Turning Our Brains to Birds

In the book To Kill a Mockingbird (adapted into a movie). Atticus Finch tells his children that they are allowed to shoot some birds with their air-rifles, but that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."  That directive resembles many laws in the U.S. when it was a rural society. Shooting birds such as crows in defense of one's crops was allowed, but killing "songbirds" (such as the versatile, melodious mockingbird) was prohibited.

Fortunately, birds have not been so discriminatory toward the human race.  They have blessed us in many ways, whether or not their calls have been labeled "songs" by us.

Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds (based on the Daphne du Maurier book) is an unforgettable movie in which birds attack humans for undetermined reasons.  The trailer for the movie, instead of showing frightening clips from the film, presented Hitchcock himself drolly giving a mock lecture about the history of the bird-human relationship.   As he speaks, Hitchcock casually picks up a quill pen, letting the viewer make the connection to our use of birds.  He then escalates from picking up a hat with a feather to picking up a hat with an entire stuffed bird decorating it.  Finally, he sits down at a dining table with an entire roasted chicken before him.  Throughout the trailer, his "lecture" feigns a naive innocence, wondering why birds, would ever be unappreciative of us humans.

A Pheasant and
a Bird Called Tabut
(1717  C.E.)

I was once given an insight into how critical birds have been for some cultures.  I found myself in a conversation with a group of people comparing their families' plans for the upcoming Thanksgiving.  Most people were opting for turkey, but a few had in the past sometimes eaten chicken instead.  One person then asked a member of the group who had been silent -- an immigrant from Haiti -- what kind of birds his family had eaten in Haiti.  His unhesitating and quite earnest reply was, "Any kind we could catch."  His reply revealed how, for some people living in poverty, birds have been life-savers.

Today, in highly technological societies, almost all the birds we eat are domesticated animals (which we distinguish by calling them "fowl" or "poultry.")  We virtually never see them when they are alive, even as the protein from their bodies gives life to our own bodies.

Despite that disconnect, there might be a way that the living birds singing all around us can add more life to our spirits.  That way is captured by Lisel Mueller in her poem "Why I Need the Birds."  Mueller imagines birds with their songs as traveling ahead of her throughout the day as they follow the arc of the sun.  Part of the poem reads:

"... the birds, leading

their own discreet lives

of hunger and watchfulness,

are with me all the way...."

~~~

Do you ever hear the songs of birds during the course of your day?  When?

(The photograph of the manuscript is used under a Creative Commons license,
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, by the Walters Art Museum.)
(Mueller's complete poem can be read on-line at this external link:  "Why I Need the Birds".) 

A View Without a Price Tag

The two things I remember most about the incident are a color and the movement of the people.

The color was beautiful and intense -- a pinkish, slightly purplish red.  I had never seen a sunset in which the color was more vivid.  Nor a sunset that covered such a vast portion of sky as this one did.  It felt as if it filled the entire western half of heaven.

The other thing I remember about the incident is the people.  I saw them silhouetted against the sky.  There were at least a dozen of them, and they were walking.

But here is what struck me:  Not a single person paused or even turned their head to look at the sunset.  They were instead all intent on their shopping expeditions as they walked from their vehicles to the mall, or from the mall back to their vehicles in the parking lot.  To all of them, it was if this gorgeous sunset -- a surge of redness with rippling clouds -- simply did not exist.  I do not mean to judge the people; I do not know the details of their shopping errands.  But I felt as if they were missing something that was more valuable than what is usually in most of our shopping bags.

Our society in the U.S. today seems more and more to tag us as consumers.  We may be hopelessly divided along Democrat-Republican lines, but we all shop.  Even during a recession, a question frequently asked on the news is whether or not we have begun shopping more again so as to stimulate the economy.

However, there seems to me to be a tension between basing one's sense of self on the ability to buy more desirable products, and placing ones trust and sense of wonder upon a divine Power that was around before there was human civilization.  This is why I am revived by turning my attention to Nature.

garden at
Wordsworth's childhood home

The poet William Wordsworth detected the negative connection between consumerism and an attention to Nature when, in his poem "The World Is Too Much With Us" he wrote:

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours."

Some of my happiest childhood memories are not of being in a shopping mall, but instead sitting with my family on a high lookout in Madison, Wisconsin, watching the sun slowly set.   Simply doing that provided something valuable my parents could never have bought.

~~~

Do you have a childhood memory of Nature?  Do you think there is a relationship between our society's attitudes towards Nature and toward consumer goods?

(To read Wordsworth's complete poem,

 click here: "The World Is Too Much With Us")

I’m Not a Car

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside,

 somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God.  

Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and

 that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature."

It's not that remarkable a statement.  What makes it so remarkable, and poignant, is knowing whose words they are:  They are words from The Diary of Anne Frank.  They are the words of a teenage girl who would never be able to go freely outside again, her Jewish family having hidden themselves behind an upstairs wall in a neighbor's house so that the Nazi's would not arrest, imprison, and execute them.

The family chose to try to escape death by imprisoning themselves -- by forcing themselves to never go outside.  Anne Frank's diary entry, however, expressed how deadly it was to the human spirit not to be able to go outdoors.  No -- that's not quite what she has done.  She has not expressed it in negative terms but in positive terms!  Her words are not a lament but instead a celebration of the wonderful benefits that can result from going outside.

Unfortunately, many U.S. cities today are not as congenial to the restoration of the spirit Frank describes as they might be.  (The twentieth-century author Albert Camus once complained that he would feel at home in the city if he were a car.)  Some cities are trying to make improvements, however, under pressure from joggers, walkers, bikers, and people with dogs, which rejoice even more in the word "out."

outside Franks' hiding place today

But what will I find when I do go out?  What will I do, and see, and think about as I take a walk? Will my mind still be chewing on the worries I had indoors?  Will I be focused just on the concrete and cars, or will I take time to look about and see a bush blooming or a bird flying up into a tree?

Will simply taking a walk be sufficient to cure what ails me?  Will a walk be enough to enrich me?  Or do I maybe need to find a place where I can quietly sit in order, as Anne Frank says, to be "quite alone with the heavens, nature and God... amidst the simple beauty of nature"?

Yes, we do need an awareness of Nature for our spirits to be fully enriched.  Because, as the environmentalist Bill McKibben observed:

"We live, all of a sudden, in an Astroturf world, 

and though an Astroturf world may have a God, 

he can’t speak through the grass, 

or even be silent through it and let us hear."

~~~

Do you have a favorite place to be outside?  What is it like?

(The Frank quotation is from  The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, © 1972.)

(The McKibben quotation is from The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben, © 1989.)
(The second photograph is used under a GNU Free Documentation License.)