Take Flight

How can you not help falling in love with birds? Every morning as I write, I gaze into a wonderland of constant fluttering and tune into their radio station. Finches share the seed feeder with mourning doves, pigeons and even crows. If a hummingbird isn’t drinking from my bottle of homemade sugar syrup, it’s sucking nectar from my wild and overgrown purple salvia, and the bountiful orange and lemon blossoms. Occasionally, a hawk visits. When this happens, a hush comes over my garden and life freezes. Clans of wild parrots swoop in just to shake things up, with their  bright green flash of feathers and loud squawking alerting the neighborhood that they have arrived.

Many days I wish I could join them, dipping and soaring, watching the world anonymously. I would enter another realm, and embrace that sense of freedom and exploration wings provide. Oh to dream!

Although my garden is not unique, I feel like I have created an environment for a multi-cultural group of winged species who harmoniously co-habitate. How can we capture this state of being and use it as a model for we humans? I think a good place to start is to close our eyes to color and size, and focus on sharing more of our real, vulnerable selves. What are your ideas?

Ciao and take flight to your dreams,

Mary

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice