Look deep into Nature and you will understand...

An incredible visitation. Albert Einstein says, "Look deep into nature, and they you will understand everything better. Albert Einstein. I had a blessed morning...that somehow gave me hope. I sat on my porch, reading a photographic essay of the last summer of Anne Sexton, a poet at Radcliffe that I had hoped to study with, the autumn she committed suicide. She had written to me, even giving me one of her "daisy" drawings...in the letter. She says that when she writes, "the blood flows on to the page." Well, while I was doing that honoring of a woman, over whom I grieved, like my own mother...what should appear to my eyes in front of me, immediately, were three bucks emerging on the mesa immediately in front of me. A yearling followed shortly after...I just watched, as they saw me, looked at me...continued on, caught another scent as they were passing the road...turned around and round again and continued...so majestic. What a gift, "from the sea' as Anne Morrow Lindbergh would say about the shells on a beach, but here on the mountain, such a sight is a "present"...Annie Dillard always grapsed this...if we look up, and see, as I saw some minutes later, a hummingbird hovering in the air, about a foot away from me...and they the emerald hummingbird turned and sipped the nectar from the plant on the table, and then in an instant, was gone. What a pleasure! What a gem, caught on the wing. I returned to my book. Suddenly, I looked up as a hawk swooped down and perched with his large claws on the railing of the porch about three feet from me; I don't know who was more startled this beautiful hawk, with plummage of gold and white and smoky brown...or me! It recovered and soared into the air, joining another hawk, and the pair circled, and glided, as hawks do, in great arcs and circles for nearly five minutes, with the sunlight flashing off the body of the hawk...making it "incandescent". The previous afternoon, had also been shocked by a hawk, as I was reading in the gazebo, and suddenly the swoosh of his wings came to my ears, as my eyes saw him sweep down and lift up a quail in its claws and soar away with his prey. The covey of quail flew straight up and away! It was incredible to witness this act. Now, the Hawk is on y porch! He must have heard the songbirds find breakfast here each day...but what a presence. I read some poetry about hawks, but as JD McClatchy said of the selection of poems about birds; most say more about the poets who wrote them, than about the hawks... I am writing this while I am listening to President Obama debate Governor Romney. Bertrand Russell is certainly of another generation, but aren't we all. He says, "I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite".