The fifth luminous thing...

Public domain image

...is the red-tailed hawk taking flight next to my car as I drive to work—her heavy struggle to get those first few feet off the ground, those first slow, powerful wingbeats. She is as big as a small dog. I can see her dark back speckled with white, her strong shoulders, her tail feathers spread in a wide, rust-red fan.


I'm startled by the size of her, the burst of wings and lift so close, the cars flying by on both sides. I notice she is carrying her prey, a dark rag of blood and fur and bone the size of a woman's shoe. I see all of this in just a few seconds, and then I'm gone and she's gone.


But the birds are here. They were there when I first woke up this morning, right around 4am. Birds, I thought, singing in the dark? But when I looked—yes, there was just the tiniest bit of light in the east, a feeling more than a seeing, a sense that whatever it is outside, it isn't quite night anymore. Anyway, the birds were singing, just a few to start, a wren perhaps, and maybe some sparrows. The fish crows were next, and by a quarter to five they were talking anxiously from tree to tree in that muttering way they have, like a mob of old men waiting for a bus in the rain.


By the time my car reaches the river I know it's a good day: the hawk is flying off with her breakfast, the sun is spinning orange flame across the sky, and there are birds everywhere—dark ruffled rockets blasting up from the fields and the trees in twos and threes, boisterous, singing their celebration of light, of wings, of the morning.

The fourth luminous thing...

                                                                  L.Pachter 5.17.12

...is memory. Afternoon sun is flowing through the window over my desk and embracing the far-flung flotsam of my past—a string of buddhist prayer beads, a small zuni fetish, a vase of birthday peonies.


The beads are from the Toda-ji temple, the size of English peas, brown and marbled. I remember so fondly my solitary trip to Nara, the temple with its enormous buddha, the Kasuga shinto shrine with its deep moss and 3000 ancient stone lanterns.


The fetish is a wolf, carved from selenite, clear and hard but shot through with misty fractures. It came out of the Arizona desert and I can still smell the desert's pervading odor of spice, feel its dust in my nose, see its sky overfull of stars.


The peonies are pink confections of petals like the disheveled feathers of a swan's wing, cut from a suburban garden. My memories are full of gardens—well-planned, well-worked, well-loved, anticipated, abandoned.


But in this sunny moment of afternoon, I'm abandoned by nothing at all—all my gardens are here with me. So is the desert, and so is that oasis of a Japanese shrine. The fetish glitters like a jewel, the beads look soft as warm earth, and the peonies glow as softly as a lantern flame in the moist twilight. I sit and watch the sunlight move across my desk as the day fades, I watch the light abandon my souvenirs one by one, and I know, too, that one day the light of these memories will wink out. But not now, not yet. And so I sit, embraced by sunlight, surrounded by my past, with memory flowing through me.

The third luminous thing...

Public domain image

...is the waning crescent moon. I'm unwillingly awake and starting my drive to work in that cold and still time just before dawn, when the sky isn't night sky anymore but the dark is still dominant. I turn the corner and there is the moon, hanging just above the dark trees and even in this first faint bit of light it's night-sky bright, a huge hook low in the eastern sky, lighting up this dim space between darkness and dawn.


The waning crescent moon, I read, is high overhead at 9am local time. Whose local time do they mean? Mine? And everywhere, all over the world? I always did have trouble with astronomy, trouble sorting out the positions of things—too many moving parts, objects circling objects circling the sun, orbits and risings and settings. I can grasp the poetry of moonrise far better than its math.


I turn the page, and read on: the waning moon is a time for spells that banish and release, a time of intuition and divination. But I can think of nothing to intuit, and I'm not very interested in spells. There's just me, alone in the dark car, and the moon—the only divine thing here—alone in the sky.


The sliver of moon rides with me along the dark roads. I can see now the low flame of true dawn in the east, and I'm clear of the trees. But the night mist lingers in the low places, like ghosts not yet absolved by morning, and the moon is fading to a thin glimmer, its sinuous hook dissolving, releasing me into the day.

The second luminous thing...

…was ancient, in a manner of speaking.

Tessa and I were having our usual morning on the sofa: tea for me, a snooze for her, both of us keeping a lazy eye on the doings in the front yard. We live on a cul de sac and, at 7am, the doings pretty much add up to a lot of not-so-much.

Suddenly we heard a racket of crows—American crows—coming up the street. This was strange—and certainly a doings. We have a resident population of fish crows, whose calls resemble an odd and subversive chuckling, but we rarely hear the cacophony of American crows.

I rushed to the front window and Tessa stood on the arm of the sofa. The clatter came closer and all at once a gray fox flashed by, loping down the street, not quite running but moving fast. He was all reds and dark grays and gorgeous against the grass. The crows were following. The fox was headed into the cul de sac but, for some reason, he turned in our neighbor’s high grass and headed back the other way, this time running, cutting across our front yard and ducking through the grove of cedars into the unfenced yard on the other side. Perhaps he lost the crows under the trees or in the ivy—at any rate they gave up and flew away.

Gray Fox in winter, Dave Schaffer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (public domain image)

Tessa and I watched all this back and forth, running back and forth ourselves between windows. We were excited—a fox! In our front yard!—we’d heard them at night, in the distance, but to see one up close and in the daylight! Tessa wanted to rush right outside but I advised a calmer, more interior course of action and we returned to our sofa.

Later I found out I’d not seen a red fox, but a gray one. I’d wondered about his dark back and lack of white—did he have mange? Was something else wrong with him? But he was just a different sort of fox. And gray foxes are different—an entirely different genus from the red fox, an ancient genus, 3.6 million years old and most closely related, now, only to the east Asian raccoon dog and the African bat-eared fox. The gray fox, Urocyon cinereoargenteus, is one of the most primitive of the living canids, its fossils first discovered in Arizona along with its contemporaries of the time: the giant sloth, the large-headed llama, and the small, early horses. The gray fox can climb trees (an ability shared today by only one other canid, the aforementioned raccoon dog), and is omnivorous but seems to really enjoy eating cottontails and birds. And, I read, it likes fruits and vegetables more than does the red fox.

I planted nine native fruit trees in our backyard to attract birds, never realizing they might also attract this splinter of the pliocene. I'll tend them more carefully now, imagining the fruit-loving Urocyon cinereoargenteus climbing our fence at night or sneaking through where those slats have rotted away. We already have birds and bunnies in profusion, an abandoned yard going wild next door and—usually—a decided lack of American crows. But I'm not sure he needs the help. This morning, I worried about that gray fox, running and harassed. Now, I think those millions of years of survival and instinct must count for something—well, for much more than something—having come together in this one moment of magnificence, in this beautiful animal, in our neighborhood fox.  

The first luminous thing...

L.Pachter 5.14.12

...on the first day of a year of luminous things. There is a silvery rain falling like needles out of the gray sky today, turning the whole outdoors green and glorious and dripping, making the whole day dreamy and drowsy. This glorious dreamy day is my birthday, and I'm at home with Josh and Tessa, at home and cozy with nothing that has to be done except noticing, and recording, this first luminous thing.


A week or so before this day, my husband Josh said to me—in an offhand and bemused and affectionately exasperated sort of way—that he'd noticed I wasn't happy unless I had something bad to think about. I've thought about that since, and what a dreadful pall it must cast over my world, my holding those bad thoughts so close.


I must practice thinking about good things, I told myself. No, not just good things, but luminous things.  "Lucid, radiant, resplendent, brilliant," the thesaurus adds. "The quality of being full of light." One luminous thing each day. Three hundred and sixty five luminous things from this birthday to next.


I woke to the rain this morning, and rain has fallen all day, steady and persistent. There's been no sight of the sun, yet this glittering rain has somehow lit up the trees and grass and bushes and flowers, all the green growing things, lit them up until the gray afternoon is overfull of a weedy glow, a sort of dampish and radiant St Elmo's fire. It seems to rise from the ground and spread into the falling rain, pulsing under the dark, looming branches of trees. It's held steady all day, this glow and this rain--there is no wind, not much sound, just the closeness of the luminous afternoon wearing on.


The first luminous thing: this day itself, my birthday green and glorious, lit from within.