Reading · Red-Tails on the Fire Escape

I had been walking with a woodpecker for miles but had yet to lay my eyes on it. It was the last day of my first week-long silent meditation retreat. On the opening night of the retreat, I’d handed over my cell phone in a gesture of devotion to my practice, so there was no Merlin app in my pocket to help me identify the loud, chewy-sounding call I kept hearing. My binoculars were back at home for the same reason—to look for birds was to try and distract myself from my messy, scattered mind—but this woodpecker had spotted me.

I was a little nervous going into the retreat. I’m not a sitting-down kind of person. My job as a pastry chef is a physical one, and I manage just about everything in my life that needs managing—my anxiety, my blood sugar, my creative problem solving—by going for a walk. Sitting on a cushion, indoors, from 5:45 a.m. until 9:45 p.m., even with breaks, was going to be not just a mental challenge but a physical one.

The retreat center sits on 400 acres of woodlands with well-marked trails. Looking at the retreat schedule on the first morning and noting that lunch was the longest break of the day, I quickly calculated that if I skipped the sitting and walking meditation periods right after lunch, I could hike for three hours and not miss the afternoon dharma talk. My true practice had begun.

This last day of retreat, having already taken all the trails, I chose to revisit my favorite, one that passed by an old stone wall left over from when these woods were all farmland. I could hear the steady trickle of water somewhere within the stones, but could never find the source. On this path were many tiny buddhas, tucked into tree hollows, smiling and laughing—gifts from previous retreatants that had delighted me when I first spotted them. On this early spring day, the trees had not yet leafed. The woods were surprisingly silent, outside of the occasional rustle of squirrels’ paws on fallen oak leaves. Silent except for the distinctive laughing call of some sort of woodpecker.

I always stop and look for woodpeckers when I hear them. At home, in Boston, I regularly see Downey and Red-Bellied Woodpeckers and Northern Flickers. I love the splash of red on the back male Downy Woodpecker’s heads, the checkered patterns of their black and white feathers, the rosy breast of a Red-Bellied, and the ermine-stole polka dots of the Northern Flickers. Woodpeckers tend to be easy birds for me to find, mostly because they have a distinct way of moving up and down a tree trunk—a kind of hopping that I love to watch.

But on this day, I couldn’t see a glimmer of movement in the trees before me.

I walked for hours, the only sounds my footfall in the leaf litter and the occasional drilling of beak into wood. CHEW CHEW CHEW, the woodpecker called. Every so often I would stop and stand or sit on an inviting rock and look up into the trees. Early spring sunlight danced between the trunks. The silent, effortless glide of a red-tailed hawk or a turkey vulture overhead, riding a thermal, changed the patterns of light. No woodpecker. Finally, I arrived at the spot on the trail where I had to walk up a large hill to get to the little foot path that would lead me back to the meditation center, and to the last talk, the end of the retreat. I hesitated, not ready to leave this sacred place, not wanting this time to end. And then, I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I scanned the trees and suddenly saw a burst of red. There before me, at the top of a pale-barked snag, was a Pileated Woodpecker! The first one I had ever seen in my life! Incredibly large bodied, long beak, with a pointed red crown bright against the tree. I stood stalk still. The bird gripped onto the side of the tree before a hole in the trunk. He looked carefully around the trunk to his right, to his left, to his right again, and then, in a flash, disappeared into the hole.

I watched the hole in that snag for 20 minutes, waiting for him to emerge, but he never did, and I never heard his call again. I reluctantly returned to the meditation hall and sat on my cushion, beaming, filled with awe, feeling like I had just received a gift.

When I think about the experience of the retreat, I never think of the hours spent on the cushion. I think of that woodpecker and me, alive at the same time, in the same place, and how impossibly awake I felt, and how impossibly connected I felt to every living thing, in those woods and beyond.

Nature has a way of returning us to ourselves. When I am out walking—even if I am just taking a quick neighborhood walk in the evening—I always feel like I am walking myself back to myself. And isn’t that the point of any mindfulness-based practice—to awaken to ourselves and to be present to what is right in front of us, in this moment? And in this one?

And being present to what is right in front of us, in this moment, leads us to the truth of our interconnectedness. The naturalist Joanna Brichetto says, “We protect what we love, but we can’t love what we don’t know and we can’t know what we don’t notice.” To be both a naturalist and a meditator is to practice paying attention, which, for me, always leads to love.

The truth is the desire to NOT be right here right now is a powerful one. Life is just plain scary right now. I read the headlines every day and worry constantly about the choices our government is making. I worry about my family and friends, my neighbors and community, I worry about all beings—people, animal friends, plants woody and herbaceous, vanishing insects, vanishing songbirds, woodpeckers seen and unseen—and about all the needless suffering that is caused by the hatred and greed of a few. Some days I can only access a sense of calm when I am outside walking, when I am engaging with the natural world. So come, take a walk with me. We don’t have to talk about anything. We will just see what is right in front of us, in this moment, and in this one. We will receive the gifts that are offered. We will let ourselves be reminded of what is good.

I’ll leave you with this poem by Wendell Berry that I keep coming back to.