When I occasionally have coffee at the donut shop, I have a full view of the sign through the large plate-glass window. A couple dozen of the pigeons will start out on the top of the double-faced billboard soon after sunrise, probably having roosted there during the night.
Although we city-dwellers call them "pigeons," I know they are, to ornithologists, descendants of "rock doves". The species has readily adjusted to city life because their ancient ancestors evolved to survive and nest on the narrow ledges of rocky cliffs.
Periodically, a large group of the billboard birds will spring off the sign, taking a brief practice flight to test either the day's air or their wings. As they fly out and back, they swirl into a large horizontal wheel, slightly tilted, silhouetted against the light sky.
I hope my own day will be as smooth as the circular sweep of those pigeons in flight. And maybe somebody will experience some beauty through something I do today -- some beauty I cannot so easily see in myself.
As my mind shifts to thoughts about myself, lines from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke come to my mind. The lines, I know, are prompted by my seeing that horizontal circle the birds made in flight as they prepared themselves for their journey further out into the world. Rilke wrote:
"I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world....
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?"
~ ~ ~
What memories of birds do you have that you would like to hold onto?
(The lines by Rainer Maria Rilke are from his Book of Hours,
published in 1905, trans. by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy, © 1996.)
published in 1905, trans. by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy, © 1996.)
6 comments:
Actually, the American Ornithologists' Union's (www.aou.org) official name for the species is (now) "rock pigeon," that moniker having displaced "rock dove" in 2003. Don't feel bad; the AOU is always pulling sneak changes like that. The yellow-shafted flicker is now a northern flicker and the rufous-sided towhee has become an eastern towhee, great losses of the poetic to the prosaic. The poetic has a few last laughs to its credit, though; the State of Alabama proudly continues to defy the AOU in calling its official bird the "yellowhammer" (that's the same yellow-shafted flicker mentioned above), and the State of Maryland scored a coup when its official bird regained the right to call itself the Baltimore oriole instead of just another northern oriole.
My husband loved birds all his life and his later years were spent as a published bird photographer. When the immediate family buried his ashes, we released three white doves. When my son and grandson freed the first two, they circled above us before flying away. When I let the third go, it flew to the cemetery lot next to ours, watched us for awhile, then walked back before flying up into an oak growing on our lot. There it remained, perched above the urn we had placed in the ground, watching as we finally drove away. Somehow I fully expected to find it there when we made the trip to visit the spot a year later.
A memory I will always cherish was actually holding little birds we had caught in mistnets. Feeling their warmth, even through all those feathers, and looking into those tiny eyes was a very tender moment.
One week after hurricane Katrina hit southern Louisiana, I went down to Port Sulphur with my friend to salvage what could be salvaged from his mother's destroyed house (thankfully she had evacuated and was OK). One thing I will never forget is the weird feeling we had there, then we realized there were absolutely no birds anywhere. I have had a renewed appreciation for their presence and songs ever since.
Shore birds on a late-afternoon beach of Galveston Bay, sunlight illuminating their white breasts against the backdrop of the brown wet sand and blue water. I enjoy seeing the simplicity of the birds in their element there.
Mark Herranen
In college I was involved in a serious car accident on my way home for Christmas break. The following days were filled with my struggle to understand how and why I had survived completely unscathed. At the time my mom called it "God's grace," and I was really having a hard time grasping that meaning and deciding if I believed it. So on Christmas Eve, I was driving home from my temporary job as a beautiful sunset was stretching out before me. Suddenly, the sky was filled with birds. A flock of hundreds, circling and swirling in perfect synch. The beuaty of it took my breath away. I don't think I'm special enough that God would send birds to ease my mind (birds fly like that all the time), but I took the message to heart: that life is fleeting, precious and beautiful, and for whatever reason we're all here, we are, and we'll allowed to celebrate that. I think of that moment every time I see flocks fly like that in the city. It reminds me to stop and be thankful, for everything, but specifically for those birds on that Christmas Eve. Maybe I think God was speaking to me after all.
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