making meaning with heron and forest
From time to time we see a heron fly over the forest that surrounds our home or standing at the edge of the River Squiriou, which runs through our woodland garden. Usually a single heron, occasionally two. Grey Heron (Ardea cinerea) are relatively common in Finistère, particularly in riparian woodland. They are solitary outside mating season, but generally tolerant of other heron unless food is scarce. Mating pairs might stay in the same feeding area and be drawn to the same pools, with a bit of wary spacing between them. Long-established partners will often reunite at the same nesting site each spring.
They are a joy to watch in flight, steady and slow, their deep wingbeats signalling their usual commute between feeding and resting sites. Neck folded into an S, legs trailing behind, calm and purposeful. They rise higher,buoyant or gliding, sometimes in circles, when scouting out new feeding areas or moving to an evening roost.
As non-migratory birds, they are here for midwinter, becoming studies in stoic routine and endurance. Focussed and patient, they take up their statue-still hunting postures, working a habitual stretch of water, often where current slows or eddies form. Early light gives good visibility into the water. By afternoon, they alternate between standing motionless and slow wading, occasionally perching on a fallen branch or rock, to rest between bouts of hunting.
A last round of foraging before they fly to roost. Their slower winter metabolism relies on any small fish and amphibians that remain active in cool water, but they’ll also take voles or insects in flooded meadows. And our meadow is often flooded in winter. In long rains, when rivers swell and water is turbid, they often move to ditches, ponds, or overflow channels where visibility is better. The temporary tributaries, ponds, sometimes a small lake, that appears in the garden at this time of year, that terrified us when we first knew this land, are ideal.
In cold, wet areas, herons roost communally in tall trees, though they may roost alone in milder areas. They like tall trees and I suspect that if their roost is close it will be in the towering ancient ash or poplars on the island over the river.
Anchored sentinels, conserving energy, quietly maintaining their territory, waiting out the season until the light changes.
The heron lifts over the river, slow and deliberate, air thickening to hold her. Along the far banks, on the island, and beyond hedges, trees stand in their winter shape — ash and poplar, willow, apple, oak and alder — each branch pared back. And along the forest track, a lick of green persists. Leaves of dandelion and plantain huddled low against the earth. Husks of water hemlock and Queen Anne’s Lace holding their fragile architecture. Old nettles leaning against the remnants of crisped fern fronds, brambles wiry and barbed.
Through December, approaching the shortest day, all that’s inessential falls away. What remains — the structure of survival. The heron, a grey thought crossing the pale light. I’ve been reading Jarod Anderson’s Something in the Woods Loves You.
The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning… When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
[…] Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices… The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. When we remove our agency in meaning-making, we start to think in absolutes.
In the deep midwinter, this collaboration is close enough to touch. The forest offers its bones and roots. I offer my attention. In the hush meaning is made — not fixed, but breathing, like the heron’s slow wings folding into distance. In the deep midwinter, the world invites a slower kind of seeing.
All that holds me — human and more-than-human, insists: Stop blooming, rest in the essential heart of things. The heron, the brambles, the oaks, the last berries on the ivy teach stillness, not emptiness. If I pay attention something true will surface. It will not (most likely) be a grand revelation, but a the faint murmur that enables us to look toward the returning light. In the stillness, meaning becomes less something I make, more something I participate in. The smallest lives — the wren in the bramble, the vole tunnelling under frost, the green persistence of dandelion and plantain — make the same quiet covenant to endure, pause, keep breathing through the dark.
It is here that I find myself held.
And I wonder — in these midwinter days in a world that too often rages and refuses the quiet voice, what holds you?
Who steadies you when the light is thin?
Perhaps the answer is not in language, but the weight of fur, the brush of feathers, the glisten of waxy holly leaves bright with berries like beads of blood, the pulse of another life breathing steadily beside your own…