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When a yellow-crowned night heron takes off in flight, it’s like poetry in motion. I discovered this one day while on a walk with my husband in our neighborhood. Hearing a loud squawk, we looked up to see a beautiful bird with a four-foot wingspan, gracefully swooping from one tree to another, collecting twigs.
A colony of four pairs of herons had come to nest at the end of our street at about the same time the coronavirus arrived in Dallas County. Some days, after reading news of the latest unemployment figures or seeing another image of an ICU patient struggling on a ventilator, I walk to the herons. They calm me. The poet Wendell Berry writes in “The Peace of Wild Things”:
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water,
And the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief.
I assumed the herons had chosen this tree and these quiet, forested streets for their proximity to White Rock Lake. Yellow-crowned herons are secretive; human disturbance at nesting sites threatens their habitats.
The morning a team of massive construction vehicles pulled up underneath their tree, I panicked. In broken Spanish, with dramatic hand motions, I begged the construction foreman to consider the migrating birds and move the equipment at least one lot away. The foreman scanned the canopy of branches for the hidden herons, and then eyed me as if uncertain about my emotional stability.
That day he obliged me. But since then the construction site has grown, and so has the hammering, sawing and earsplitting noise from more trucks and bulldozers.
Day after day, I kept my eye on the herons, who went about their business of nest-building and egg-laying high above the human activity — as though they knew exactly how to tune out unwelcome intrusions. I took my cues from them as I struggled to live above the anxiety and uncertainty in my world, brought on by a tiny microorganism.
Then on Easter Sunday something gut-wrenching happened. A glorious, sunny spring day gave way to a freak hailstorm that pummeled the neighborhood and sent all the humans — joggers, cyclists, parents pushing strollers — running for their shelters.
The next morning, I walked with trepidation to the heron colony, hoping they had weathered the onslaught of nickel-sized hail.
The tree was empty. Not one heron stood sentry at the nests they’d built so carefully over the last few weeks. I imagined the stately birds lying dead under bushes somewhere, battered by hail, their eggs smashed — on the very day I professed my faith in Resurrection.
For the first time since the coronavirus gripped my world, I sank into despair. Life felt brutal and senseless. The wall I’d built to shield myself from the shock and sadness of tens of thousands of deaths by the coronavirus came crumbling down in one afternoon. If creatures of the wild can’t survive a freak storm, how could I survive the unpredictable storm wreaking havoc in human lives?
It became clear to me that in my efforts to stay safe, I’d become an addict. Neither alcohol nor weed was my drug of choice, control was. I had deluded myself into thinking if I just had enough toilet paper, if I could rebalance my 401k account, if I could get my hands on a mask, if I could get tested for COVID-19, if I could only protect the herons, then my world would return to normal.
But every addict knows the world isn’t manageable. If I wanted to preserve my sanity, I’d need to change course. I turned to the experts. Millions of alcoholics take comfort in a prayer I had my children memorize when they were very young.
Now, on my long morning walks, I’ve dusted off the extended version of the Serenity Prayer, and I recite it slowly, absorbing the weight of each line.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is and not as I would have it.
Trusting that you will make all things right,
If I surrender to your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with you in the life hereafter.
This was my prayer a few days ago as I walked beneath the canopy of trees where the herons once nested and noticed something unusual. In one of the nests, a lone heron had returned. Though herons mate for up to 20 years, this one’s partner was missing. Even so, I see her there every day now, still, and seemingly calm, guarding the new life soon to emerge beneath her.
“It’s not the strongest of the species that survives,” Charles Darwin famously said, “nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
It’s dawned on me that the baby chicks sheltered beneath this lone heron may hatch about the same time my oldest daughter gives birth to her first son.
The distance the coronavirus has inflicted between me and my children and grandchildren has caused heartache for all of us. For the first time, I won’t be able to go to the hospital to welcome a new grandchild, nor will it be safe for me help my daughter with her new baby in her home.
This must be what accepting hardship as a pathway to peace looks like. I’m counting on everything being all right in the end. My COVID-19 test came back negative; I’m healthy right now. And like the lone heron, I’m learning to adapt.