Finch, Robert
Robert Finch is Publication Director for the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and staff member of the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference at Middlebury College. He is also the author of Common Ground: A Naturalist's Cape Cod.

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On the ninth of May a new season - call it True Spring, Leaf Time, or Warbler Weather - was ushered in on waves of soft, bugless air from the south. The Primal Place, 1983.

These night fish seem to be my own thoughts, racing along or dropping back with motivations and intentions of their own, forming shifting momentary patterns, leaping and fragmenting in the dark, pouring tongues of water and then coming together again on the next level in new shapes, new designs. Ibid.

I think of cities I have known, and of the profound loneliness of urban crowds that is a loneliness of a thing unto itself, however large or extensive. True belonging is born of relationships not only to one another but to a place of shared responsibilities and benefits. Ibid.

Unlike the fish and the birds, we have no clear, unambiguous directions to our lives. Yet spring still asks extensions of us, pushing up from under the accumulated debris and the storms of winter, a new re-entry into life. Ibid.