But for the Birds

The Holy One speaks all languages. One of her most intelligible, in my life, has been birds.

When I was 16, I went to Ocean City, Maryland, with my foster family. It was a trying time for me, because I didn't fit in particularly well with this group of people, and they were brazen and chronic in reminding me of my outsider status: when the rest of the family ate steak, I had spaghetti, that sort of thing. My personality is of the sort that I need to know that I am special, wanted; feeling mediocre or insignificant or unwelcome is unbearable to me. Well, two weeks in a recreational vehicle with five of them was a perfect nightmare.

On the last day of the trip, I was feeling rather low, and I decided to walk down to the bay to hide out for a while. Even as a child, an undisturbed natural landscape was a balm to almost any of my aches. This bay had a small, deserted beach where sand dollars and hermit crabs washed ashore with every wave, tall grasses and cat tails pulsed and quivered in the salted Atlantic wind, and the rhythmic whisper of the water drowned the din of the consumer wasteland and coastal highway. It faded into marshland on one side. I crouched against a log, feet jammed into the wet sand, weeping and brooding with all the artifice of a dejected adolescent bohemian, when an emissary of the divine swooped over my head and alighted in the marsh: a towering, majestic whooping crane, no more than 50 feet away. I froze, awestruck, and forgot my misery. We sat in stillness together, the crane and me, appraising each other. He preened; I tugged at my stringy hair. He plucked morsels from the water; I chewed my fingernails. He whooped; I whimpered. He watched me, and I watched him, and there we sat in stillness.

As I kept company with the crane, I was struck by my loneness, my separateness. I felt special. How many people keep company with a crane? Certainly not anyone I was with. How many teenagers would cherish such an experience as I did? I felt like the only girl in the world in that half hour. Sure, I ate spaghetti when everyone else had steak, but I kept company with a crane.

The crane never left me. I knew that, eventually, someone would come looking for me, and I knew I needed to keep our secret, the mystery of our rendezvous. So to give sanctuary to my new friend and to defend his sacred haunt, I crept away, and he watched me go.

This is not the only profound experience of company with a bird I've had. You may recall the evening I spent with a community of geese last winter. A few months ago, I was walking in the woods with a friend after a difficult experience, and a hefty blue heron mounted the air above our heads so closely that I could feel the wind of his wings on my face; and I knew that everything would be okay. There have been cardinals and bluebirds, bald eagles and baby robins, hummingbirds and wild turkeys, and birds, and birds, and birds. So many messages have come to me in encounters with birds. When I see birds, I have to watch them. I have to hear them. I'd follow them if I could, anywhere they'd take me.

I may need to take up bird watching in earnest as a means of spiritual seeking. For real.

Pondering.