Bird Grace

A couple of times a year where I live, great undulating clouds of starlings and blackbirds pass through on their seasonal migrations. Driving down a road with fields on both sides, I saw a mass of blackbirds settled on the asphalt like a dark mirage.

Birds rose and fell, skittering and fluttering. But the ones on the road were in no particular hurry to move. Why get out of the way when you number in the hundreds, flowing across the road in a slow-moving feathered river. I could see their rationale. One bird, launch up quickly. Two-hundred birds, take your time.

I slowed to a crawl, inching my way across the winged river. And then I was inside a snow globe of swirling birds. Above me. Around me. So this is what being part of the flock feels like! The susurration of flapping wings, the ebb and flow of rising and settling, the animated avian vocalizations surrounding me.

Many times I’ve stood under these tumultuous winged migrations: the viscerally-felt tumult of their calls, the pungent smell of their bodies in flight, the rush of wind against my face from their wings. But to be part of the flock - this was a moment of grace in an otherwise ordinary day.

I look for, I long for these small benedictions as my day spools forward. What can I see, or smell or hear, or even taste that throws a little exclamation point into the daily hours? What wakes me up to the world and its gifts when it is so easy to feel the weight of the world’s dark stuff press in? When the sense of “Groundhog Day” threatens?

Bird Day. The baptism of bird grace in a parched terrain.