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.
I have a friend who loves feathers. Until I learned this about her, I didn’t see them. Now, in our yard, on the trail, in a different country, I see them everywhere. And what’s most surprising, I suppose, is that I am a bird lover. I listen for them. Look for them. Study them. Paint them. How did I not see the random feathers? Now, I not only see them, I begin to think of how the feather came to be in our pool. On our back stairs. Was there a squabble? A falling out? (no pun intended) And I smile as the words come so rapidly for a new story. And this is the true gift she gives to me.
Empathy — Maybe if we saw it for what it truly is, we would give it more readily. It’s like we think we’re losing something if we take a minute to see the world through someone else’s eyes, but oh, we have so much to gain.
My friend loves feathers and birds. Now I love birds and feathers.
I ask myself today, what is it you see that I’m not seeing? Maybe we could all ask that of ourselves, as we make our way under the birdsong.
