the Red wing blackbirds come back
Good Morning,
On Sunday the red wing blackbirds came back. On that frigid 11 degree March morning they came with their signature swoop and bobble on the swinging suet feeder, confident to the core. I knew it was them before I knew, their flight pattern registered somewhere deep in my brain, recognizable out of the corner of my eye. Do you ever wonder how that can happen? How we can recognized a shape or type of movement and instantly know what it is?
I was inordinately happy to see them, and their thrilling 'coo coo CHEE!' transported me to a summer afternoon, the blackbirds swinging on the emerald cattail reeds, flouncing about in that way they do, the pond a liquid diamond hung on the lip of the horizon, it's banks spiked green and redolent with birds and bullfrogs and tadpoles the size of tennis balls darting in the hot clear shallows of the shore.
The birds at the feeder gave no indication of the temperature that morning - have you ever seen a whiny bird? I haven't. Instead I see how they flutter and rustle up their feathers without one iota of concern for whatever anyone thinks of them; in this portrayal of freedom I am a student.
I could sit on the back deck for the next 50 years before I learn all they know about how to unabashedly flit their head around, twisting for the best look at a thing, or how to plonk down on a twig much too small and remain unaffected during the ensuing foot scramble, the moist black steel of their gaze belying the fumble beneath.
One day long ago I was walking on Kigigak, the tiny tundra island in the Bering Sea. Employed by the National Fish and Wildlife Service we'd walk for 8 to 12 hours a day my partner and I, separately, covering our own assigned quadrants of the island, tracing each tidal slough and little pond with our steps, looking for nesting Spectacled Eider.
When I say each little pond I mean each little pond; if you have ever looked at an arial photo of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta you will know that there is substantially more pond than land for hundreds of square miles and from the vantage of a float plane window silver flashes out along the black water to a horizon that curves off the face of the planet, nothing but birds and water and wind for 100s of miles.
The sound and way a bird flushes from a nest is unique to each species, and on the island it got so that you could see a sudden movement and instantly know what kind of bird had just flushed. Spectacled Eider are fast. When they flush it's usually close by and they shoot out in a low angle to the ground.
On this particular day it was only a few weeks into my first summer there, and I was just starting to know all of the birds and some of the flora.
I'd been walking as usual and there, as I looked up from the ground, on the edge of in the mudflat in front of me was a blue plastic bottle, the label long claimed by the sea. It was Downy bottle; I knew this instantly.
I had been chiding myself for not learning the names of all the birds sooner; throw a plastic bottle my way and its identified before I even see it. This makes sense. I was not raised on the edge of the Bering Sea, I was raised in the continental US, and grew up with Downy bottles, not Western Sandpipers rumbling their tiny engine noises as they skim the shores nor with colonies of Black Brant lining their depressions in the upland sedges with a pound of beautiful grey down for a clutch of 18 perfect white eggs.
Friday Evening Silent Meditation & Prayer
Friday March 21st
* Spring Equinox *
$10-$40 sliding scale.
Click Here for more information.
Come sit with your fellow humans and I at Place of Peace for an evening this Spring Equinox and let's open our ears and hearts and listen to what can be heard on this hill high in the Odessa wilds.
There is a power greater than the individual when we gather and sit in presence and shared intention together. Do not underestimate our ability be a mystical conduit of real peace and healing for ourselves and the world.
It is needed, the call is great, and we can do this together.
The biggest embrace you’ll ever make is the full, absolute, and complete embrace of your humanity, exactly as it is. ~ADYASHANTI
