Things Your Friends Share With You

The Merlin App → Wendell Berry

One of the gifts of friendship is the things people share with us simply because they’ve brought them joy.

My friend Mimi recently told me how much pleasure she was getting from the Merlin app during her morning time of journaling and meditation. She loved it enough that she wanted me to know about it too.

Of course I immediately wondered what the Merlin app was.

Mimi learned about it through an ornithologist she knows who worked on Merlin. The app listens to the birds around you and identifies them by their calls and songs. When a bird is actually singing, its name lights up in yellow. You can click on the bird to learn more, hear its different calls and songs, and eventually begin recognizing them yourself.

I’ve started going out to my back porch in the morning, opening Merlin, then going back inside to make my matcha while it listens. When I return, I get to see who’s visiting.

It is SO fun.

There’s almost always a Northern Cardinal, Painted Bunting, Mourning Dove, or wren.

Sometimes there are just a couple of birds and sometimes ten or more. They also seem much more vocal when I play my Qi Gong flute music. It really gets them going.

What I hadn’t expected was how much this simple little app would deepen my connection to the property here. I already felt so connected to this land that I honestly didn’t know that was possible.

Before Merlin, I heard birds.

Now I’m beginning to hear who is there.

There’s something wonderful about hearing a call and thinking, I know you.

One morning, headed back out to the porch, I grabbed Leavings: Poems by beloved Kentucky poet Wendell Berry. Berry is from Henry County, and some of you may know that I grew up in Lexington, so I’ve always felt a particular connection to his work.

I opened the book directly to “XVI,” one of his Sabbath poems, which begins:

I am hardly an ornithologist,
nevertheless I live among the birds
and on the best days my mind
is with them, partaking of their nature...

Perfect.

As Berry continues, he writes about the birds that inhabit his world with such familiarity and care: swallows, a yellow-throated warbler, Carolina wrens, owls, blackbirds, martins and more.

And suddenly, I was reading the poem differently.

When he describes his thoughts being high in the sycamores with the yellow-throated warbler, singing and feeding among the light and shadows, I understand something about that passage now that I wouldn’t have before.

And somehow, learning their names and calls has made this place I already love feel even more alive.

For those of you who are already Merliners, you know.

And for those of you about to become Merliners, I think you’re going to love it.

What I love is that all of this began with something a friend happened to share with me.

Mimi shared Merlin. Merlin got me listening more closely. Listening connected me even more deeply to this land. And then one morning I picked up a book by a poet I’ve loved for years and his words met me differently.

The birds were already here.

The poem was already here.

I just hear them both a little differently now.

Wendell Berry, “XVI,” from Leavings: Poems
Read the full poem →

— Laura xoxo