familiar_birds-5.17#

Today I decided to rest.

I woke late. Heated up some chicken tikka masala I made for lunch yesterday. I ate while I perused a Henri Nouwen book I’ve read before.

I went for a drive. The usual drive. Forty-five minutes of winding through forests to a lake-side park. I always stop halfway at the same grocery store for a rather humble cup of coffee to accompany my pipe.

Today, the whole drive out, I felt like I was waiting to wake up. I have been tired. And I’ve been blowing on an ember of discontent, and it’s been glowing. And it’s been hard to hold, and I’ve been holding.

I parked in front of a wall of honeysuckle. I stepped out, and was struck by the scent. Just like always, like every spring, when those fragrances of the warmer South spread again.

I sat at a picnic table there, looking out over a broad expanse of lake. I lit the pipe, which took a while in the wind. I sipped the coffee. And sat.

And the only thing over all that water, under all that sky, were five birds, small and sharp-winged. They sped and dove, they played the whole time I was there. I would forget about them, and one would arc a few feet away from me. I hope to remember enough about them to identify them later. But I do not trust my memory, as fleeting as those fast wings. The birds either did not know I was there, or they considered me harmless. They flew close enough to feel kindred.

When the pipe was done, I took my coffee back to the car and got in. But then, I got out again, the car still running. I walked to the honeysuckle bush, and bent to find a suitable flower. I picked it. Pinched it at the base and pulled the pistil through to drink the nectar. I drank a couple more–like when I was a child. It was sweeter even than I remembered, the flavor stronger.

I heard a rustling–a cardinal, in the bush near my feet. A flash of red among the green. He saw or heard me, and he vanished.

And then I left. Almost as if to remind me of their play, the birds danced around the car as I drove from the park. I almost had forgotten them, as I forget so many of the small joys each day brings. I turn from blessing to blessing to blessing. Like a child, I forget, and I am overwhelmed again and again.

What a joy to share the world with these creatures that could occupy the novels of Marquez or Murakami: strange and beautiful birds that seem to know me, but whose names I either can’t remember, or never knew.

The day made me think of a Li-Young Lee poem.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Note: After spending some time with my copy of the Sibley Guide to Birds, I think my friends at the lake are cliff swallows.

it_is_enough-5.4#

It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made.

-Franz Kafka

I read this quote earlier today, and I have been turning it over in my mind since, with a host of other thoughts that sweep and startle like scattering birds.

Some think Kafka was saying that we had been prepared to receive our wounds, that our bodies held a readiness to shape the affliction. Looking afterwards, it is as if we had borne the arrows’ mark before we met them, and thus shaped our meeting. And, most importantly, as we reflect on our injuries, it is impossible to see the arrow apart from how we have received it.

Or maybe he is, more simply, referencing the kind of intimacy that we build with our sufferings. How beautiful that our lives turn into our stories! and that the borders of ourselves meet the edge of that which has helped to shape us.