A life bigger than ourselves: Gods, dogs & birds
Sam and I surveyed the dewy spring garden in the delicate morning light. It was a rare moment of stillness for Sam who as a toddler was usually always very busy. Nevertheless, there we were - sitting next to each other on the bottom step of the studio, simply mesmerized by the transcendent serenity of the scene. Bliss!
…and then something really strange began to unfold…
A family of tiny wrens- Mum, Dad and their baby flew into the garden. The “baby” was more like a toddler really, for it was beyond the stage of learning to co-ordinate its limbs and just like Sam usually, it reveled in the ability to move, non-stop! How quickly it flew from flower to flower and branch to branch! We were amazed and stared in disbelief. For creatures so little, they were all astonishingly boisterous.
Despite our awestruck intrigue we held our vigil there in the garden, silent witnesses to the divine beauty unfolding in front of us.
The toddler-bird was like an embodiment of perceptual motion. It could have had its own page in a physics text book! Was it showing off? Was it simply exuberant with its newfound superpower of flight? I guess I’ll never know; but what I do know now is that: Sometimes the observer is also the observed…
For it was in that perfect moment that toddler bird shot past us twice, circling the garden in big loops and then for the first time stopped completely still- on the palm of my hand which was resting on my knees! For what seemed an eternity, toddler-bird just looked at Sam - the other toddler in the garden; and Sam looked back at toddler-bird.
Wow! I have never felt so simultaneously humbled and delighted!
We saw toddler bird some days later. Sam was at the stage of learning new words and excitedly pointed and called toddler bird “gog” which is toddler-speak for “dog”. I wonder what toddler-bird called Sam.
Daily 5 minute #freewrite, prompt provided by
Photograph by Author (Copyrighted)