Liberating Wings

Magpies, Parrots, Flickers, and Fathers - All God's Children Grieve

 

This past week an article appeared about magpies grieving for their dead Mail OnLine.  I don't know if anyone can say what emotions another species is experiencing, let alone another of our own species, human.  By studying avian behavior, however, it does seem to me that birds do experience emotion, and part of those emotions may include sadness, confusion, and loneliness. When working as an avian veterinarian, I've seen parrots whose mates have died going into "mourning" by being quiet, still, and refusing to eat for a day or longer.  I imagine that bird brains, like our own, need to rewire after losing another individual that was so much a part of a social, cultural, and neural network.  This liminal time we humans know as grieving.

Once when a teenager  I saw a Northern Flicker grieving.  I was a teenager on an errand with my father driving when the car in front of us struck a flicker.  The mate that had been flying ahead, turned, and flew back to the ground to stand by his companion.  My father stopped the car to see if there was anything we could do.  There wasn't.  Her beauty was now stilled.   We could not believe that the male  bird did not fly away as we approached, his quiet stillness beyond words.  I could never really guess what my father was thinking or feeling, he being  rather stoic and undemonstrative.  On this occasion he had tears trailing down his face to see such sadness and loss, echoed in his own heart I do believe.

I never asked him what the dead bird meant to him, or the loyalty of her mate.  I did not ask the surviving flicker either.  Furthermore, science and cognitive ethology may never answer what magpies or parrots experience.   But whatever other experience, I do believe that emotions are the substance that makes up interspecies communion that sounds along the ages as echoes of loss and joy in our hearts.

   

 Norther Flicker

Speciesist Reporting in Gainesville Sun

The confluence of articles on the front page of the "Local and State" section of the Gainesville Sun October 11th, 2009 tells us much about humanity. The news portrayed how we care for and admire plants, bats , and dogs, and also our own species as we muddle through our health care reform attempts.  Embedded on this page though were children chasing a pig, as intelligent and feeling as the dog, and a man cooking pigs and chickens, who feel, suffer, and have inherent worth and dignity comparable to the other species mentioned.   We are a remarkable species in how much we can care for those unlike us, and our ability to form relationships and see beauty around us is an incredible resource to enrich our lives and other beings on this planet.  It is a resource that is underused and undervalued.  My dream for the beloved community of all species is that we might grow our inclinations of concern and compassion in a more consistent and thoughtful fashion.   I  mourn that we do not examine our speciesist views that assign more value to some species, and hence treat other species with less respect.  I lament not just the immense suffering of other species, but of our own.  When we treat others as objects and not as beautiful beings we live in denial that we make tragic choices in our lives that negatively and painfully impact other species, environments, and human communities.  Because of this denial we perpetuate the misconceived notion that the desires of the powerful  naturally trump the flourishing of the less powerful, and this hurts us all.  For deep down, I believe that we all long for a beautiful world of peace and health for everyone, and if we can live according to these values, we would find greater joy and satisfaction.

(shortened version of this appeared as a letter to the editor 

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20091015/OPINION02/910149836/1077/OPINION?Title=Letters-to-the-Editor-Oct-15-2009)

Hate Language Flung at Birds

 

European Starling (Photo by Philip Heron)

 

The Associated Press ran an article “North America’s Most Hated Bird Wreaks Havoc” one week ago.  The reporter compared the European starling’s presence in North America to a Hitchcock movie, described it’s dropping as “corrosive and foul-smelling,” and called their swirling mumurations “intimidating statements.”  It reported the starling’s nuisance qualities and never once said anything about the positive aspects of the bird, such as the species’ inherent worth, dignity, and beauty, the bird’s helpful impact on certain insect populations through foraging, and their song and language abilities.   For me this seemed a case of biased reporting, if not just incomplete, and for my part, disheartening to see the word “hated” referring to any living being.  To do so spreads disconnection and denial of responsibility, and leads to heart constriction instead of compassionate opening which we so desperately need to deal with the complex issues that confound we humans.  What might you feel if the title ran, “World’s most hated religion wreaks havoc,” or “South American’s most hated indigenous culture population surges?”  I know that life is difficult for our species and we make difficult decisions that harm other life to support our own, however, I long that we do so with awareness of the wondrous beauty all around us, in us, and flying above us.  If we could do this, we might, just might, find a way to reduce our harm and see these mumurations as prayerful love language flung throughout the skies to make us ever more wise.  May it be so.

Batting Average in Avian Welfare Increasing Among Veterinarians

 

 

 

I recently attended the Annual Meeting of the Association of Avian Veterinarians  (AAV) in Milwaukee.  Demonstrated there was much change in the air for the hopes of keeping more birds in the air and more human hearts focusing on avian welfare.  To start off, the keynote speaker was Dr. Gail Golab, head of the Animal Welfare Division of the American Veterinary Medical Association.  She spoke of human complexity and diversity in welfare issues that depend on science as well as people skills and understanding.  She later attended the AAV Welfare Committee where a room full of bird veterinarians organized how to address the ethical dilemmas facing our world today regarding compassionate care for humans and birds alike.  During the main conference, various presentations covered critical thinking, socioscience (how to hold competent and compassionate ethical discourse), avian welfare, avian conservation, and grief and bereavement in avian loss.  Everywhere I turned it seems that this body of veterinarians increasing wishes to tackle difficult issues that tug at the heart, and impact our incomes and profession. 

 

In particular I was struck by the admission during the “Cutting Edge Hot Topics” session from researchers who mourned the use of birds in terminal experiments.  They named and thanked the birds, and reflected upon the angst caused by euthanizing birds to gain data to fight infectious disease.  Later during the conference I heard from these same researchers and from others about the stress and moral dilemma involved in avian medicine and companionship that constantly raises the question, “Should we have these birds in captivity at all?”   This kind of discourse was underground 15 years ago, whispered as it was a defect in veterinary professionalism to have confusion about the role of birds in captivity and for human use. Now it becomes front and center as more veterinarians wish to lead the change they wish to see in the world.  For this I am deeply grateful for my fellow veterinarians.

 

On the way home from the conference I had a layover in Memphis.  As I walked up to my gate, I noticed a somewhat weakened bat flying up and down the concourse.  People scooted out of the way and some swatted at it. One man in particular tried to harm the bat, and I told him that we were trying to catch the bat and that we didn’t need to harm it.  He asked me, “Why, it’s just a bat” and I responded, rather curtly as I was busily attempting to capture the bat with a spare t-shirt of mine, “Because bats have a right to live too.”  I suppose I made quite a scene running around trying to catch the bat and a crowd gathered.  Then suddenly the same man I had spoken too throws his shoe at the bat that ends this creatures flying, and perhaps also her or his life.  I stare unbelievingly at the man who pursued his plan of death while I followed my plan for life.  I gathered the still form in my t-shirt and approached the gate attendant asking if there was a way I could place the bat outside.  She looked at me and asked, “What, are you a veterinarian?” as if that explained my absurd behavior. I answered yes and she led me outside through a door in the gateway ramp, where I pried the still breathing, but quite unmoving bat from my shirt and lowered her to an alcove in the stairway. 

 

Returning to the gate waiting area, I sat in shock that there could be such opposing views on life and how in the public realm we can be at such odds with one another, disconnecting us in human relationships as well as harming other life.  In this sorrowful and confusing musing, however, I felt a note of pride for the veterinary profession and a resulting symphony of hope. For others see veterinarians as the saviors of life, even on the leading edge of behavior that stands against the status quo of society that states “it’s only an animal” in action and in word.  May we so live up to this understanding of who we are, in both action and world.

Terns and Turns

 

Common Tern (by Andreas Trepte)

 

 

Listen, maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world in the clasp of attention, isn’t the perfect prayer, but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt, is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason, but of pure submission.  Tell me, what else could beauty be for? – Mary Oliver in poem, Terns (see below for entire poem)

 

The beauty of birds, what is it for?  It is to add names to our life list?  Is it to heal the ache in our hearts?  Is it to find that we belong here on this earth, have a place in the family of things?

 

When I see a bird, hear her or his call, or hold it’s still form in my hands, I hear the invitation to give myself over to a better thing, and not a bitter thing. True, it is hard to be minister, conservationist, and veterinarian whose daily activities ask me to be present to what might seem hopeless in the tragic pain, loss, and death of all beings.  Incessant questions hover around me: What is mine to do?  How can I help?  When will the suffering end?

 

Then I see a bird, a tern perhaps hovering over ocean swell.  My heart fills, the world shifts, it turns.  In this great turning I only know beauty and that is what I am for.

 

What are you for?

 

 

 

Terns

 

Don't think just now of the trudging forward of thought,

but of the wing-drive of unquestioning affirmation.

 

It's summer, you never saw such a blue sky,

and here they are, those white birds with quick wings,

 

sweeping over the waves,

chattering and plunging,

 

their thin beaks snapping, their hard eyes

happy as little nails.

 

The years to come -- this is a promise --

will grant you ample time

 

to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought

where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

 

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,

than this deep affinity between your eyes and the world.

 

The flock thickens

over the roiling, salt brightness.  Listen,

 

maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world

in the clasp of attention, isn't the perfect prayer,

 

but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,

is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,

 

but of pure submission.  Tell me, what else

could beauty be for?  And now the tide

 

is at its very crown,

the white birds sprinkle down,

 

gathering up the loose silver, rising

as if weightless.  It isn't instruction, or a parable.

 

It isn't for any vanity or ambition

except for the one allowed, to stay alive.

 

It's only a nimble frolic

over the waves.  And you find, for hours,

 

you cannot even remember the questions

that weigh so in your mind.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(New and Selected Poems, Volume Two)

 

 

 

Life of the Skies

  Étienne-Jules Marey around 1882

 

Is there a bird inside of you?  Yearning for freedom, for meaning?  DH Lawrence wrote, “Birds are the life of the skies, and when they fly – they reveal the thoughts of the skies”.

 

There’s more to bird watching than meets the eyes.  I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but now and then the choir likes to hear a song it knows.

 

Do you know the song of a bird?  Well then, maybe a story like this has happened to you.

 

A Buddhist master is walking with the disciple and accuses the master of hiding the secret of Zen from him.

Just then a bird called from the riverside.

The master asked, do you hear the bird.

Yes said the disciple.

Well then you know I have hidden nothing from you.

Yes said the disciple.

And then he was enlightened.

 

In watching birds not just a lightening of the spirit is possible, but something fiercer and not all that comfortable to behold.  For when birds tell us of meaning, they tell us not just of life, but also of death.  And it’s in that crucible held by feathered wings that we can be held in both beauty and tragedy, and make meaning of our lives.

 

Jonathan Rose, author of the ministers’ book of the month, The Life of the Skies – Birding at the End of Nature, says the reason why there are some 50 million bird watchers in this country is because birds are the last remaining wild animals that are abundantly visible to us.  They are the windows into all of wild nature, our own wild nature as well.

 

Birds link us back in time to evolution, where creative life constantly arises out of death.  Each year it’s increasingly clearer that birds evolved from dinosaurs.  If the movie Jurassic Park were made today, Tyrannosaurus Rex and all the velociraptors would have feathers.  It’d be great to see such a dinosaur, but I’m glad it’s a goldfinch that comes to the feeders and not a T.Rex.

 

 Photo by Aarong Gustafason

 

So we lost dinosaurs along the way for the dynamite soaring birds of today, and now we are losing them too, at our own hands, and it’s not clear what new life might arise.  It’s hard as a bird watcher to not be aware of their dwindling numbers, and to despair.  How amazing that there are 5,000 Sandhill cranes, but imagine 50,000 here in Florida, hundreds of thousands of Carolina Parakeets, and 2 billion Passenger Pigeons in the U.S.  The Parakeet and Pigeon went extinct for many reasons, and tragically the last birds succumbed to collectors.  The only nest of Carolina Parakeet eggs, long dead, is housed here at the Florida Museum of Natural History. They were turned in by a poacher who would not reveal the location of this last nest until long after the parents died, and subsequently the entire species.

 

In our primate minds, the urge to kill and the urge to conserve are so closely linked, death never far from life, as experienced so acutely with a flying bird of life easily dead due to the fragility of their hollow bones, air sacs, and paper thin feathers.  John James Audubon saw a monkey kill his parrot.  He mused that it is this image that caused him to study and paint birds with pleasure, and to do so he killed thousands of birds.

 

The wild primate lives inside of us all.  We hunt as we look for birds through our binoculars, and we are haunted by a lifestyle that leaves ¼ of Florida’s birds in danger.

 

In the early 20^th Century, President Teddy Roosevelt heard reports about plume hunters wiping out bird populations in Florida, and made Pelican Island the first time the federal government set aside land for the sake of wildlife.  Roosevelt was a great conservationist, not “in spite of the fact that he was a hunter, but because he was one.  He never discounted the human urge to destroy, since he indulged in that urge so zealously himself.  Rather accepting it as a given of human nature, he allowed that knowledge to inform his understanding of the necessity of check and balances of human rapacity.” (Jonathan Rosen).

 

Knowing who we are and what we might do based on our understanding of our place in communities of mixed species are key religious questions.  Birds help us know of our sacred reality, our divine possibility, and how we must arise out of the ashes of our burning human greed.

 

    Harold Bloom who studied American Religious Poetry found in Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Adams, Frost, and Dickinson the image that the risen Jesus is in each of us – that each of us as individual can bring salvation to this world through the blessing of our very being.  John James Audubon paintings captured this in his anthropomorphized birds.  They don’t look like birds as much as they look like humans with feathers.  He melds birds with humans – wild nature, beauty without end, amen.

 

    Walt Whitman perhaps best portrayed nature and birds as lived religion.  As a boy Whitman listened to a pair of mockingbirds one summer.  Then one of the pair died, and the remaining bird sang throughout the night. The young Whitman went out into the night to listen to this song, and was changed forever.  Later he said, “Now in a moment I know what I am for.” 

 

He wrote about this episode in his famous poem, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.  “It’s fusion of the human and the animal, and in its depiction of an entire country through animal symbols is a kind of poetic extension of Audubon’s paintings” (Rosen, pg. 59).

 

Emerson too melds human experience with birds.  Drawn to Sufism, Emerson writes of the Conference of the Birds, one of the most central of all Sufi texts. In this text, birds undertake a spiritual journey and show us the way of Emerson’s Transcendentalism, a kind of homegrown American Sufism.  We are the image of God, and divinity reflects from our souls ever more brightly as we work to polish our inner mirror.

 

    Colleague to Emerson, Emily Dickinson compared birding to church, and preferred birding.  It’s a tough call.  The point is birds and church-like activities are just some of the ways to grow more connected, more aware, and more whole, which is the eternal light ever shining in the darkness.

 

Robert Frost wrote in the 20^th century, a time of darkness, death and extinction. His poem, The Ovenbird poses this:  The question that he (the bird) frames in all but words is what to make of a diminished thing.

 

What are we to make of our diminishing lives through age, illness, death, and the loss of biodiversity?  Hope isn’t the thing with feathers – it’s us.  We are the ones who can learn to know ourselves and the world around us, and take intentional steps forward into a future of abundant life.

 

In the U.S. there is a unique chance to know who we are through birds and to respond accordingly because of our long history with birds and nature religion.  We’re the Republic of Feathers.  We could also probably call our congregation the Unitarian Universalist Feathership of Gainesville because so much of our country’s nature/bird traditions come from those with UU ties.  Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau, and Frost had strong Unitarian Universalist connections.  Unitarians clearly claim as their own Emerson, the two Adam Presidents and Thomas Jefferson who kept a pet mockingbird in the White House Study.

 

So here we descendants are today, helping one another face the darkness around us and in us, seeking to free ourselves from senseless suffering through joy.  Birding is but one way to take up an intentional practice that asks us to look within at our inner demons and look outward in acknowledgement that though we may be alone or feel it, we are interconnected to all of life.

 

Thoreau, the patron saint of backyard birders, exhibited the paradox of birding and our kind by loving isolation and craving connection. He wrote:  

Each new year is a surprise to us.

We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous sate of existence.

The voice of nature is always encouraging.

In a bird we meld the past with the dream of the future.

 

Birding is the synthesis of individuals and communities, of art and science, and of secularism and religion.  Watching birds allows us to live in a symbolic world that is also scientific.  We do not lose our rational mind, but find our wondrous mind in seeing wonder around us.  Birding perhaps seems such a small thing to do, but small gestures can save the world, as can small groups upon wooded or sandy trail.  For it is there on the path where beauty is all around us, as is death, that we can let loose our joy. Joy does not lead us to “escape the world, but to fly free in it, to embrace it with all its suffering and all its wonder and creative powers.” (David Spangler).

 

It’s not an easy path.  In the middle of preparing this sermon yesterday I went for a short walk to get my mail.  There flew across me a Cooper’s hawk carrying a red-bellied woodpecker screaming it’s final song.  The hawk could barely fly so burdened was it with the crying pitiful bird.  I wanted to run after it and tear the beautiful dying thing from its talons, and yet was also mesmerized by the beauty of the successful hunt.  In me was a turning of the gut, a heart-wrenching glimpse of reality where all moments consist of inseparable life and death.  In that one moment, I knew what I am for.

 

We all are burdened with dying things.  For a good part of my life I have been a bird veterinarian and I know the stark truth that that the desire to have bird beauty in our homes is killing off the wild birds, and causing much suffering to those held captive.  I’ve handled Spix Macaws, which are now extinct in the wild, due largely to collectors who desired these startlingly blue beings. In my career as a bird veterinarian, I worked for 3 of the four largest bird collections in the world. I did this so I could be close to beauty and hence I captured my joy, binding the world to my desires with resulting loss and suffering.  I am the monkey with parrot blood on her hands, the hawk with a dying bird in its talons, the dove with a rising spirit of joy that cannot be caged.

 

 In the movie The Thin Red Line based on John James novel the hero says, “One man looks at a dying bird and sees nothing but unanswerable pain, and another looks at the same bird and feels the glory, feels something smiling through it.”

  

Before Christmas I was in Puerto Rico where I reunited with the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project.  Once there was nearly a million of this parrot species on the island and by the 1970s, only 15.  Two weeks ago there were 40 in the wild and I witnessed 20 more captive raised birds released into the wild, increasing their numbers by 50%.  To see those birds fly free, prone yes to hawks and the ravaging reaches of humankind, death ever before them, creates a smile that did not end that day and I believe echoes the eternal smile in each of us that is born in each sunrise.

 

I wish I knew how to live more constantly like that, to free and feed the bird within and the bird without.

 

Do you know how?

 

Please let me know. Let us share this life of the skies together.

 

LoraKim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Spiritual Practice of Backyard Birding

I have a daily spiritual practice that includes sitting on my back porch in silence, pondering the lives of birds while also keeping my eyes roaming through the multi-layered habitat of my backyard.  There daily dramas play out among the complex social systems that don’t really have a lot to do with my own ego concerns. 

A few days ago a movement in one young Magnolia tree revealed an immature Red-shouldered hawk that flew to an adjoining tree.  There, in a newly fledged way of beholding the world, he or she watched the ground closely.  Following the hawk’s eyes I saw a Florida Box Turtle ambling along the edge of lawn and woodland, his bambooed patterned shell well worth my gaze, and perhaps the hawk's as well. After several minutes the hawk flew away and the turtle disappeared into the ground cover, perhaps bored with one another and the terrain of our lawn. (I say lawn although that is liberally applied – it’s more like mowed “whatever that wants to grow here, may.”

 

From that same Magnolia tree a Mourning dove fluttered to the ground, followed by a Ruby-throated hummingbird who hovered over the dove and then flew away.  A minute later another dove joined the other, this one too chased by the hummingbird, who in one still moment was the apex of a relationship triangle formed by doves and hummer. 

As I considered my role as observer in this geometric biologic form, the Red-shouldered returned, and as it flew across the back yard, the doves erupted into a whirlwind of wing beats.  Now alone I wondered about my place in this drama playing out between the chaser and the chasee.  Am I just an impartial watcher?  Am I part of their world they create with each other?

I believe that I am.  They respond to each other, and in my distanced voyeurism, I create a beautiful world with them, and now with you.  We each take into our holy interiors stimuli from shared exterior worlds, actors, directors, audiences each of us in every moment as we both chase after beauty and life, and are chased by tragedy and death. 

Seeing these winged wonders play out this ancient chase game, I imagine myself as if a little girl squealing in a game of tag, fearful of the chase yes, while also half wanting to be caught by the fierceness of life and death so that I may remain free.  Tag, this moment is it.

 

 Florida  Box Turtle (photo by Jonathan Zander)

 

Inherent Worth and Dignity of Pigeons

This week I am attending the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Salt Lake City.  Thousands of us gather in a beautifully landscaped bowl ringed by snow-topped mountains and infinite sky.  Even from down town we are reminded that we are one with all that is.  Centering moments abound in vista and in worship, but also in the day-to-day acts of hearts willing to see the suffering of others.

 

 

 

Rev. Beth Johnson holding found pigeon and beauty next to her heart

 

Early in the week Rev. Beth Johnson called me on my cell phone from the streets around Temple Square.  She had found a recently fledged pigeon in a parking lot and she wanted to know what to do.  I spoke with her on the phone as I coached her on the possible decisions to make.  My stance is it is better to leave a bird in the wild, especially as parents take care of the fledged chicks even when they can’t fly.  Beth guarded the chick while I called around to see if there was any one who could take the young bird, such as a wildlife rehabilitator.  I found that someone would take the bird, if indeed it was best to take the bird into captivity. 

I met her on the sidewalk; the bird hunkered down between her legs. I quickly discerned that the bird was very thin, weak, and dehydrated.  The night was coming on and no parents were in sight. So I took the bird for the evening to try to feed her so she wouldn’t die in the night. She ate voraciously, regained her energy, and kept me company for the next 18 hours with her peeping song.  The next day Beth and congregational member Barbara took the bird to a sanctuary where the owner said, “Of course I’ll take care of the bird, I love pigeons!”

This seems to me a faith statement, a universal vision that I long for that applies across species and cultural categories, “Of course I will take care of my neighbors, I love life!”

When we can see the beauty of life in one another I believe our species has a chance to bring justice to our world.  In a lecture that was part of Unitarian Universalist University this week, Galen Guengerich quotes Elaine Scarry, “the experience of beauty has a built-in consequence: fairness-refers both to loveliness and to the ethical requirement to be fair, play fair, or distribute fairly.  Beauty issues a call to symmetry and equality, a call to be just.

I bow deep in gratitude for witnessing the beauty of others who see beauty in pigeons. Thank you Rev. Johnson, fledged pigeon, Kay the bird rehabilitator, and the citizens of Salt Lake City who adorn their streets with pigeon art.

 

Transportation stop with pigeon sculpture (with rainbow arc of our covenant with all life)

 

Guatemala Scarlet Macaw Chick Exam

Examining Avian and Human Virtue

At long last I have up a video in three parts that shows the Wildlife Conservation Society team of veterinarians and biologists examining wild Scarlet Macaw nest in Guatemala. It depicts a fairly thorough physical examination of wild parrots that is possible under field conditions. We learned so much about the birds, and about ourselves while doing this work in April of 2009. As you watch these videos perhaps you too can learn about what it means to be human in a community of mixed species, for me a primary religious, ethical, and hence scientific question. Like us, birds have the virtues of caring, compassion, protection, prudence, and nurturance. The parents care for their young, feed them, protect them, treat them with kindness, while also keeping a safe distance from we humans climbing the trees. You can hear the parents calling out in warning while we handle the chicks.

 

Like us, birds are anxious for the well being of other birds.  The calling of the parents echoes our own anxiety about what will happen to the younger chick, and what can we possibly do to save this one bird, let alone an entire species that is under threat from poaching, forest fires, and habitat loss that results from an economic system that is based on addiction – to consumerism, to drugs, to satisfying one’s own needs, now, at the costs of meeting others basic needs.

 

Like us, birds demonstrate perseverance, strength, and adaptability.  The youngest chick in this nest (the second one to be examined) is frightfully thin and over the next several weeks falls further and further behind in weight as her/his sibling thrives. Yet the bird lives for several more weeks as one or both parents still feed the ailing chick.

 

 

Like us, birds are beautiful, defiantly so as it seems against all odds that such a rainbow of colors and social complexity survives from egg to the powerful, gliding adults circling over us during the examination. How did such beauty come into existence and how shall it survive we ask? To answer this question we continue to examine our own lives, our own complicity in a system fraught with harm for ourselves and others, and we continue to examine these birds and their chicks, for the hope of understanding what is ours to do in this world. How shall we liberate ourselves as we liberate the birds, and love ourselves as all our neighbors?

Something Opens Your Wings

Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.  Someone fills the cup in front of us.  We taste only sacredness. – Jelaluddin Rumi

 

Brown Booby (picture by Aviceda)

  

With a call towards migration, I now am on St. John’s, U.S. Virgin Islands.  I come here to serve a small Unitarian Universalist congregation, study, reflect, and quite frankly pursue pastimes that invite sun burns.    When telling people that I was heading here for 12 days I mostly received comments such as “tough luck” or “it must be rough” or “sure, working hard.”  These islands have a reputation for vacations, peace, and “getting away from it all” and I too hope to regenerate my spirit and heart. 

It didn’t take long.  On the ferry ride over from St. Thomas a Brown Booby flew with us.  This marine wonder mirrored the freedom that I have felt when swimming and snorkeling in southern climes.  Surely here peace and love will fill my heart.

 

That evening I check out the St. John newspapers and talk to a few locals.  Their news is full of deadly car accidents propelled by the confusion of alcohol, drugs, gangs, murders, robberies, and “progress” taking away their pristine paradise.  It didn’t take long to remember that there is joy in sorrow and sorrow in joy and even here in my little apartment overlooking the sea, I see, overlooking pain in paradise.  May we never overlook the hurt and the darkness so that wings may always fill our hearts and fill the skies.