Small Things

                           1.
Our bird feeder is currently empty,
and one of the red squirrels who regularly
swipes seeds from it now sits atop the
snowy woodpile on its haunches, unmoving.

From our window we can see its front paws
tucked together across its middle,
no doubt to stay warm while it keeps
its inscrutable watch on the world,

but from here this gives the impression
of nothing so much as that of a monk,
rufous cowl tucked close against the wind,
hands folded in contemplation,

bushy tail straight up against its back.
I wonder aloud what this squirrel monk
might have in common with its fraternal order
of chipmunks, when K. suggests

                           2.
its meditation could be on the revelation
to Julian of Norwich in which she saw
all creation as a mere hazelnut, so tiny
she was amazed it could exist at all,

expecting “that because of its littleness
it would suddenly have fallen into nothing.”
After all, she lived through the Black Plague,
which laid waste to half of Norwich.

In her time too was the Papal Schism, the
Hundred Years’ War, and the Peasants’ Revolt.
What further breath of fate would it seem to need
for the world to fall into nothing?

Yet she wrote of a God not of wrath
but compassion, of Jesus the mother,
that sin is but a step in coming to God,
that humanity is not evil, only ignorant.

                            3.
We’re still amazed by such thoughts
some 600 years later. But perhaps the squirrels
have always understood: the world their hazelnut,
the world in which they might at any time

fall all at once into nothing. Julian heard
in her vision, “It lasts and shall last forever,
for God loves it. All things have being by
the love of God.” Honestly, what sort of net is that

in this high wire dance of history and predation,
of making and unmaking, of plagues and wars
and weasels and hawks? Enough to get me up
and out into the cold, to refill our feeder with tiny seeds.