would get if autocrats took control of the American presidency in 2024.
My husband is not very worried about the election. He trusts that American voters aren’t fools. He is able to check the news at night and only a moment later fall into the sleep of winter bears. I, on the other hand, will lie awake if I so much as glance at the headlines after dark.
I found I didn’t worry so much while I was out on book tour last fall. There is really nothing like spending time in libraries and bookstores to give a person faith in humanity. I am profoundly direction-impaired, and solo travel can be disorienting for me, every street bewildering in the dark. But inside those little lighted spaces, people were nodding and smiling. People were reaching out for my hands.
They would go home with a book, or sometimes a whole stack of books, and I was reminded yet again of how this commonplace miracle of connection — between writers and readers, between readers and one another — persists across distances. Every time I left a bookshop or a library last fall, I was filled with love for the sweetness in people.
But it’s January now, and there is nothing to distract me from a looming election during which a shocking number of Americans hope to see an aspiring dictator reinstalled in the White House.
My husband and I saw the New Year in as we always do, with our closest friends, and the next morning I woke up smiling. But when I went to the bedroom window to look for my first bird of the year, there were no birds to be seen. A squirrel peered at me from our largest birdhouse but quickly ducked back into the shelter of the leafy nest she’d built inside the box. She raised a litter of babies there last summer, and I’m pretty sure at least one of those youngsters, now grown, was inside with her on that cold New Year’s morning.
When I stepped outside my own house, all was silence. No towhee scratching in the leaf litter. No winter-drab goldfinch picking through seedcrowns in the pollinator garden. No thirsty bluebird at the heated birdbath. No robin harvesting the last of the pokeberries. Not even any crows stalking across the churned soil where our late neighbor’s house so recently stood.
According to birding tradition, the first bird you see on New Year’s Day sets a theme for your year. A robin can be a sign of renewal. A starling suggests adaptability. A crow might mean a year of wit and problem-solving and maybe even a little mischief. What did it mean for the new year to dawn entirely bereft of birds?
I know that songbirds are quiet in cold weather, conserving their energy for warmth. I know they take shelter on gray days when hawks are on the wing, hunting while they can fly without casting a warning shadow. But my first thought on that silent New Year’s morning was not a realistic recognition of the cold or the drear. My first thought was an atavistic, apocalyptic fear: This what it will be like when all the birds are gone.
After an hour of scanning the trees, I finally heard a blue jay, and then the returning call of another, and a moment later the first bird of 2024 appeared. Its colors were muted on that gray day — in birds, the color blue is created not by pigment but by the interaction of light and feather — but the blue jay’s impossible beauty was as clear to me in that instant as it has ever been in all my life of loving blue jays.
The birds weren’t gone, of course. Like the squirrel in the nest box outside our bedroom window and the opossum tucked between the floor joists under our family room, they were only keeping still in the dense protection of pine and cedar, or roosting in the boxes they nested in last spring. In bad weather they always shelter together, sharing warmth — bluebirds in the nest box in our front yard, chickadees in the box under the climbing rose, Carolina wrens in the clothespin bag by the back door.
The natural world does not exist to teach us how to live, much less to match our purposes, and the first-bird game is only a bit of whimsy. But in that moment of whooshing relief, after a blue jay finally flew from a pine, I found my lesson for the coming year. And it had nothing to do with where I keep the phone or how often I check for news, and very little to do with silence or candlelight or even poetry.
To make it through the gathering disquiet, I will need embodied connection. As my wild neighbors did in the uncheery newness of an inhospitable morning, as I did myself in all the lovely places I visited on book tour, and in the company of dear friends on New Year’s Eve, I will need to seek comfort in the warmth of others this year. Whenever the cold creeps in, wherever the dark night pools, I will need to look for others. I will need not pixels but voices. Not distances but reaching hands.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
