A Deep River Year
April 9,  2014

The little wren in our back yard is singing its heart out again.   It has been a long winter, but yesterday the air was soft and the rain didn't seem to cast a pall over the day at all.  Late in the afternoon the sun smiled from the breaking clouds, and it was a time to just stand and wonder at the age-old miracle happening around us.   "Now the green blade riseth," the French carol proclaims.   And a day of Spring rain seems to green the earth right before our eyes.  Over on Elm Street, a yard is filled with blue Siberian Squill rising from the winter-weathered grass.  But there is nothing as full of Spring's joy as the song of the Carolina wren on a tender afternoon.   The bird books say that the song of this wren sounds something like "teakettle, teakettle, teakettle!"     Perhaps so.   And this seems appropriate for this little creature who inhabits the edges of a world that makes us feel like we are home at last.

We all have a place that makes our heart sing.    This morning my wife Phyllis left before dawn to visit a hospital and orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.   She has made that trip a number of times since the catastrophic earthquake there in 2010.  Back then she felt a tug at her heart to go and offer her nursing skills, mostly in community health clinics in the devastated neighborhoods where cholera was epidemic.    What she found amid the broken buildings and impossible streets was people with amazing spirit and even joy, and they have taken up residence inside of her.   These past weeks she has been collecting baby clothes, powder, diaper cream, and other supplies to distribute to new mothers who sometimes have nothing to offer their babies except love.   She may also visit the city morgue with Father Frechette of  St. Damien Hospital as he seeks to offer a dignified and loving burial to bodies that have remained there unclaimed.

On the counter in the kitchen Phyllis' datebook lay open to a page where she had stuck a small handwritten note from our granddaughter.   "Dear Mimi," it said.  "I love you so much I can't wate [sic]  to spend the night at your house."     That's how Phyllis feels about going to Haiti.  Maybe that's how that wren feels out behind the barn, singing Spring into being.  "Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle!"

Wren's Song

Over the just-turned earth,
up into the budded branches
of great trees swaying in an April breeze,
through the glass of a kitchen window
shining with afternoon light,
the song soars,
a mighty thing from a tiny heart.
It is an endless emanation of joy,
as if this melody has been bottled up
too long,
and now flows wild and free
as Spring and love,
as if the canticle itself had wings and feathers
and must take flight.
Perhaps we all are wrens,
and every sullen creature--
every humble, wintered one of us--
has something burning deep inside,
a fire, a joy, a love, a song,
and we will not live,
nor will Springtime ever fully come,
until we dare to sing.

--Timothy Haut, April 9, 2014