"Song of the Red-Wing Blackbird" (Image & Text Copyright Wylddane Productions, LLC)
When the Red-Winged Blackbird Sings
Spring always seems to come slow to the northwoods. It's a season that arrives not with a trumpet’s blare but with a whisper. Subtle. Steady. At times, it feels like winter's grip will never quite loosen, like the gray and brown of a thawing world might stretch on forever. But then, one morning, the ice is thinner, the snow patches smaller, and something stirs in the air. A change, almost imperceptible, but real.
Perhaps spring comes exactly when it’s supposed to.
As I gaze at this image—a stream cutting through bare and brambled brush under a softly painted sky—I can almost hear it. That first song. The one that cracks open the silence like sunlight spilling across a frost-covered field.
The red-winged blackbird.
Its song is not just a sound—it's an arrival, a proclamation. It tells me that winter has begun to retreat and the world is waking up again.
When I was young, I was fortunate to grow up by a lake. My parents’ home sat just above the shoreline, its windows catching the light off the water in every season. We had a boat, and in the shoulder days of spring—when the ice was still receding and the world looked bare, brown, almost sterile—we would stand outside and watch, listen, and wait. Because even in that seeming emptiness, life was everywhere.
The red-winged blackbirds returned each year with the wood ducks, the mallards, the geese, the coots. A feathered procession of the returning wild. But the blackbirds—with their unmistakable crimson epaulets—were like punctuation marks on the still-sleepy sentence of spring. Their song didn’t just fill the air; it announced something eternal. Something larger than any one season, any one life.
Now, many years later, I still listen for that song. And each time I hear it—whether in memory or in real time—I feel a kind of peace settle over me. It is a peace that transcends the hectic, often chaotic machinations of human life. While we scramble and strive and worry, nature carries on. Governed not by deadlines or ambition but by rhythm, instinct, and trust.
Is that not a metaphysical thing? That deep and abiding trust that the earth will warm, the waters will flow, and the red-winged blackbird will return?
There is solace in this. There is hope in this. There is a soft and powerful invitation to accept the eternal gift of cycles, of renewal, of return.
And so I listen. I listen not only with my ears but with my soul.
I love the song of the red-winged blackbird.
~Wylddane
Spring always seems to come slow to the northwoods. It's a season that arrives not with a trumpet’s blare but with a whisper. Subtle. Steady. At times, it feels like winter's grip will never quite loosen, like the gray and brown of a thawing world might stretch on forever. But then, one morning, the ice is thinner, the snow patches smaller, and something stirs in the air. A change, almost imperceptible, but real.
Perhaps spring comes exactly when it’s supposed to.
As I gaze at this image—a stream cutting through bare and brambled brush under a softly painted sky—I can almost hear it. That first song. The one that cracks open the silence like sunlight spilling across a frost-covered field.
The red-winged blackbird.
Its song is not just a sound—it's an arrival, a proclamation. It tells me that winter has begun to retreat and the world is waking up again.
When I was young, I was fortunate to grow up by a lake. My parents’ home sat just above the shoreline, its windows catching the light off the water in every season. We had a boat, and in the shoulder days of spring—when the ice was still receding and the world looked bare, brown, almost sterile—we would stand outside and watch, listen, and wait. Because even in that seeming emptiness, life was everywhere.
The red-winged blackbirds returned each year with the wood ducks, the mallards, the geese, the coots. A feathered procession of the returning wild. But the blackbirds—with their unmistakable crimson epaulets—were like punctuation marks on the still-sleepy sentence of spring. Their song didn’t just fill the air; it announced something eternal. Something larger than any one season, any one life.
Now, many years later, I still listen for that song. And each time I hear it—whether in memory or in real time—I feel a kind of peace settle over me. It is a peace that transcends the hectic, often chaotic machinations of human life. While we scramble and strive and worry, nature carries on. Governed not by deadlines or ambition but by rhythm, instinct, and trust.
Is that not a metaphysical thing? That deep and abiding trust that the earth will warm, the waters will flow, and the red-winged blackbird will return?
There is solace in this. There is hope in this. There is a soft and powerful invitation to accept the eternal gift of cycles, of renewal, of return.
And so I listen. I listen not only with my ears but with my soul.
I love the song of the red-winged blackbird.
~Wylddane
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