Wings Of Contemplation

We received a surprise skiff of snow during the night, and an even more surprising squall of the stuff during the morning, giving us a couple of inches of nice, fluffy snow, the kind that squeaks beneath the boot and provides good traction. The sun came out a while ago, but more snow is supposed to move in during the night. Jinx is keeping a close eye on the weather forecast, as snow is one of his great joys in life. He enjoys speeding along the ground like a spotted rocket, nose barely above terra firma, mouth slightly ajar and scooping up loads of the stuff. He stops occasionally to chew it, then races off for more.

Mrs. Orr and I made a quick trip to town to pick up groceries and replenish the sunflower seeds with which we feed our songbirds. We ran out of seed earlier in the week and I have been worried that the birds would think I have abandoned them. They seem to be creatures of routine.

When we returned, Jinx and I made the rounds of the feeders and filled them. Have you ever been rebuked by a woodpecker? Neither had I, until today. When I approached one of the feeders, a large woodpecker with a magnificent crimson cowl was sitting on the suet basket next to the feeder, watching me. He squawked out that curious tropical-sounding cry and flew just a short distance away to a bush, where he sat, still watching me. Taking the hint, I fetched a suet cake from the barn and placed it in the holder. I was barely six feet away from the now-filled basket when the woodpecker swooshed back to it and began to feed. One begins to fear. If a woodpecker is bold enough to fuss at me and is bold enough to return to his feeder when I’m almost within arm’s reach of him, he might decide to take me out. One must be watchful. The teachings of the Catholic church are replete with admonitions to “keep custody of the eyes,” meaning avoiding intentionally looking upon things that are shameful or that tend to be avenues of temptation. One does not wish for a woodpecker to take custody of one’s eyes in the literal sense of the phrase.

During the pleasant chore of what I call “feeding my livestock,” I noticed that many of our songbirds were watching me from their places in the trees and shrubs and fences. None of them were as bold nor as impudent as the woodpecker had been, but they did descend en masse on the feeders as soon as Jinx and I had withdrawn a safe distance. Later, my wife and I talked about the birds and their awareness of us. We agreed that the birds seem to display gratitude for the seed we provide, not only in their rush to eat it, but also in the lively activity and songs before and after they are fed. Even when I am in the act of loading the feeders, I am aware that the birds seem to dance restlessly, chirping among themselves the way children will shift from foot to foot when their grandmother is pulling a sheet of cookies from the oven. This anticipation seems to demonstrate awareness and even thought.

I’ve written here previously about my strong belief that animals and trees and even “inanimate” objects like stones are sentient and aware in their own ways, on levels or wavelengths that are invisible to us. As we talked today, my wife and I explored the idea that animals communicate through some sort of mental telepathy. The more we talked, the more reasonable the idea became. Consider a flock of birds or a school of fish. Large masses of living creatures moving in stunning unison, shifting and turning and diving and rising as one. Scientists explain this phenomenon using the idea that animals are able to detect and respond immediately to the lead bird/fish’s changes in direction. This has never made sense to me….the bird at the tail end of 5,000 starlings can detect and move with the changes in the lead bird’s flight movements? Even if the last bird is watching the next-to-last bird, who is observing the ones just ahead of him, and so on up the line, it seems to my blunt and unscientific mind that there would be some sort of time delay that would introduce chaos into the coordinated movement. No, it won’t do. It seems more likely that the animals are communicating via their minds, the leader telling the followers what he’s doing, what he’s anticipating, and that the followers are able to respond instantaneously because they are already “there” in the leader’s mind.

When I was in boot camp, our Drill Instructors worked us so intensely in close-order drill that we became almost able to anticipate their commands. The DIs would sometimes drill us by barking one rapid command after the other, moving us around like fish in a school, and we grew in our ability to exist in that very moment as one body made up of many members. By the end of three months of such training, we moved with such precision and unity that it was almost unnerving to those of us who were in the middle of the platoon….or flock, as it were.  To this day, watching close-order drill of a group of Marine Corps recruits who are nearing graduation is a fierce joy for me, lifting me to a sense of transport that sometimes occurs when listening to Wagner or Beethoven. The experience is magical.

And all this occurred without any sort of telepathy, at least any of which we were aware. I think back on those hours on the grinder, remembering the metronome of leather boot heels digging into the pavement in such pure unison, the slapping of hands against the black rifles, the yope-yoit song of the cadence hot from the lungs of the hard, bronzed ministers of battle who were guiding us…and I know with certainty that the birds of the air are communicating with their minds as they pierce the air and scrawl their very presence across the pages of the skies.

And if I’m right, then what? Can they reach into our minds with their small, skittish ones? Is this mental awareness a part of what God did when He put the fear of man into them after the great waters had subsided?

When the birds went several days without seeds in the feeders, did they worry and fret? Did they think I had abandoned them? Was their restless behavior while I replenished the feeders tied to a sense of gratitude for….answered prayers?

Could it be that when God seems so remote, seems so deaf to my prayers, seems so aloof to my troubles…could it be that He is busy with something, that He is preoccupied, that He is unable to be everywhere at once, and turns His loving attention to me when He can, not making me wait for “my own good” but rather because He cannot help me at that time? I am grateful for the grace that allows me to think through these things. I am also grateful for the vehicles through which His grace often comes to me. The writings of William James Tychonievich have been such a vehicle for me, helping me to think and wrestle with thoughts that I once would have shunned out of the fear of being a heretic or theological weirdo. And I may very well be a heretic or a theological weirdo, but I no longer fear being called one.

So here I am, on a snowy day in the Christ-haunted South (and bless Flannery O’Connor for crafting that beautiful phrase), far behind in my chores and my correspondence, typing out my questions about birds and the God Who sailed them into the air, Who notes their final tumbles to His good white earth. Here I am, wreathed with the aroma of the supper my wife is preparing, watching my dog play with a toy, listening to the song of arthritis in my creaking joints, walled in by stacks of books, garbed in wool and flannel, loved by my lovely ones, anxious and devious and doubting in the final days of our battered king’s reign. Here I am, drawing nearer to the hour when I will light a candle and sit before a crucifix and whisper into the air of a quiet room. The birds are returning to their shelters now, and Jinx and I will go for our evening walk before the table is set. We will walk and I will think some more. Perhaps something will fly past me while I listen to my boots squeaking in the snow. Perhaps my thoughts will be as loud to a bird as the sounds are around me on a winter night. Perhaps.

~ S.K. Orr