I have expected to see my crocuses squashed and broken under the weight of the recent snowfall. Instead, they emerged victorious and wasted no time to greet the spring snow sun.

A house finch joined the usual chorus of cardinals, robins, chickadees and song sparrows today. I heard a downy woodpecker in the forest.

While walking in the forest today, I had to stick to the large paths, as the smaller ones are too muddy to follow. I couldn’t hear the birds, silenced by the cacophony of human voices, and I kept thinking: what if we just learned to keep quiet as a species? What if our survival depended on our ability to be still and listen.

Oh, and how could I forget the wonderful walk to the city park we took this morning. We halted on a little bridge listening to the brook. (“Mama, did you know that water sings?!”) and soon were joined by a girl a little older than my daughter. The girl, Layla, took us to the stones at the edge of the brook and taught us to “fish” for leaves and sticks in the stream. It was wonderfully fun, even as Elise’s foot slipped into the water.

Now that I know his song, I start noticing the pattern. He’s there every morning, at the same spot, singing to his invisible kin. The Mohawk word shé:kon that we translate as hello, actually means “still, again.” As in “I still love you” – “shé:kon konnorón:kwa.” It makes sense to greet this bird in Mohawk, not only because we meet on an unceded land where he is native and I am a settler, but because he helped me to understand shé:kon as an expression of gratitude for the continuation of life. Shé:kon to the sun that rises in the East, a minute earlier with every day, shé:kon to the bird that sings at the same place every morning, preparing to read a new generation of beautiful red songbirds. Shé:kon to the wild geese that fly over neighbourhood, making us look up. Shé:kon to the crows, who know my patterns better than I know theirs. Shé:kon, as in “you are still here, I see you, I acknowledge you.”

A phrase in the Wolf Willow Institute email startled me today. Apocalypse means revelation. How could I forget this, given my past? I read the book a dozen times, yet, if someone asked me yesterday what the word meant, I’d say “end of the world” or “end of times.” Apocalypse means revelation. The question is what is being revealed. I you’d asked me now, I’d say cracks. It feels like they’re everywhere, like the very surface of time, space and reality is covered in cracks that look tiny at a first glance, but go deep. Monsters are hiding in them, but also possibilities and maybe the two are the same.

My neighbourhood is worn-out by yesterday’s storm. There are broken branches everywhere and the snow looks dirty and out of place. We woke up in a cold house, but with electricity, so we decided to make the morning special and have a breakfast at Cafellini before barely making it on time to school. On my way back (there is no driving, because the driveway is covered in snow and we already changed to summer tires) I heard the loud, insistent song of the cardinal. With every step, the sound got louder until I finally saw him – the beautiful red bird perched on the hedge of the last house on our street. He was singing, unperturbed by my steps or by the wet noises of the cars. Somewhere across the road, unseen to me, another cardinal was answering him. It went on for a long time: two cardinals, one visible, another invisible, singing back and forth. They continued, as I moved on, through the chirps of robins, sharp cries of grackles, joyful noise of sparrows and a single cry of a blue-jay somewhere at the distance.

I think there are two ways to wisdom, both equally exciting. One is looking inside: a deep exploration of one’s own story, origins, relations and ancestors, digging through layers or trauma and wisdom, discovering who we are in time. The other is more about space: letting the world to become alive for us – no longer an object or a backdrop for our story, but a place full of stories that are just as important as our own. This is what I experienced this morning, as I was listening to the duet of the cardinals – the world as a living, breathing, unfolding story of life. The cardinals were singing to each other, oblivious to my presence. Their song started before I came and went on after I left. It was guided by the millenia-old instincts of which I have no understanding. My role was witnessing this miracle – an act that had no benefits for the two cardinals, but was life-changing for me.

This spring, my suburban neighbourhood becomes alive, exciting and mysterious to me through the birdsong. I leap from joy when I can trace the song to the singer. I start noticing the patterns of flight. I got all excited this evening, while walking towards the school, when the three crows flew over me and I was able to tell that they are craws and not ravens.

I keep a lot of these observations to myself. The only people able to get excited about my cardinal, crow and raven stories are my children. On the way home tonight, I entertained my daughter with my very inapt description of the grackle’s feathers.

I don’t want to become an expert on birds. I love learning facts about them, but I don’t want to reduce the birds to the science of them: the density of their bones or the span of their wings. I want to keep falling deeply, endurably in love with the web of living things around me. Be they grackles or stones – I want to let them know that I know that they are alive.

The biggest snowstorm of the winter came in spring. Tons and tons of heavy wet snow two months too late. Snow buried my crocuses and the new leaves of tulips, bent and broke more limbs of the lilacs. We haven’t had electricity for almost 24 hours. I kept kids at home and we moved from a cafe to McDonalds, from there to the library then back to our cold dark home, trudging through the wet snow and debris left by the storm. the electricity came back on after 9pm, after i’d put children in bed and went to bed myself, hiding under covers in my thermal underwear that i used to put on to run by -20. The day was long and exhausting, but looking back at it, it wasn’t a bad day. We got to spend a lot of time together, work less and not feel guilty about it, be small and helpless and dependent on the external circumstances and all in all it wasn’t that bad.

Vika’s birthday.

The sunny days turned into cold wind that turned into cold rain that will turn into 20 centimetres of snow overnight. Every time, we say it’s the last time. Last year we had an icy rain on April 16 and I remember my tiny crocuses frozen into whimsical ice sculptures. Which means that they are two weeks early this year. Tomorrow, they will be covered in snow. I had planted them two years ago to have something to look forward to through the long days of late winter. I admire their courage and resilience – the smallest of flowers, they always come out the first, into a barren and unwelcoming world, they bloom bravely through the night frosts, tardy snowstorms and icy rains. They are undeterred. Thank you, little flowers.

This morning I recognised the insistent tchiu tchiu tchiu of the cardinal and heard the goldfinch for the first time. My favourite song so far is that of the song sparrow. This world makes sense, even if the rest of it doesn’t.

There are stories from Ukrainian war that still haunt me, now there are the stories of the Gaza genocide that will haunt me. I can’t write the down, I can’t share them, I can’t forget them, they are mine to remember, even as they are not mine to tell. I wonder how many of stories like these my grandparents carried. The ones they never dared to share with me and I never asked.

The four days of the Easter holiday break flew by, more violet crocuses popped from the ground, we had our first picnic in the forest and spent long time watching the busy fish in the lake, we ate our first meal outside on the deck, we listened to birds – we almost recognize chickadees, cardinals and robins by their song now, there seems to be an abundance of sparrows, on Saturday we heard a white-breasted nuthatch (повзик каролінський), today Merlin picked up a song of a dark-eyed junco and introduced us to a harsh cry of the common grackle. I took a bath for the first time in many years. I was thinking a lot and writing a lot and made a feeble attempt at spring cleaning.

We’ve been conditioned to the dichotomy between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary. I am not an expert, but I guess that this dichotomy stems from the same market forces that keep destroying our planet. The experience of happiness, delight, wonder, awe, joy are sold through influencers and travel websites. You need rest? Get away. Want to discover something new? Travel. Wish your life was more fulfilling? Buy this new device or better yet, subscribe to this service. We’ve internalized the idea that a good weekend is the one spent in some extra-ordinary way. I think that if we are serious about de-growth, if we want to at least try to live in a more sustainable way, we need to fall in love with the ordinary. A walk in the park, an afternoon tea on the deck, an evening with a book, listening to the bird chorus in my backyard, some time with kids, some time alone are all I need for a perfect weekend.

Good Friday. violet crocuses started blooming and yellow crocuses and tulips poked from the ground. We found a millipede larvae, three worms and two sleeping woolly bears. And we planted milkweed around the house.

Mama told me this morning that auntie Valya died yesterday. She was my mom’s best friend since forever. She was the bridesmaid at my parents’ wedding. She was my godmother. She was smart and very, very talkative. She could talk for hours. She knew French and was very good at math. She never married and had a son who was, still is, a few years younger than me. When I was a child, she was the only single mother I knew. Rest in peace, tyotya Valechka. I am not certain anymore what is beyond the life we know, but I hope that you are in a good place.

The day when I saw the first flowers. I’d been paying attention to the green poking from the ground for several days now. Not to forget that on Saturday, less than a week ago, the ground was covered with snow. I thought that the crocuses in a beautiful front yard I pass by on the way of picking my kids up from school would be the first flowers I see. Instead, the first flowers caught me off guard when I was walking fast through the Milton-Park neighbourhood. Milton-Park, of all places! It’s like you sang, dear Leonard, “and she teaches you where to look between the garbage and the flowers.”

It was also the day when I went to the Roulant and didn’t get elected to their board, but got to speak to so many wonderful people that I’d do it all over again, even knowing the result.

I left the Roulant and walked along Saint-Denis street, because the metro broke down and made me miss my bus and all of a sudden I had all this time to kill. So I walked down the street and looked at the lights and remember how nice this city can be on the eve of a long weekend and in the very beginning of spring, when everything feels tender and new and possible, although so many things aren’t. I felt tender and new and a little sad, because it still sucks not to win. And yet, I felt good. Good about where I’m at and where I’m heading and thinking, what matters is making this journey with a good heart.

This may very well be my favourite season: the time when living things poke from the ground and swell on branches, the time when days are getting longer, the time when kids arrive home from school and fish outside to play with friends.

This morning, the inevitable happened. The morning itself was wet and mild. I set out for a short walk around the block. Usually, I would do the walk while listening to an audiobook or a podcast, but since I am still reeling from finishing The Comfort of Crows, I decided to listen to what’s going on around. I don’t think that I had ever listened with so much intent, neither have I ever felt so connected to the here and now as during this short walk. I though I had heard about six or seven different bird songs, but was able to see only two plump chikadees and a robin. The rest of the birds remained invisible to me.

When I came back home, I finally downloaded the Merlin app and now I can tell to which bird belongs a song. I feel like I am learning a new language – although I can’t interpret a song without my Merlin app, I am learning to tell them apart and rejoicing in the anticipation of the moment when I will not need to rely on my bird interpreter any more. One day I will walk on my street and say “hello robin” “hello cardinal” “hello goldfinch.” One day I will hear the land I live on and understand its song all by myself. But for now, my greatest pleasure is to stand on a corner of a suburban street, under some big tree and read the names of the birds that appear on my Merlin screen: that was a red-winged blackbird, this is a sparrow, here is a cardinal and a chikadee and here is a bluejay.