In spring, summer, and fall, I sit in our back garden and play solitaire and drink tea and think about things while I don’t think about things. From the days you’re glad for warmth and sun to the days you avoid them, back to the days they feel like a blessing. Watching things grow, watching things glow, watching things wither and die, watching shifting light, growing plants, changing birds. This is a thing I’ve been doing every morning for as long as I can remember. I heard somewhere that if you do something repetitive with your hands that doesn’t require too much focused attention — like knitting, or crocheting, or playing solitaire — it frees your mind to dwell on things you might not consciously direct your attention to. And so it is for me. A meditation.

I have strange, specific ideas that creep into my thoughts. It changes from day to day and year to year, but some are oddly persistent. Things I’ve seen or read (Diary of a Country Priest, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Brothers Karamazov, why these, why?). Glancing memories of uneventful times, one time waiting for a train to pass in front of the car on a windy night with autumn leaves and train lights casting their scattering glow in the darkness. Once arriving early to a restaurant, and sitting in the back seat of the car, biding time. I don’t know why these things, but I feel like it will all add up, someday, to something I should make. Something I should write or film, fragments I should connect to make something rich and whole. Maybe someday, there’s more non-thinking to do first.

In the winter, I can’t sit outside. It’s a small loss, but it’s a thing I miss, as I miss many things about the warmer months. But here, as with all things, it helps to turn to the birds. They’re around all winter, not all the same birds, but all beautiful in their own way, in their own songs. The blue jays have taken up winter residence in a great flock in the tall oak trees next door. They have such rich language — so many calls and songs, mostly strident, emphatic. But in the last few weeks their songs have changed, they sing a gentle, plaintive tune, with a glass-like poignance. It’s thoughtful, meditative, moving. All the birds are gathering now, in flocks, with none of the territorial combativeness of spring and summer, and you’ll find a berry-full juniper teeming with the excited high-pitched fluttering of cedar waxwings, starlings murmuring their carnival songs in the burnished fields, and the bamboo stand shaking with the haunting songs of a flock of white-throated sparrows.

I think a lot about how we miss all the bright greenness of summer, but the warmly dark slick black tree bark, vivid moss, and even bronzing decaying leaves have a beauty of their own. And here’s a thing I read today that I like. The word “brown” comes from a word that means dark and dusky, but it’s also related to a word that means bright and shining, as in burnish (which is a word I love). Winter’s dark and dusky colors have their own warmth and glow, just as the birds’ songs become softer and warmer and are always bright. In the winter, we all draw in together, as the birds do, and create our own shining warmth.

All of this nonsense is now going to be followed by the most nonsensical Magpies’ Mix Tape ever. Actual bird songs, as one might hear throughout the year, in my back garden, for which I am full of gratitude. Happy Thanksgiving, to those who give thanks.