Seasons of the Wild

I’m in the garden when the scream rings out.

Surrounded by beauty and bumblebees sipping at the roses and the salvia, I’m at peace despite the chaotic world. I have worked hard to build a sanctuary, planting hundreds of flowering shrubs and trees, bulbs and perennials, so I’m surrounded by joyful color, visited by all sorts of creatures that inspire wonder.

I tend to the garden each day, listening to birdsong or reading with my dog. Most of the time, however, I revel in the luxury of taking in my surroundings. But today I’m interrupted by a screech and a piercing whistle. The sound grows close before I’ve registered what it might be. Then I see a baby rabbit, no bigger than my palm, running frantic circles around the garden beds that surround my patio, chased by the dark ribbon of a weasel.

It’s common to see rabbits for many months of the year. My home sits on several acres surrounded by wooded conservation land, and the rabbits consider the yard more theirs than mine, venturing unconcerned into my lavish garden to feast on hydrangeas and hosta, which I happily allow, because the creatures are so tender and wise.

But I have never seen a weasel. I am simultaneously frightened and intrigued. It takes me a moment to register that the weasel is in sharp pursuit, its shrieking hunting call chorusing with the rabbit’s cries of terror. Over and over, they circle while I watch transfixed. At last, I grab my dog and run inside, afraid to see the hurt I know is inevitable.

~ ~ ~

I wailed when the injury happened and for many months and years after.

One moment I was fine and the next I was not, one wrong move and my spine suddenly injured in several places. I was unable to move, my muscles stiffening and spasming, each of my limbs pulsing electric with severed nerves. I was so in shock that my body had betrayed me this way that it took a while for me to register the severity of the injury.

Doctors did not know what was wrong. Round and round we went trying to determine the cause, if there was any solution. They sent me for countless MRIs and CT scans, to countless specialists and surgeons. It was many years before we accepted that these injuries were permanent, many years more until I received a diagnosis that explained the chronic pain I had felt throughout my life, an invisible disability that rendered me susceptible to these sorts of injuries and many others. 

Pain was the only certainty, my future one of degeneration, the inevitable breakdown of my body. This was unavoidable, yet I was to remain vigilant. I was to see doctors and specialists regularly for the rest of my life, and to complete several hours of physical therapy each day until I died, and to try to find a way to accept that I existed in pain that others could comprehend and most would not believe.

I felt lost, uncertainty creeping closer, danger all around, no map to lead me out of the woods.

~ ~ ~

I bought my home many years ago because I wanted to escape the chaos of the contemporary world. Tucked at the end of a rural dirt road, my home does not even appear on most maps, conveniently straddling city lines, so that my mailbox appears in one city, my home in another, a delightful confusion for anyone reliant on the certainty of location.

Tucked deep into the woods, my home is a haven for wildlife. I regularly see coyotes and bobcats, foxes and fisher cats, hawks and cormorants. I find the spoils of their ferocity on the ground, carcasses and bones, blood and fur. But I also encounter gentle creatures like groundhogs and rabbits, otters and great blue herons, who gently swoop home to roost in the wetlands each year, gliding through the sky like a prehistoric reminder that nothing can escape its place and purpose.

I am grateful for a safe place in a cruel world, even if it is a reminder that danger and beauty exist simultaneously.

~ ~ ~

As a child, I pranced through the house, a fur pendant at my throat.

I have long loved what is wild even if I could not understand it. 

One of my earliest memories is of wearing a fur scarf around my throat like an embrace, several tiny creatures sewn together, their eyes made of glass beads, their tiny hands and feet clawing my clavicle, their slender tails sewn together like a daisy chain. Surely, they were mink, but I believed them weasels because I wanted to believe them wild, wanted to wrap myself in this freedom. And I could not bear to accept that humans could raise such delicate creatures only to kill them.

I do not remember where I acquired such a garment, but I do remember the feel of what was once feral precious against my skin. And I remember that I pretended they were still alive, pretended I could hear them chittering, whispering to me. Sometimes I held them to my nose and breathed deeply, inhaling a scent I imagined came from some musky tunnel deep in the earth.

And I remember how I did not prance like a princess but pretended myself instead one of their kind. We were all weasels, all of us tangled together for protection, each of us gripping fiercely at the throat.

~ ~ ~

When I teach Annie Dillard’s “Living like Weasels,” my students do not believe the story of a man looking into the sky and seeing a weasel dangling from an eagle’s throat. Many say they have never seen an eagle to begin with, couldn’t recognize any kind of bird, are too distracted to even look at the sky most days. Many say they have never seen a wild creature hunt, though some have stories of feeding frozen mice to snakes or crickets to family lizards. But most simply do not believe that a weasel would latch on to something as ferocious as an eagle, do not believe anything would fight for its life despite such overwhelming odds. 

We read about the weasel’s instinct to fight against what would cause injury. We read about the weasel’s body lifted up and aloft, flying though it was never meant to do more than skim the surface of the ground. We read about how the weasel would rather let its flesh fall away than give up, would rather become a skeleton dangling from the throat of what meant to hunt it rather than let go. We read about the weasel welcoming death because it is so intent on survival.

Because I know my students rarely believe this story—believe it less the more we become removed from the natural world, as our instinct shifts instead to doomscroll or obsess over the latest global disaster—I show them a recent photo of weasel riding a woodpecker. The weasel latches onto its back though the bird is larger, though the bird’s beak is sharp enough to pierce wood. The two soar, united, into the sky. 

Students accept this recent evidence, then wonder how the photographer even thought to look, how he even noticed. I ask them to go outside and pay attention. I invite them to describe the color of a particular tree or the smell of a particular plant. I ask them to spend some time looking at the clouds and finding as many images as they can within a single formation. They ask me if I do this and I say not as often as I wish.

~ ~ ~

I could not watch my friend feed his ferret. Yes, the creature was darling, a slender noodle with intelligent eyes and an expressive squeak. But I could not watch my friend place live mice and rats, even raw meat, in the cage for her to devour. She shredded the flesh with such skill that I knew what she would do to creatures in the wild, feared for what she might do to me, though I knew I was much larger and she would likely fear me. Still, I did not trust what her instinct would inspire if she were caught unaware.

What I hated most was watching her eat rabbit. Even though it was the meat my friend caught while hunting, it pained me to think of the creature caught by both predators. It pained me, too, to think of such a fearsome creature relying on a human for her hunt, relying on his luck or skill or generosity to give her a proper fill.

But it pained me most to think of the rabbit. I knew the clever way it burrowed, and the resiliency it used to survive long winters, the alert way it kept watch for danger. The contradiction of soft and skillful, tender and tough was fascinating. I wanted to be that way—two things at once, and everything in between. 

~ ~ ~

Curiosity gets the best of me, and I go back outside to watch the weasel. The bunny is gone, but I suspect the weasel has dragged the carcass under a set of stairs because it is frantically running back and forth, attempting to pull something from beneath the steps before rising up on its hind legs to look at me.

The weasel is darling, though I know it is also ferocious, that it survives by drinking warm blood. And still, its eyes are inquisitive, bright and pure as it stares curiously, waiting to see what I will do. Weasels are solitary creatures, and it is rare to see them in the wild, yet this creature does not seem afraid of me standing so close to its kill. It watches me and then resumes its work before standing again to make eye contact. We stare at each other, each of us transfixed. 

I was frightened only a few minutes before, afraid for the bunny and my dog, and perhaps even myself, though I know this is silly. But now I cannot turn away, even as I know there are more bunnies in the den, that the weasel will surely sniff them out. But there is something about being so close to wildness that transfixes me, a kind of awe that is holy. I feel fortunate for this witness, for this tender moment that reminds me that life and death are not so different, that they are not binaries, but a circle like the one the weasel and rabbit ran around the garden, around me nursing my wounds like the center of the universe pulling me away from my pain and toward a reminder that not everything is as simple as good and bad, predator and prey, sickness and health.

As though an echo of this thought, I turn the other direction and see a grown rabbit, most likely the mother, crouching beneath a small ginko. She is crouched down as though sleeping, waiting to see what has happened to the bunny, what might happen to the rest. The weasel does not see her, easily thirty feet away in another portion of the garden, darting through the hibiscus and holly, cardinal flower and kniphofia. I wonder how long she will wait, resting beneath the jade leaves spread out like fans or butterflies, backdropped by roses that flower all spring and summer and well into the fall and lilies that only bloom for one day.

There is something to learn from her, I think, about accepting our place. She has glimpsed danger and still she stays, will not run from reality. Instead, she quietly accepts what cannot change, does what she must to survive. She does not fling herself to panic but instead waits, stoic in the sun.

~ ~ ~

When I first suffered my spinal injuries, I was in a state of shock. I had long lived with chronic pain and weak muscles, yet suddenly I could not hold a cup or fork, could not shower or open bottles of pills that did not offer much relief. My body froze, simply unable to move without assistance, an immobility that left me wondering how or if I would survive.

The days and weeks and months and years of attempted recovery were long and lonely. I could not leave the house except to complete hours of daily physical therapy, painful and exhausting, and followed this with trips to various specialists and surgeons who could not determine how to make my body work again. I swallowed thousands of pills and eventually the hard truth that I would not get back to normal, that this was my reality going forward.

At first it seemed impossible to accept this reality. I wanted to be free, but after a while, there was nothing to do but receive this. I could not spend my life thrashing against reality, could not expend the little energy I had fighting against what was. There was simply no choice but to bear witness to this moment. And in doing so, I was surprised to rediscover my purpose and power, to tap into a wildness long ignored, an instinct long forgotten.

~ ~ ~

When I returned to teaching after several years of medical leave, I was afraid. It felt as if I was trying to return to a previous life when this was not possible. I’d long taught Annie Dillard’s essay, asking students what it meant to grasp onto your instinct and fight for what you want and need. 

In the past, we’d talked about instinct and desire, listing them off in a show of vulnerability. Students struggled at first, so accustomed to living as they should, following life’s predictable patterns that they did not understand what was necessity and what was expectation. But eventually we shifted into talking about what it takes to survive, about how much modern living counters these necessities, about the ways capitalism and this social and political moment defy basic needs. We talked about how we might grasp instinct and fight, and what this means in a world that does not wish to provide this for its people.

Perhaps it was too much for me to ask such young people what it means to latch on to the neck of anything that would seek to destroy you and refuse to let go. The older I get, the harder life becomes, the more I realize that this act of self-discovery takes a lifetime. The teacher I was before my injuries could not imagine living in this world in this body, and perhaps this is best, for had I known, I might not have had the courage to believe that I could survive. Disability ensures my life will be painful and full of risk and injury, but also much shorter than most, survival not even a guarantee. Yet I now understand that survival is not the goal but rather running in circles as long as you can, simply carrying on beautiful and enough. 

It is too easy to praise the weasel, with its ferocity and shrewd survival skills and to read ourselves onto this model. American culture has long praised rugged individualism. American culture has long praised going for the jugular, doing whatever it takes to feed your solitary survival. We live in a world where those who feast on the flesh of others become our leaders and the vulnerable are ignored and then blamed for their own inability to thrive, when survival often has little to do with skill and everything to do with circumstance, with luck, with instincts we do not all possess because we have never been privileged enough. 

I will not praise the weasel when I am the rabbit. My students are rabbits, too, frightened and unsure, yet still coming to class, pursuing knowledge, hoping they might find a better way. Most of us are rabbits, terrified and running circles just to make it day-to-day. We are not weasels capable of ferocity, drinking warm blood, going unnoticed until we are in the perfect position to strike, yet this does not mean we do not possess strength and courage and skill.

It is too easy to praise the weasel for its survival while ignoring the shrewdness of the rabbit. For the rabbit is ferocious in its own way, capable of kicking the neck of any predator, capable of glimpsing danger in any shadow, alert to all the senses and danger coming from every direction. To say a rabbit is not capable of doing whatever is necessary is to ignore the ease of larger predators, to discount how much more skill is required to endure when you lack the predator’s privilege. And yet, despite the advantages bestowed on these larger predators, there are still far more prey. Rabbits far outnumber weasels, their collective community a truer story of survival, of the miraculous way we endure.

We would do well to remember the rabbit is wild in its own way. The rabbit is capable of devouring my garden in a single afternoon, discovering the tenderest leaves and eating them down to the dirt, feasting on flowers until it is full and still find room for more in summer, chewing through wood to the tender fleshy green of a shrub in the depths of winter. 

~ ~ ~

Deep in the heart of winter I talked with a friend about missing our gardens. We are both the kind of people who seek nature as a balm for what ails us. We are heartsick with the current state of the world, but nature reminds us of wonder, of the holiness of moss and mushrooms, beetles and bumblebees, the reverence we can feel for something larger than our solitary struggles if only we look all around, if only we invite this witness.

We spend more time outside than most, hours each day tending to the earth, studying plants and animals, learning to recognize bark and bird song, to understand root systems and archive plant information like a catalog of joy. We help each other be the kind of people who believe that to understand the natural world is to understand the self and to accept our small place in a larger system, to accept that our many hurts are not the center of the universe but instead an inevitable part of it. There is relief accepting our humble smallness in favor of appreciating the largeness of overhead pollinators or underground fungal networks.

As though presenting an offering, I shared with my friend the story of my first weasel over the summer. We often do this, telling each other about discovering trillium deep in the woods or looking high into a tree and seeing the glint of a fish in the talons of an osprey. We place these sightings before one another as though on an altar—a way to honor what is sacred.

I still could not believe that for all the things I have seen in the wooded area of my home that it took me so many years to see a weasel in the wild. Surely my friend, who worked as an arborist and knows the natural world more than the human one, would have seen a weasel before. But he delighted, exclaimed that he, too, saw his first weasel over the summer, a twin sighting. We shared our wonder, forgetting, for a moment, my injuries, his recent layoff, our aging parents, the winter maelstrom outside mirroring collective global chaos. 

All around us, at this gathering, our friends ate, drank, and shared their own difficulties. A partner recently hospitalized, parents recently deceased, financial strain and suffering children. We were, each of us, lost in the woods, so deep it was hard to see the sun, the path obscured so that we did not know how or if we would find our way out. And yet, there was abundance all around, each of us animals finding a way to exist despite the harsh climate, the darkness, the natural ebb and flow of seasons. 

~ ~ ~

I spend a long time watching the weasel and the rabbit, trying to appreciate them both for fulfilling the roles they were given, for their unwavering pursuit of their purpose. The weasel returns, time and again to try and retrieve the carcass. The rabbit watches, quiet and waiting, determined to keep itself safe, to provide safety for the others in the den. Each persists, no matter how futile. 

Eventually I come back to the stone patio to sit, the creatures allowing me to be among them so long as I do not interfere with the natural order. All around me are yellow roses soft with fragrance and pink speedwell shooting soft points to the sky and dark penstemon and purple alliums with their fist-sized blooms like fireworks floating in the air. And just beyond are the woods—the boundary between cultivation and wilderness merely an illusion.

I think about my initial fear as the rabbit and the weasel ran around me in an endless circle. I think about how quickly I villainized the weasel when it was merely doing what it was made for, just like the rabbit, just like me, and how often we reduce things to binaries of innocence and evil, predator and prey, weakness and strength, illness and health, past and present. It is too simple to place things on opposite ends of a flat line, too easy to reduce each experience and emotion to extremes. The weasel is gentle in the way it ribbons over the earth, just as the rabbit is ferocious in the way it kicks. They exist in all forms, exist in give and take, ebb and flow like the shore of the lake lapping near my home.

Both the weasel and the rabbit accept their circumstance, the weasel eventually retreats hungry and disappointed, the rabbit eventually darts back to its den full of babes. And I determine to accept mine—to accept my chronic pain, the difficulty of navigating my disabled body through an abled world, the reality that my life will be difficult and short and that this is OK, perhaps even right, because this life is mine and I am simply fulfilling my purpose. I had been injured and thrust to one extreme but because life is not a line, the circle has spun back around and I am OK again, changed by the lessons of danger and injury, beauty and resilience.

We sit a while as the sun begins its summer descent, each of us—the weasel and the rabbit, my dog and me—simply doing our best to exist in the only way we know how, soaking in the light before the darkness returns.