The waxwings have been about again lately, coming through to the trees around the house in flocks, perching high in a single birch tree, facing towards the sun, trilling their soft calls in a chorus that sounds like a wave of crickets has spontaneously erupted in song. I love how mysterious they are—they appear as if from nowhere and leave just as suddenly, backlit against the white-grey sky, never knowing when or if they’ll be back. Each time they arrived I stopped to watch and listen to them.
When I saw them earlier this winter one late afternoon, they looked as if they were singing to the setting sun. And today they too looked as if they were singing to something—all faced in the same direction, at least sixty of them determinedly trilling, perched together. They remind me of the Kodama in my favorite Miyazaki film Princess Mononoke, when the small tree spirit-kodama wave among the trees in the winds caused by the forest spirit walking at night.
Kodama are tree spirits that live among or within a tree when it reaches 100 years of age. Our birch tree is an old one—at least it seems old, one of the larger ones in the woods around our house. Birches are shorter-lived than most tree species—its rare for a tree to live past 140 years. I’m not sure how old the birch we live with is, but the waxwings feel like tree spirits made visible for short intervals, their soft trilling a reminder of what is around us, even if we don’t always see it. The world speaking to us, with us. David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, writes of this:
Walking in the forest, we peer into its green and shadowed depths, listening to the silence of the leaves, tasting the cool and fragrant air. Yet such is the transitivity of perception, the reversibility of the flesh, that we may suddenly feel that the trees are looking at us—we feel ourselves exposed, watched, observed from all sides. If we dwell in this forest for many months, or years, then our experience may shift yet again—we may come to feel that we are a part of this forest, consanguineous with it, and that our experience of the forest is nothing other than the forest experiencing itself.1
That was how I felt watching the waxwings arrive and depart in the branches of the birch, turning towards them with attention. I felt a part of the same world, experiencing itself.
Waxwings are called so because the red tips on their wings look like they have been dipped in sealing wax—wax, the etymology of which means “made from bees.” I love that the name becomes a type of tautology—small wings dipped in wax made by bodies with other wings. I wonder what messages the birds hold safe with their bright seals. A flock of waxwings is also known as an “ear-full.”
For thousands of years, until the 16th century, it was believed that waxwings could glow in the dark. Pliny wrote that a waxwing’s feathers were thought to “shine like flames” in the dark forests of central Europe. Solinus also recorded this phenomenon, stating that the birds give off a warm glow, and that the Germans held these birds in cages as lanterns to light one’s way in the dark of night. This was later proved wrong in the sixteenth century, an age when mystery became suspicious.
I love the idea of the waxwings lighting a way out of the dark. Because this world feels so dark. We may know that waxwings cannot become candles, but I would happily believe so if it meant we could move in a world that paid more attention to the trilling of waxwings among the branches of an aging birch, rather than the violence that this country is intent on amplifying and enabling.
Jenny Odell writes, in her new book Saving Time:
To look into the future is to look around; to look around is to look into history—at not the apocalypse coming but the apocalypse past, the apocalypse still unfolding. Observing that the Greek word apokalypsis meant “through the concealed,” [Elissa] Washuta writes that “apocalypse has very little to do with the end of the world and everything to do with vision that sees the hidden, that dismantles the screen.” Likewise, French feminist poet and philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote that “we need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.” The current meaning of apocalypse is modern; in Middle English it simply meant “vision,” “insight,” or even “hallucination.2
The etymological root of apocalypse is “to uncover, reveal.” I thought of all this as I watched the birds, the trees, experiencing that world of reciprocity, of sudden appearances of song and flock, wind joining in through the branches. Thinking of the sap beginning to wake and rise in the trunks of those same trees. What world do we want to turn attention to? What world can we co-create when we do turn attention towards it? Odell writes earlier in the book:
Creation is not an event in the distant past, but something that is continually unfolding and needs custodians to keep co-creating it by linking the two worlds together via metaphors in cultural practice.3
What world do we see, what world can we lose, what worlds do we acknowledge—and which worlds do we co-create and link together? As I listened and watched the waxwings yesterday, that was a world I wanted to be a part of and continue to co-create.
The one we are fed on our collective screens is the one I am very, very ready to refuse.
April in many northern places is known as ‘the month of birches’ or the ‘month of birch sap.’4
Spring is such a different type of process at this latitude. It has taken me years of living here to begin to notice, become familiar with the signs of the season turning here. It’s more subtle than where we lived in Trondheim, Norway—since despite being at a higher latitude, the air from the gulf stream breathes warmth there that allows apples to grow, and first blooms to appear earlier.
Here there are no early blooms really. It’s more the shifting light, the return of warmth to the sun, a freeze/thaw pattern that will continue for weeks, staying below freezing each night, hovering around freezing during the day. Southern exposure begins to take on a different appearance from its neighboring patches of ground. Gulls return in mid-April—the gravel grey of the receding snow and leaf meal reflected in the grey sky and grey and white of their wings. Color only returns when it's suddenly summer.
The last couple of years we’ve tapped our birches, collected the sap and tried to reduce it to syrup. There’s something so beautiful about how clear the sap is, and how silky it tastes when fresh. But the syrup is hard to spend time on—I saw one account that said it essentially feels like trying to reduce well water into syrup, and that’s pretty much spot on. But birch water was widely harvested, sipped, fermented, drunk, preserved, across northern Europe, Canada, and Alaska. It was used in porridge, bread, cheese, sodas, beer, wine, and as a healing tonic.
I have a push-pull feeling about tapping those trees—I worry about harming them, wounding and taking the sap that is so actively rushing up to nourish its branches in readiness for leaf. And yet I love the idea of becoming part tree, noticing a sign of spring in the rising of the birch sap, learning what the past winter—waiting among rock, soil, and snow—tastes like as it turns into spring.
Abram also writes about the sense of the past and future as what is beneath, and what is beyond the horizon, and I thought about it again in thinking of the taste of birch sap, of what it embodies:
And the visible landscape has the other moments of time “inside itself,” precisely in that the past preserves itself under the ground, as well as inside every entity that I perceive. The sensorial landscape, in other words, not only opens onto that distant future waiting beyond the horizon but also behind each tree, behind each stone, behind each leaf…5
Maybe collecting birch sap is a way to be rooted with the past, anticipating and shepherding it for storage so it can nourish in the future. Maybe it’s the possibility of both rootedness and horizon that is so appealing in that act of harvest. Maybe it is not an act of taking, but of reciprocity—of being with the trees, having a faith in and awareness of the coming arrival of spring. Noticing the rootedness of the trees, co-creating metaphors, a custodial act of linking two worlds together.
I don’t know. But I know it’s a taste of spring and winter, of roots that extend far underground and branches that support the whispering chorus of waxwings, sealed messages of worlds that are not obsessed with exploitation, violence, cruelty, and power. The world I want to converse with is one where we know of leaf, root, and wing. It’s that world that I want to continue to co-create, to make visible, reveal, and uncover.
Maybe I’ll write a poem to the birch I tap, bury it beneath the soil at its roots. Make an offering to the tree spirit, as it is done in some places in Japan. Pay attention to ear-fulls of waxwings, the shift in wind, and be stubborn in the refusal of a world intent on violence. I’ll collect the birch sap, taste its embodied past, store it for that vision of the future.
Abram, David. 2017. The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage Books. p. 68
Odell, Jenny. 2023. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Random House. p. 187
Ibid. p. 152
Svanberg, Ingvar et al. “Uses of tree saps in northern and eastern parts of Europe.” Acta Soc Bot Pol. 81(4):343–35
Abram, David. 2017. The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage Books. p. 215
“The world I want to converse with is one where we know of leaf, root, and wing. It’s that world that I want to continue to co-create, to make visible, reveal, and uncover.” - to this I say yes, a thousand times yes 🙌
This is such a beautifully written and rich meditation.