Every spring, Jason finds as many of the nests as he can. He goes to them. He tells the herons, with his actual words, that he loves them and wishes them good luck. He is not the only one. Without any discussion, all of his friends love night herons. They are raising their young in the willow oak, as they have done for millions of years, as they will do after we are gone, as long as the trees hold.
In 1956, five of his former students — Luis Usatorre, Jesús Larrañaga, Alfonso Gorroñogoitia, José María Ormaechea, and Javier Ortubay — pooled their savings and skills and founded a cooperative. They bought a small workshop, moved it to Mondragón, and began making paraffin stoves. The cooperative was called ULGOR, after the first letters of their surnames. It would later become Fagor. Arizmendi blessed the foundation stone of the new pavilion. He never held any position in the cooperatives he spent his life building. He died in 1976, the year after Franco, having spent thirty-five years in a single valley building what he believed the Gospel and the etxe together required.
For a season I lived and worked with a community at the edge of wilderness in the Pacific Northwest. I was not a visitor. I was a teacher, and I taught not through information but through affect — the only way this transmission works, and only within a community, never one on one. I taught honoring and blessing and singing. I taught witnessing, listening, speaking to plants and trees. I taught the stalker's gait that the children dropped into when the deer walked into camp — not as a skill but as a doorway. Evocation, passed the only way it passes. I learned from people who carried these ways, and from ancient trees that were older than the tradition I was learning. I learned with my body and my soul as well as my mind. I remembered my ancestors.
You have walked. Whatever else is true — whatever you skipped, whatever you went back to, whichever doors you took and which you closed without opening — your body has carried this book across some distance it did not know it was crossing. You are not at a finish line. There isn't one. But the walking has happened. There is something in the way your attention sits at this page that was not there at the prologue, even if you cannot name it. So before we go any further: that is the first good thing. The walking is what this chapter is about, and the fact that you have done some of it is what makes the rest of the chapter possible.
Last winter, during a storm, I watched a tiny kinglet taking shelter in the tall grass of a managed meadow six blocks from our house. A kinglet is one of the smallest birds in North America — barely four inches, burning calories against the cold at a rate that requires almost constant feeding. This one was tucked into the grass, out of the wind, exactly where a meadow should be. It's the meadow I gave the parks department hell over two years ago — their plan called for mowing it, and they haven't cut it since. I walk past it every morning expecting the mowers. Every morning it's still there is a small triumph.
The night herons will return to the willow oaks in a few weeks. Every spring, up from Central America, to raise their young in the same trees. We find the nests. We tell them we love them and wish them good luck. They hear us — they talk to each other about it, in ways we can only begin to understand. They know about the road too, in ways we can't imagine. They've been navigating it for years.
The night herons know about the road in ways we are still learning to understand — their territory maps include the crossing, the people who bless the nests are part of what they know about this place. The doves know about the argument in their way: they feel the quieted body that years of practice produced. The deer that walked through the camp in Washington knew something too — and the twenty five-year-olds who dropped into the stalking gait were learning to know it with them. Life is what we have in common — the herons and the doves and the deer and the people and the elders and the sugarcane worker writing his name and the employee at the bar, telling the story proudly, not needing me to be at the center of it.
The awareness practices are political acts. The walk around the neighborhood is political. Waking up for the cardinal at 5am. Finding the heron nests and telling them you love them — this is political. Not because it changes the zoning board or restores the common land or forgives the debt — but because it trains the attention toward what is real and living and shared, and attention trained that way is the root of everything else. The enclosure underneath all the other enclosures: you don't need to suppress the conclusion if you can enclose the attention that would produce it. The awareness practices are the counter-enclosure. They are what makes it possible to see the trickle when the catastrophe has trained you to look only for the flood.
Go find the nests. Tell them you love them. They're listening.