The quiet hour
of gold
The quiet hour
The chickadee lands outside the wired feeder, finds a way in, takes a seed and flies away to grind it and eat it elsewhere. He comes back, lands on the hummingbird feeder, takes a tiny sip of sugar water, flies down on a stem, glides down the stem and hops inside the leaves of a cup plant to drink deeply. He then returns to the wired feeder and stays, crunching down seeds right there and then.1
A titmouse drinks a sip of water from the same plant, a squirrel, the tiniest of them all, drinks a sip of water from the saucer.
The blue jay munches on bugs on the winterberry, just beginning to bloom, a blue indigo lands softly on a bare dogwood branch and moves on…the first in the season. In the distance, a pair of brown thrashers acts like chickens, spreading the ground aside around the compost, looking for worms? A rabbit runs as I never thought rabbits could run this fast. A green heron croaks loudly and flies off.
The quiet hour, the golden hour of no expectations.
I miss my camera (out for repair or replacement) - so the photos are from the archives of machine and of memory. They are reassuring historical illustrations of fact. But it feels so nice not to intrude with a click in that golden hour of quiet…
I love this. The quiet has so much to say.
A golden hour or passive vitalism, a contemplation.