Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Tag Archives: bird by bird


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In the birdsong.

Maybe nature knows, how the gifts are only borrowed. From nest to song, how it’s all impermanent. We’re given everything we need between sky and tree, but it has always been for the sharing. We were meant to live in the birdsong.

I think all creative ideas (and I’m including love here, perhaps topping the list) are like dandelion seeds floating on a summer breeze, with the bravest of barefoot children chasing them, stretching to pluck them from the blue, knowing if they don’t, there are countless chubby legs running behind and beside, willing to make the journey. And just as the summer child borrows the fleeting day, I gather the words and the paint, into the shape of love, and hope and try and pray it makes it to the next season.

Painting in a new room yesterday, brush in hand, I sang along with each stroke, the Christmas songs so generously lent to me, to us, each year. Within the music, somewhere on the canvas, I am suspended in time, in the gift of the moment. No doors of advent are opening. No rushing toward the next. I’m catch myself in the song of the bird, in a moment of happiness, and I find myself in the most wonderous gift of all. I know I won’t keep the painting. It must be shared. Chubby summer legs will be waiting.

The gift we only borrowed.
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Into the bird song.

It’s so often the case. Looking back. Seeing that we did actually bear the unbearable. 

On my walks I frequently listen to the podcast “How I built this” — delightful stories of success in business, arts and industry. All with their own challenges. (No story is complete without them.) I suppose just enough time has passed — I’ve noticed a large percentage of the stories began during Covid. People suddenly had the time and the urgency to create something. And it’s beautiful to hear the good that can come.

It was during Covid that she decided to learn how to play the ukulele. Not the obvious choice, but as they say, we all have to make our own kind of music. And she has it now, the thing I think we all look to do when going through something — make the proof that we did in fact survive — And didn’t just survive, but thrived! We awakened the “good that can come.” She not only woke it up, but put it to music. 

The bird book is my ukulele, my “How I built this.” And the most glorious thing is when our stories merge. When her music seeps on to my page, into the bird song, I know that we are thriving. I know that together, no matter what, we can do anything. 

I suppose the real heroes don’t need the “proof.” But still it’s nice to see. It’s nice to hear. All the good that can come.

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Wonderland.

Long before I even knew how to read, I knew how to comfort myself. It started with off-brand crayons and coloring books from the bottom shelf at Olson’s Super Market. I can’t be certain I even knew what the feelings were. If I even had a word for comfort. But I did know this, after completing a page, presenting it to my mother, I was held in the warmth of her embrace, and I was saved. It’s still true today.

It wasn’t until I moved to France that I started painting birds. And true to my own algorithm, I suppose, it was then I was introduced to the book “Bird by bird,” by Anne Lamott. It was her father’s incite that gave the book its title:

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

Reading it so many years after practicing it, seems to me to be but a wink from heaven. 

I made a short video after completing the page of birds. The first suggested song was “Wonderland.” It sings the question, “How do you get to Wonderland?” I smile, because I learned the answer so long ago —bird by bird. 

Bird by bird.
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