Life-and-death drama played out at Cold Comfort Cottage today.
When I got home from work tonight, my mother met me at the door with, "You need to do something unpleasant after supper tonight." (Mom has a talent for delivering these cheery messages just when I'm at the cusp of relaxation -- when I walk through the door at the end of a trying workday, Saturday mornings as I'm pouring my first cup of coffee, and so on -- but I suppose that's grist for another day's blog entry.) Turns out that a fledgling robin had killed itself against our front door; its body lay twisted and stiff on the porch.
I was sad. I'd been watching this robin, with its sibling, hopping around the lawn this morning as I was eating breakfast; now I had to bury it in the woods. To make matters worse, I could hear the parents fripping anxiously from a nearby tree. Damn, I thought; I hate this. I wondered what had caused the bird to hit the door at such velocity.
Later on, as I was planting my dillweed out behind the garage, I heard a strange swoop just over my head; too low-frequency for a hummingbird, too loud for an insect. A few minutes later, as I was back at the house, I turned toward the garage, and saw a sharp-shinned hawk shooting past it, maybe six feet off the ground.
I'm sure the hawk has been preying upon both nesting birds as they're foraging for their young and upon the young themselves when they're newly fledged, slow and clumsy. Perhaps the robin family were fleeing from the hawk when one of the panicked youngsters slammed into our door. Now I worry for my family of chickadees -- the youngsters are so loud and perpetually hungry, and the parents are constantly fluttering hither and yon. On the other hand...I'm sure that the hawk has its own nest of fuzzy, endearingly helpless chicks demanding to be fed.
Sometimes Gnosticism is an appealing philosophy: The material world sucks; it's all about death and decay; we need to escape it.
On the other hand...there are days when, as Lewis Thomas put it, we should all be staggering around in stunned awe of the vast and intricate universe around us.
Right now, in my head, L'chaim! is winning...but just barely. I think I need to go water my flowers, then come back in and make some tabbouleh for dinner tomorrow night, and otherwise get my hands dirty with material reality.
3 comments:
It's a jungle out there, all right.
One day I came home to find only one of the dove babies in the nest - the other had left already. I was worried it had fallen, but I didn't see its body anywhere, so I assumed it was in the natural course of things. Then the other hopped out and sat on the porch for a couple of hours (my inside cats were sitting in the window, watching, enthralled). I worried about that little kid and decided I'd approach to see if it was hurt or just hangin' - and it flew (sort of) away, so all seems well. The parents had sat on the garage roof for hours the day before - trying to entice the babies to leave the nest, I suspect. All that is instinct, and quite amazing.
But at least half of these babies don't survive. It's a sad story, but it's just nature, red in tooth and claw. It's nothing we can do anything about, and it is about life, really. Just not quite what we have in mind. I suppose God knows what S/He's doing.
(Actually, the Psalm from Sunday (#50) had quite a bit to say along these lines. I was glad to hear, again, about mercy and not sacrifice:
7 Hear, O my people, and I will speak: "O Israel, I will bear witness against you; *
for I am God, your God.
8 I do not accuse you because of your sacrifices; *
your offerings are always before me.
9 I will take no bull-calf from your stalls, *
nor he-goats out of your pens;
10 For all the beasts of the forest are mine, *
the herds in their thousands upon the hills.
11 I know every bird in the sky, *
and the creatures of the fields are in my sight.
12 If I were hungry, I would not tell you, *
for the whole world is mine and all that is in it.
13 Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls, *
or drink the blood of goats?
14 Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving *
and make good your vows to the Most High.
15 Call upon me in the day of trouble; *
I will deliver you, and you shall honor me.")
I was feeling a little Annie Dillardlike that day, wasn't I?;-)
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