A Season of Grace

What exactly is grace? It is not a single, easily-identifiable quality but a combination of many, with some elusive prerequisites that make it even more ineffable. We cannot experience grace when our hearts are anxious or stressed, as they often are in these troubled times. For grace to suffuse our soul, we must be at peace with ourselves and with the world around us as is, even if partially. That, and be open to new ideas and insights, be humble and patient, and have an instinct for the sacred and the transcendent.

I speak only for myself when I say that I find grace difficult to come by, either from others or from me. Yet when I experience it, I know I am having a transcendent experience. Recently I experienced it when a dear cousin passed away. I announced his passing to the congregation at my local mosque and sought their prayers for the departed. The way they opened up to me in sympathy afterwards, the way they consoled me and shed tears with me, told me that none of us need be alone, that when we express our vulnerability and seek solace from our fellow-beings, irrespective of race and religion, we have a chance to be touched by the Divine. We have a chance to experience grace.

Grace can originate from the natural world as much as it can from humanity. In fact, I will go so far as to say that it is easier to summon grace from birdsongs, from the way the wind ripples the surface of a pond, from the wonder of stars blooming like flowers in the garden of the night sky, from the way an agave leaf holds drops of rain.

Photo by Hasan Z. Rahim

But for this to happen, we need to be attuned to the natural world, to its rhythms and patterns, to its strangeness and, well, to its grace. It will never happen when we waste our time consumed by the small screen of our devices, when social media and smartphones, to paraphrase Wordsworth, are too much with us, awake and asleep, buying and selling, wasting our powers, seeing hardly anything in Nature that is ours.

So, for a change, take a walk in the woods. Behold the magic of the sprouting tulip or the first appearance of butterflies in your backyard. Stroll along the shore and hear the song and sigh of wind and water in the waves that break at your feet. Listen to a towhee singing its heart out in the rain!

Photo by Hasan Z. Rahim

As the year draws to a close, and as the times threaten to become even more trying, each of us need to find our North Star, to focus on that which matters in our lives, be it love, friendship, living with less stuff, curbing cruel desires, revealing the power of humility to the arrogant, filling the despairing with hope.

In other words, we need to experience grace in our lives, whether summoned or unbidden, and know in the depth of our hearts, as the prophets of olden times knew, that beauty, truth, empathy, humility and unconditional love will set us free.

Allow me to end with a poem by Wendell Berry that I find myself reciting more frequently than ever before in a world that seems to have gone awry in a hurry - “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 come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

Finches in Frenzy: Teachable Moments

Goldfinches, purple finches, house finches, pine siskins and dark-eyes juncos find nyjer seeds magnetic. These bite-size morsels pack a punch with their high oil content. Hang a small feeder filled with these seeds in the backyard and you will never experience a dull moment as the wild songbirds alight on it from nearby trees and put on a breathtaking display of avian acrobatics.

It becomes clear after a while that the pine siskins are the feisty ones, thrusting their beaks at the goldfinches and purple finches to hog the seeds. The polite cousins put up with the bullying for a minute or two and then fight back, or at least, pretend to. That seems to be enough. A kind of a uneasy democracy settles in as the birds take turn feeding, flying away to rest on the nearby trees to catch their breath (and poop), and flying back again to begin the cycle.

The goldfinches win the beauty contest hands down. The flash of their yellow brightens up any gray, cloudy day. They keep clear of the siskins as much as possible and use their acrobatic skills to get at the nyjer seeds, often hanging upside down to avoid invading the siskins’ space.

The dark-eyed juncos are content to walk the ground beneath the feeder, avoiding any possibility of a skirmish with the other birds. Plenty of seeds fall from the feeder, enough to feast on. You can see them pause to look up, almost as if pitying the feisty ones for their foolishness.

Feeding frenzy reaches its climax when it’s raining. The joy of the songbirds is palpable. They seem to be filled with a mysterious energy as they flutter, swerve and hover, their jostling increasingly dramatically for the privilege of a peck or two at the seeds. Leaves tremble as water drips from the trees and squirrels frolic in the fresh green grass but it’s the raucous songbirds that own the world as they dart back and forth from nests to seeds in their ruffled, rain-soaked plumage through air translucent with raindrops.

College campuses teem with birdlife. Jays, sparrows, robins, juncos, finches, swallows, buntings, bushtits, bluebirds, towhees, red-winged blackbirds, doves, warblers, hummingbirds and many other kinds enrich campuses in their ineffable ways, offering teachable moments to students as they hurry between classes or meet up with tutors and friends.

These moments are unfortunately rarely recognized. Birds connect us to the natural world in ways unmatched by other species. We become keen observers ourselves by observing them. These symbols of freedom tune us to the rhythm of the seasons. As they swoop and hover and descend from trees like autumn leaves, they kindle our sense of wonder and remind us that there is more to life than jobs and commerce.

So when you take a walk in that familiar campus, observe the junco as it seems to appear from nowhere in front of you to stroll the ground and acknowledge its fleeting grace. Pause for a moment to follow the movement of the towhee as it searches for worms beneath the sprawling oak and marvel at its dexterity. Whatever you do, don’t go around campus with blank faces plugged into ear buds. Open your eyes and ears. When from that evergreen pear tree emanates the trill of a red-winged blackbird, ask yourself, have you heard any song as lyrical?

The joy that birds communicate can perhaps translate to joy of learning. A sensitive soul can even conjure life’s meaning from birds. Whatever one’s disposition, taking the time to reflect on the beauty of birds can help any life take wing.

Spring Rain

Since the official arrival of spring on Saturday, March 19, the rain has been coming down hard on Santa Clara Valley. This hill, this valley, never seemed so lush green. I exaggerate, of course. Every time we get plentiful rain in spring, and there have been many such years in the last two decades between droughts, these hills and valleys become as verdant as the imagination allows.

Today was particularly wet. Strong winds accompanied the rain that fell in gray, slanted slabs, flooding roads and fields. I walked across one of these fields to the creek near my home. It was swollen with brown, rushing water that looked like a small river in its own right. The oaks, sycamores and cottonwoods that lined its banks swayed with wind and dimpled the creek with drops. The ancient sound of water against rock filling the woods is the gift of a day like this. You listen to this music, the music of earth and sky and forest, and feel peace enter your body and soul.

Gulls and geese flew in formation across a barren sky. I heard birds chirping in the upper reaches of the trees but couldn't see any. A calla lily and several stands of cattails moved to and fro as the creek flowed past them toward the sea. I could see cows moving briskly on the hills through the gap in the trees. It was is if they were unsure of where to graze, since the grass looked so tempting everywhere. It was a comical bovine sight.

The forecast calls for more rain in the coming days. You can almost sense the wildflowers preparing to shoot forth from inside the earth when rain ends. Poppies, lupines, sorrels, soon they will sprout by the roadside and on meadows and forest floors. I don't miss the sun. We will have plenty of it soon enough as the long days of summer approach. Now is the time for rain, when the sounds of the world fall away and all the silences we have known since childhood weave enchanting stories of love and longing.

Rain, Rain, Come Again

For the last five days, we have been getting rain aplenty from a storm that swept in from Alaska to the San Francisco Bay Area. While rain and sun play hide-and-seek during the afternoons, the nights are filled the sound of continuous downpour, a tap-tap-tap that haunts and mesmerizes. The clouds parted one night just so to reveal a full moon and a tremulous Orion, and I also noticed that the bare ash trees were beginning to leaf.

We needed this rain, or else a drought this summer would have been inevitable. The hills were already turning brown toward the end of January but now they are a wet green, punctuated by the yellow of mustard flowers.

Reading the local paper, though, would give you the idea that somehow the rain is interfering with the essence of the Golden State. "Oh, February, must we go through this again?" wailed the San Jose Mercury News. And what if we didn't go though this? What would a drought do to a state already hobbling financially from slashed budgets and cut services? The rain offers a glimmer of hope but sun worshippers cannot see beyond their stupid pleasures and so moan and whine.

Driving on Hwy 280, I saw the first rainbow of the season, a perfectly poised arc over downtown San Jose. Its deep colors stood out against the dark, rain-soaked clouds but what was breathtaking was the white of the gulls flying languorously in the sun-dappled sky. The palette of white, black, red and blue was a gift of the rain that motorists zooming by seemed to have no use for.

Taking the Bascom Street exit, I found the tall palm trees lining the ramp bathed in a magical golden light. It is impossible to capture with words or with photographs the ineffable beauty of this light. Next moment, clouds covered the sun and the elusive light was gone.

There is snow atop Mount Hamilton. The alpine scene will no doubt inspire many San Joseans to head for the slopes soon, perhaps to Lake Tahoe and Ski Valleys nearby.

Tender and delicate pink plum blossoms absorb the rain and light up parks and pavements. After many years I see flocks of red-winged blackbirds darting between trees and empty fields. Their trills, oka-lee, oka-lee, is the music of meadows and streams and spring. It is the music of love and longing, and I feel a restlessness for long-lost joy and sorrow that only the rain can calm.

Rain and Memories

For five days now it has been raining incessantly in California. Meteorologists have confirmed that we have received more rain than normal for this time of the year. Total seasonal rain in San Jose, where I live, has already surpassed 9 inches. This week alone 3.5 inches of rain has fallen and more is on the way. Streams, creeks and rivers are overflowing. This is good news after three successive years of drought in the Golden State.

Rain falling on roof is an ancient sound. I listen to its cadence in the middle of the night, insistent and hypnotic. It draws curtain upon curtain and wraps the entire earth, so it seems, in the deepest of darkness. I am between wakefulness and sleep and it is as close to a state of grace as I feel in a long, long time.

In this state, my thoughts and limbs spread outward until I become the earth and the rain falls on me. I feel the stirring of the as-yet-unborn wildflowers, lupines, poppies, clovers and honeysuckles, responding to the waters coming down from the heavens. I imagine the fields and the meadows filling with them. We speak in words but nature speaks in songs and somewhere in their confluence lie memories.

On Monday, the hills and the valleys of the Diablo Range around Santa Clara County displayed only a hint of green. By Thursday, plentiful rain had transformed them into the very essence of the color. Gray clouds pour gray rain on them and there is no letting up. Even from the road leading up to the highway, I can hear a stream, hidden by oaks and sycamores flowing restlessly toward the bay.

On Saturday, when the intensity of the rain lessens a bit, I head for the creek within walking distance of my home. All I need is my old but functioning umbrella. Along the way, I hear the trill of red-winged blackbirds in a field full of yellow mustard flowers.

At the bank of the creek, I locate the lichen-covered stone and stand by the water. Two calla lilies sway with the current, their white giving texture to the soft darkness that has descended from the sprawling oaks around. There are eddies here and there but the song of the rushing stream, from whisper to laughter, holds me spellbound. Raindrops create small ripples but the swift, foaming current quickly smothers them. There is a swing someone had hung from a sturdy branch some months ago and the wind moves it back and forth over the water. It is easy to imagine a child on it, only the child is invisible.

This spot, hidden from view, is redolent of childhood. Another day, far removed in time and place, slowly works its way into my mind. I was probably in the seventh or the eighth grade, in my ancestral village in the Old World, and it was raining like this, and I had the time of my life with friends jumping into a pond, dragging myself up over its muddy bank and jumping in again. We were hollering and throwing mud at one another, pushing each other over, attempting to climb the mango and the coconut trees for more spectacular dives. A kingfisher observed us from its perch on a bamboo pole in the middle of the pond, flew away and then returned. It did this again and again, and I knew it was having the time of its life as well.

“The strands are all there,” wrote Eudora Welty. “To the memory, nothing is ever really lost.” So true! I would only add this: More than any other element, it is rain that best brings the strands together.