Love letter to a thrasher (& the world)
Hymning the world differently
The day after Americans voted Donald Trump into office in 2016 — the morning after my young daughter texted “I’m scared” while watching election results as part of an assignment for school — I wrote “Things Only I Can Do” at the top of a lined sheet of paper.
At that time, I knew I could set myself afire, trying to report on every person, ecosystem, and environmental regulation Trump and his appointees threatened or destroyed. Evaluating my influence, skills, and responsibilities, I composed a list of things only I could do.
For more than four years, until Jan. 20, 2021, that list empowered me to stave off helplessness and despair and keep cynicism from mocking me into apathy.
Because environmental degradation, cruelty, and greed persisted beyond the span of Trump’s first term — and the impacts of climate change keep deepening and accelerating — I stuck with the practice of asking: What are the things only I can do? What are my skills and connections? What knowledge and influence do I have? Who am I responsible to? How does my community need me, and who will I try to keep safe?
And: What do I hope will happen?
Every day — every overwhelming day — I continue tending my list.
When my daughter and I first moved to our house, the corner across the street was tangled with conifers, tamarisk, mountain mahogany, yucca, and cholla. Mesmerized by the animals who relied on that neglected eighth of an acre, I mimicked that vibe to better entice birds and rabbits and snakes into our own neatish snooze of a yard.
Then in the fall of 2023, the neighbors cleaned up the wildness around their driveway, shaping trees, ripping up bushes, culling cholla branches, and hiring crews with backpack leaf blowers to scour the understory. The roadrunners and curve-billed thrashers and rabbits and squirrels and coyotes who relied on this tiny refuge for generations became frantic; their nests and food sources were obliterated. In time, some of the more-than-humans returned, but it had become a different place.
The following March, when the curve-billed thrasher began singing for a mate, his song sounded different. So different that the bird app on my phone no longer identified him as a curve-billed thrasher. Sometimes it marked him a brown thrasher, a red-winged blackbird, or a mockingbird. Most of the time, though, the app’s blue dot didn’t even light up in recognition of birdsong. I downloaded another app, which did recognize parts of his song, but labeled the ID as “uncertain.”
Every morning last spring, I’d listen for that handsome, orange-eyed thrasher, and wonder if a lady bird would even hear him over the traffic and the noise of the city.
But he sang,
and he sang,
and he sang,
all day long, starting before sunrise and usually lasting until after dark.
He kept singing, and the app kept not recognizing him, and I started to dream about his song.
I wondered if he sang that it’s too warm, too early, and there aren't enough bugs.
I wondered if he sang that it doesn’t cool down at night.
I wondered if he sang that it rarely snows in winter, and the summer rains are strange and irregular.
I wondered if he sang about how someone cut back the cholla.
I wondered if he sang that he’s scoped the neighborhood for other available cholla, but this is the spot he knows to stick with.
I wondered about what he knows. And I wondered if he ever sings about uncertainty or only about the things he knows.
I wondered if he sang that he’ll guard a safe nest; if he sang about how hard he’ll work to provide for a family.
C'mon, I imagined him singing, take a chance on me. I’ll sing every morning. I’ll kill roaches for you; bash their bodies on the sidewalk and teach our young to do the same. I’ll watch over you, preen for you, show you how sexy I am. I’ll teach our young about this world. The cholla will grow back. The people will lose interest in this part of the yard. We’ll be together, you and me, c’mon, baby baby baby.
And so, ignescent, the thrasher kept singing from pre-dawn to twilight, every day through the spring. Gorgeous notes I couldn’t resist. Gorgeous notes the app wouldn’t identify.
While I obsessed over this bird and his song and his cholla, and what it all means, I kept thinking of my friend Larry Rasmussen, a theologian, who knows about singing songs in a new key.
In his book, Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key, Rasmussen wrote that as the world has changed, “we must learn to sing a new song in a strange land.”
Larry wrote about how the “third rock from the sun can no longer be counted on for steady seasons of seedtime, and harvest; for glacial waters feeding great rivers; for sea levels trustworthy enough to permit the building of great cities; for sufficient time for flora and fauna to adjust to new insect predators and diseases, or drought and deluge; for governments capable of marshalling resources to handle disasters of greater number and intensity, or to allay the conflicts that arise when desperate people are rendered helpless and homeless en masse; for rainfall and snowpack and enough resources to assure that future generations will survive and thrive on their diminished planet; and for ocean biochemistry stable enough to maintain the eons old underwater forests.”
He continued: “How, then, do we hymn the Earth differently? How do we write and sing a new song for a strange land, even though it be our own? How do we do it with our neighbors, all our neighbors?” Human and more-than-human neighbors, I believe he means.
And he asked: “Where do we turn when we discover that the religion we have lived by since the industrial technological era emerged — eternal and exponential economic growth — is an illusion, dogma masquerading as common sense and kept alive by willpower and nothing else?”
To navigate the changing world, we all need to hymn the Earth differently. I’ve got my list. And I’ll also channel my willpower not toward “dogma masquerading as good sense” but toward singing a new song. I’ll learn from the elders what worked and what no longer makes sense.
And I’ll ignore the words of those who aren’t in love with this changing world, not because I don’t mourn what’s lost but because I’m still going to love what’s here.
That’s what I hope will happen.
A final note: This essay is adapted from a talk I’ve given to a couple of different audiences. If you’re looking for more resources on coping with the overwhelming, changing, beautiful, maddening, luscious world, here are a few I recommend:
What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Anaya Elizabeth Johnson
A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet by Sarah Jaquette Ray
Colette Pichon Battle: On Knowing What We’re Called To (On Being podcast)
2022 conversation with Larry Rasmussen, “Faith in a Time of Climate Change”
For all the words we’re “losing” these days, I want to keep tending those and now add “hymning” to my lexicon of hope.
This essay is a joy— and that word too holds so much. Thank you.