Hummingbird

It's morning. I awake and find myself wishing for an uplifting experience. Everywhere I turn lately there is sad or tragic news. America's politics is sorely and scarily lacking in reason; a Black man, who I signed a petition for, is executed in Georgia and might have been innocent; several new movies out are about people finding romance while they are dying...I could go on but writing it all down is making me depressed. I need to find some joy, I tell myself; I need to have a sign of hope.

As I am doing last night's dishes, there it is, my hopeful emblem. I watch intently as a flitting hummingbird rises above my plum red perennials. She perfectly balances herself mid-air and then flies off. How beautiful and wondrous, I think. Then the deepest azure, blue jay appears on the chrysanthemums. He seems to be searching the garden for someone. Another bluest jay sits camouflaged on a finger-thin branch up in our flowering cherry tree quietly scanning the horizon. The eyes of the two birds meet. Their songs float between them and then in a finger snap they both fly together towards a fir tree across the street.

In gratitude I bow to the simple, yet magical scene of daily living outside my window. It is enough to momentarily lift my spirits. Dear Mother Earth, dear majestic realms of the natural world, I want to remember you are always here whenever I open my eyes and heart. I get so caught up in my small, small world and forget there is the constant companionship of myriad trees nearby or the sweet melodious sounds of frogs, crickets and fowl on the Amazon canal, or the frolicking teasing of squirrels in my own back, cedar enclosed, garden.

My heart has been heavy lately and my voice has been stuffed with the pain of my own creating. I've been spending too much time alone, waiting for my school year as a home instruction teacher to begin, waiting for the days of summer to blend into the days of autumn, waiting for new dreams and purpose to enter my line of vision. We are our thoughts, I am told; we are what we can imagine; we are our own self-creators. I've been stuck and struck dumb and numb, telling myself being stuck is fine because that's where I am.

Time is leaving me behind and I figure because time runs away so quickly that my sour mood will runaway quickly too. Why is it, though, that the events, feelings, experiences we want to pass us by linger on and on, while the positive ones are over in a lightening flash? Like the hummingbird moment...I want to capture this raising of the soul's essence and put it in a treasure box. Then whenever I want I can open this box and observe my hummingbird one more time. But life doesn't work like this. Life's precious moments pass and cannot be recaptured.

I want my good memories more accessible and my bad ones buried beneath a pile of debris. But I have this tendency to remember the words wrongly spoken or the needed words not spoken at all. The creative optimist becomes unseen under a stack of wishes and regrets. Like Alice's white rabbit, I tell myself there is no time and I run away faster from all I want to be and do. I am becoming lost in metaphor and lost from my own blue jay intuitive communication. I want to come out the other side...an other side I imagine as a kind of heaven to my self-imposed hell. Wasn't it in Paradise Lost where Milton reminds us we can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell?

The answers are blindingly simple to any question I pose. The up to the down, the forward from the back, the turn around is there before me...there right outside my window. If only I'd remember to look and see.

© 2011