d8b                   d8b 
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  88b                 d88  
  888888b  d8888b d888888  
  88P `?8bd8b_,dPd8P' ?88  
 d88,  d8888b    88b  ,88b 
d88'`?88P'`?888P'`?88P'`88b

                          d8b 
                          88P 
                         d88  
 d888b8b    88bd88b  d888888  
d8P' ?88    88P' ?8bd8P' ?88  
88b  ,88b  d88   88P88b  ,88b 
`?88P'`88bd88'   88b`?88P'`88b

 d8b                          d8b 
 ?88        88P               88P 
  88b                        d88  
  888888b   88b  88bd88b d888888  
  88P `?8b  88P  88P'  `d8P' ?88  
 d88,  d88 d88  d88     88b  ,88b 
d88'`?88P'd88' d88'     `?88P'`88b

Today I woke up and I felt In My Bed. I think that it is a wonderful thing when a bed becomes safe and normal enough that on the fringes of sleep, you can forget you are in a specific bed. You can just sleep.

Today I woke up- not in Kingston, not in Stone Ridge, not in Cottekill, not in Vermont, not in any place in particular, but just In My Bed.

Today I woke up and I heard birdsong. I knew two things- that I was In My Bed, and that the memories of the birdsong that I was hearing went straight to my core, closer to my personhood and more affiliated with myself then my current gangly teenage body. These two things together made me feel that I was at home.

What a joy it is to know birdsong! Not only knowing, but feeling. Feeling the thousands of days I had heard it before. It is the joy of knowing a song’s movement before the movement happens, the joy of knowing. To know the movement of something non-human could be described as a type of communication with nature.

Yesterday I woke up to silence. I got out of a bed and on my way to the car, I was greeted with thunderous noise. A cacophony, a boundaryless object that encapsulated warfare and fanfare and NOISE. The color drained from my face, seconds ago hydrated in the newness of morning, now oil and blood drained as I turn to face the tumult. A four story tree I had never noticed before stood cracked and naked at the end of the block, caked in thousands of cawing clumps of birds that wrenched open their maws and sawed their throats against air so warm your stomach dropped as if you had just driven off a cliff.

It’s been getting warmer recently. It is always a shock for me when the perpetual winter gives way. I feel the ice buried in the ground through my bare feet. For the past couple weeks, it has been slowly weeping water and bleeding mud, but in the last couple days, I feel the integrity of the ice giving way. It’s like that living moment that the ice cube in your mouth squeaks and cries and deforms like plastic to the pressure of your teeth. The ground has been softening and slacking like skin that tears gruesomely when you run too fast and hard down a hill.

For us who have come into this world midway up the exponential curve, it is clearer that the awe of climate destruction is not apart from the awe of nature. How am I to know if the birds on that tree came to project their power in response to my species’ violence? Perhaps this show of rawness has happened this time every year for the last millennium.

We will exchange with nature whether we communicate with care or violence.