The Whole World in a Few Bright Notes

how a smattering of comments about birdsong reminded me of the grand scheme of life

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I like talking about birds. I don’t get tired of it :)

In fact, I like talking about birds so much that I was a bit tickled when I was sitting down to write and found my auto-correct stumped by what I thought to be the most obvious of typos. I mean, if anything, I expected predictive text to find me predictable in this particular area:

And it just so happens that, this week, I noticed a bit of a conversational trend converging on the moments of my day, drifting gently around the engaging topic of birdsong. I never get tired of talking about birds. I never get tired of listening to birds talk. I never get tired of talking about birds talking.

I’m no stranger to his family, of course. The year that I spent in Texas was filled with morning cheer, as an eerily-similar Northern Cardinal embraced me as his new neighbor. It seems I had moved into the little house adjacent to the woods that he called home, and he was happy to welcome me to the neighborhood each morning without fail.

Back home in Maine, we have been excited this year to entice a small group of Purple Finches into residence, with the promise of generous helpings of sunflower seeds. It’s delightful to have them around, their songs filling the forest with tumbling joy, seemingly recounting the endless delights of wings stretched jubilantly into soaring summer skies.

I am greeted by many different birds throughout my days, throughout the seasons. Some birds sound curious, some friendly, some sassy, some laughing, some definitely, strongly scolding.

The Common Loon is, perhaps, mournful. Perhaps patiently reminiscent. Solemn, drifting vocally across silver ripples of time and memory.

And somewhere, though I am now unable to find the comment, someone reminded me that the calls of Mourning Doves strike the same tone, and I responded that a Hermit Thrush song catches my heart and my breath with every fluting note, every single time.

Each bird, of course, is simply being the bird that it is, singing the song that it sings, complete in its existence without fragmentation of emotion. The cardinal is not happy while the loon is sad, the robin laughing while the crow is scolding. They are each cardinal-ing and loon-ing, robin-ing and crow-ing, in fullness of their own individual beings.

Birdsong meets me in my incompleteness and slips into place alongside the emotional space that I need it to fill. I haven’t asked for that, actually. And the bird didn’t plan it, specifically. And yet, my heart knows instantly that it is the perfect fit.

I am the one that needs to have my heart stirred by morning joy. And aching sorrow. To feel sometimes befriended or sassed or laughed-at or scolded. And, as it turns out, there’s a bird for that!

Birds are utterly reliable in this role. Once my heart has made the connection between the song and the space, the connection will endure. If one cardinal is singing cheerfully, I can rely on the expectation that they all will be, whenever and wherever I meet them.

Isn’t that a fascinating thing? How the bird can exist entirely for its own good, can sing for its own good, and fly for its own good, and live and breathe and nest for its own good, because these are the things that complete its life on this earth.

And the bird can also exist for my own good, and I can experience all these different goods that all these different birds bring into the days of my life on this earth.

And the bird can also exist for the good of this whole world, in which we are neighbors, delicately and inextricably interwoven into a web of life that ripples with every heartbeat.

In my faith, we have a pair of related sayings: Consider the birds of the air…Consider the flowers of the field…

This type of saying, an allegory based in natural observation, is not just true, but deeply true. Not just true for some one topic in some one circumstance. True in ways that as you consider, and turn over in your mind, and draw nearer in your heart, grow more true in more ways than you first imagined.

The initial purpose of these sayings is simply to remind us that the wild things are never over-concerned with matters of daily food and dress, but live the different aspects of their lives in full balance.

But also, scientifically speaking, to consider the birds of the air and the flowers of the field is to always be enriched. You would think, after long ages of sharing this earth with its wild inhabitants, we might have learned all that we can learn about their ways and their habits and their lives. But actually, you can pick any one thing in your own back yard and discover, not only how much you didn’t already know about it, but likely how much science doesn’t yet quite understand about it, too. It is endlessly educational to consider the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.

But wait, there’s more. As we consider the birds of the air, and the flowers of the field…As we listen to the songs, and feel them settle into the spaces waiting within our hearts…We experience, personally, this even greater truth about connection and relation, about purpose and intention, about a wide world and every tiny part that makes it whole.

We live in a world where somehow that bird is there for its own sake. And it’s also there for our sake. And it’s also there for the whole world’s sake. And if this is all by luck, then at least it is very good luck, indeed. A sublime comfort to sink into the dreamy realization that there is always more to everything than just what meets the eye.

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