​About this time of year my friend Albert Culbreath will hear a strange bugling in the Tifton sky.
 
Actually, he feels it more than hears it, he says. Gazing upward, Albert will witness a flock of sandhill cranes, flying northward, calling back and forth to each other their magnificent ga-roo-roo-roos. 
 
Before Albert lost count one year, he had tallied over 100 cranes.
 
Sandhill cranes stand four to five feet tall, with a gray body and a red forehead. They court with enthusiastic, leaping dances. They mate for life and nest in marshes and other open, treeless places.
 
Florida naturalist Archie Carr once wrote that only three great animal voices remain in the southeastern United States -- "the jovial lunacy of the barred owl... the roar of the alligator...the ethereal bugling of the sandhill crane.”
 
The birds never fail to put me in mind of my great friend Milton Hopkins, a passionate observer of wildlife on his Osierfield, Georgia farm until his death last year. Milton always dropped me notes to say that the cranes were passing in their flyway. Sometimes they descended to feed or spend the night. Once Milton was standing in a field when a flock of over 300 cranes landed. Milton always reported the cranes migrating between March 1 and 19.
 
After Milton died, right in the middle of his funeral a long vee of sandhill cranes passed overhead, sounding their ancient music, their rattling trumpets. Maybe Milton heard the cranes, Albert wrote me, and decided to fly off with them.
 
I don't live in the crane flyway. When I hear reports of sandhill cranes, I know that spring is on its way. I start looking for purple martins to come flying in from South America, and the dogtooth violets to bloom in the woods. Frogs will be breeding, and soon we’ll see our first swallow-tail kites.
 
This study of plant and animal life cycles is called phenology, or in other words, a natural calendar. 
 
I too am a phenologist. On March 3, 2015 I first noticed purple martin scouts. On Feb. 2, 2020 I saw the first Carolina jessamine bloom. Right now Carolina jessamine is in full craziness, cascades of yellow in the tops of leafless trees. Red maples are putting out their samaras. Redbuds are starting to bloom. (March 7, by the way, is the birthday of writer and environmental activist Rick Bass.)
 
The climate crisis has disrupted many evolutionary adaptations of many species. People say the cranes are moving earlier in the spring and later in the fall. Some plants are blooming earlier than ever or later than ever, and some are leafing out at crazy times. Often fruit trees bloom early, only to get their blossoms zapped by late frosts. South Florida birds are moving into Georgia. Some birds are not migrating as they once did.
 
When things change so often and so chaotically, a person can feel shaky. As a human, we want to be able to depend on patterns and schedules. A psyche can't take too much chaos and crisis and remain healthy, not without a lot of self-care and interventions.
 
Now, it seems, there is very little on which we can depend. There's too much rain. School gets cancelled and houses get flooded and roads get closed. Then there's too much wind and trees fall. Then there's not enough rain, and we're deep in a sucking drought. Then there's a tornado where tornadoes did not traditionally occur and at a time they did not occur. Then comes another fortnight of torrential downpours.
 
The migration of sandhill cranes, going and coming, has been something we could depend on. Now it’s almost spring, the time to watch and listen for them. I'm hoping they come when they're supposed to come, not too early and not too late. I'm hoping we get serious about making the adaptations we humans need to initiate, and soon, to mitigate these climate disruptions and more. 

This week a friend said to me, “I thought when the children went off to college that our lives would slow down. Instead, they seem to be speeding up.”
 
Many of us feel as if we’re running constantly, and that we can’t stop. Even I, who work at home and often never leave the farm for days at a time, find myself sprinting to meet deadlines, do the chores, finish projects. Sometimes I am literally running, dashing back and forth from my office.
 
I find myself racing the clock, the weather, seasons, the calendar, age, colleagues, and my own goals. The more we dash, the more of the earth’s resources we consume. The more stressful, the more unhealthy.
 
However, I believe that we can make conscious decisions to decelerate. Some people call it voluntary simplicity, which means improving the quality of your life although perhaps not your bank account.
 
Here are a few ideas for slowing down.

1. Once a week (or more often) refuse to climb into your vehicle at all.
2. Literally decelerate. Keep your speedometer below 55.
3. Take the time to walk instead of drive whenever you can.
4. Fly half as much this year as you did last year.
5. Stay home.
6. Try slow food, not fast food. Put Mississippi John Hurt on the turntable and whip up a good, home-cooked meal. Relish it with your family.
7. The more possessions I own, the more responsibilities I have. Therefore, buy less. Shop less. Get by with what you have. Sometimes our family keeps a daily log to track how we spend money. Even the simple act of recording expenses makes us think twice about making a purchase. Do I really need this? I ask myself. Can I make it myself or make do with something I already have?
8. Learn to say no to those tasks that aren’t worth the effort. Focus on the essential.
9. Get out of debt and stop paying interest and fees.
10. Do what you love and spend time with those you love.

When you stand on Temple Mound at Ocmulgee Mounds in Macon, Georgia, you can look out across Walnut Creek and its floodplain. Interstate 16 runs less than a quarter-mile away, parallel to the Ocmulgee River. The creek runs beneath an interstate bridge to get to its mama, the Ocmulgee.
 
Yesterday when I was there the creek, floodplain, and river were one body of water, lapping at the interstate embankments and bridge pilings, swirling around leafless willows and river birch, flooding the park trails and also the boardwalk, with only the railing visible above water. Although the Ocmulgee is a blackwater river, the water everywhere was red as clay, hepatica-colored, saturated with the red silt from nasty construction projects upstream, the blood-sucking of a booming economy. 
 
Red earth turns its water red.
            
Yesterday all day the sky looked as if an old wool blanket had been pulled across it, and occasionally rain poured out of the blanket. You could tell by looking up that more rain was coming. On the ground, the spring ephemerals were coming out, things like henbit and the tiniest violets in the world. 
            
History will always find you, said the man who introduced the poet. He said a poet laureate embodies the soul of the nation, one moving now toward reconciliation.
            
Joy Harjo is the first Native American poet laureate of the United States. 
            
Harjo said that the Ocmulgee Mounds touch her deeply. This is her ancestral home. The Creek Nation was forced to leave when Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. They left behind homes, cornfields, pottery, printing presses, food stores, horses, trading posts, burial grounds – so much they loved. 
            
Harjo was 23 the first time she came to Macon. When she returns to visit, she is a ghost -- for the people who stayed behind, the people forced at gunpoint to leave were essentially killed. 
            
She sang a song. Ah-le-na-le-no.
            
She was wearing a red, v-necked sweater with black pants and tan boots. Her black hair was thick. Circular earrings tangled in her long hair.
            
She read from An American Sunrise. She said that our spirits always ask us questions. Hers asked, "What did you learn here?" and that's how this book got started. She read "My Man's Feet" and "Redbird": I think of all poems as love poems, she said. Then she played her flute and sang a poem.
            
We were in the visitor's center, probably 250 people, about half of us in chairs, the rest standing. The room was rounded to look like a kiva. The earth, she's a circle, Harjo said. I was wedged behind a massive display, a thigh-high cabinet with a map of the territory printed on it, perching on a narrow concrete window ledge. Between the slats of the blinds I looked at Earth Mound, Great Temple Mound, Lower Temple Mound (2/3s of it was destroyed with the first railroad came through), Cornfield Mound.
            
A lot of powerful, intelligent people live in Macon, and I could see many of them when I looked around. The people were so beautiful. When Harjo played her flute, one woman in a long, multicolored skirt wiped her eyes.
            
The poet Gordon Johnston was standing beside the cabinet. He teaches at Mercer. He and Matt Jennings, who introduced Harjo, wrote a book on the Ocmulgee Mounds. Before the reading Gordon and I were talking. Gordon has been canoeing all the waterways of Georgia. 
            
Gordon said something I've been thinking, that I've not heard anybody else say. He said, "This is the worst flooding I've seen since I've lived here." I agree. This is the worst flooding I've seen, I think my entire life. Only the roof of the picnic shelter is visible above water at Deen's Landing on the Altamaha. At English Eddy, where last fall somebody made a moonscape out of hundreds of acres, it's all standing water now, proving they logged a floodplain. Crossing the bridges, with so much water, is dizzying.
            
I asked Gordon if he'd paddled the Ohoopee, and he said no, so I invited him to come visit, told him I'd like to paddle with him.
            
Since we're talking about reconciliation, I could say a lot about reconciliation with the earth. But this is a blog-post, my first, and I'll just leave it with this: yesterday I heard the first Native American poet laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo, read her poetry while her dead ancestors listened and while ancient ceremonial mounds, emerald with grass, rose high above the swirling red waters of the Ocmulgee.
            
"We all make our way back home eventually," Harjo said. "May we all find a way home."
 
From “Equinox”:
Soon they will come for me and I will make my stand
before the jury of destiny. Yes, I will answer in the clatter
of the new world, I have broken my addiction to war
and desire. Yes, I will reply, I have buried the dead.