HOW TO THINK ABOUT A BIRD

The bird was there on the ground one morning, tucked into the corner of the little alcove garden just outside the bathroom window. The habit of flossing my teeth mindlessly had me staring out of the window and seeing that bird. At first, I thought the little creature (what kind of bird is it?) was just resting, maybe sleeping there. Do birds sleep on the ground? Each time, morning and night (I am a twice a day flosser) I would look out at the bird and find it interesting that it hadn't moved from one day to the next, except for almost imperceptible shifts in the way the visible wing moved, so unlike how we picture birds “on the wing.” It was as if the bird was dead but not dead. It was “not dead” as it lay there moving so slowly, changing position so subtly that only staring at it during a flossing routine would reveal how it had moved. Its head was into the wall but the wing I could see was ever so slowly changing position.

Here it is important to know that I, too, had a self perception of being dead but not dead. I had recently been diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer and was awaiting the surgery that was anticipated to be curative. From day to day I found myself relating to the bird in the corner as a being in a state of change, of being perceived in one way by habit and in another way by the pressure of a new realization. As I thought about the bird and me, its life became a metaphor for my own. Of course, faced with such a dramatic diagnosis there was the implication of limited mortality and this came to mind twice a day while flossing my teeth.

The little bird itself opened up for me all the observations and perceptions and metaphors that accumulate for all of us over a lifetime. What is it like to be a bird and how could a dead bird in any way resemble me? Birds in poems and prose and in Nature herself are the creatures that soar and perch and fly in those mysterious and astounding murmurations. This is what a bird “means” to so many of us. We don't picture many birds on the ground and we certainly don't think of them falling to the earth in death by natural means or the victim of an over zealous flight colliding with a window (I am not thinking of birds shot out of the air for human enjoyment). They are meant to be forever in the air and as eternal and free as anything we might imagine. They are meant to be joyous in song and deft in flight. They are so often cited for their songs bringing joy to our hearts and their vivid colors substance to the artist's palette. We see them in groups and flocks and are reminded of what a community (and maybe a family) is.

On the other hand, to complement the joy and freedom we assign to birds, there are birds that don't feed on the seeds we put out for them but feed on those little birds themselves. There are the birds that hoard our trash and valuables alike. There are birds that feed upon the road kill carrion as well the bodies of those in the Buddhist world laid out in the Himalayan skyways to illustrate how our skin and bones recycle for grander purposes, food for great birds hunched just to make us their meal. There are the devious birds that substitute their eggs in a borrowed nest or even eat the eggs of a trusting nesting mother. We make judgments and anthropomorphize bird behavior as if it were similar to our own, yet feeling superior as the end product of some unchanging evolutionary process. There are “good” birds and “bad” ones. But we are always the “good guys.”

When I watched the dead bird over many weeks and in my mind became more and more of a dead bird myself, I began to wonder about mortality and how it affects all living things and beings. I wondered about my own mortality and how my wishes for a green burial would resemble the slow and shifting deterioration of the little bird of my life. I thought more about symbols and metaphors and what birds mean and have meant over the millennia to the poets and oracles and ornithologists. How as young students do we come to know about birds and relate to them? What, then, do different birds “mean”? Can they mean more than one thing at a time? Can they be dead but not dead? Can that be true for us as humans? In the grand system of cosmic meaning, aren't all of us creatures the same in soulful ways? If God notices the fallen sparrow, are we not all of us fallen sparrows in the end?If birds are messengers or prophets, why don't we notice them and heed them?

Psalm 84:3: Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young—a place near your altar, Lord Almighty, my king and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you.

Matthew 10: 29-31: His eye is on the sparrow. And I know he watches over me. God cares for all the birds and all the animals that walk this earth. Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.

The accretions of time have added meanings to birds as symbols. Some of them are:

Sparrow: God's love and care, humility, love and loyalty, fertility, new beginnings, hope,

productivity, diligence, creativity

Dove: God, Holy Spirit, peace

Goldfinch: Jesus

Cardinal: God's messenger, the spirit of the departed, faith, balance, romance

Crow: intelligence, curiosity, adaptation

Crane: blessings, good luck

Eagle: courage, rebirth, power

Owl: insight, wisdom, death

Swan: light, romance, purity

Nightingale: anticipation, love, secrets

Hummingbird: joy, love, healing

Falcon: longevity, victory, nobility

Bluebird: joy, honesty, harmony

Swallow: safe passage

Starling: spiritual unity, family relationships, community, cooperation, prosperity

(Here I reference Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Mozart's Starling)

As I read over the list it seems to me we assign characteristics to birds that align with elements of the human being, often reaching the level of the highest virtues.

Of course, among the many features we think about when we think about a bird are freedom, perhaps spiritual flight, flocks and community, migrations and navigations, the ecological losses of species, accelerated climate change and the slow pace of evolutionary adaptations, the effects on the natural world of pollution and population density and technological changes including light pollution and giant wind turbines with their disorienting blades.

Do humans find what they need in life through natural forms, imitating or appropriating or exploiting? While we see among birds the life imperative and free-floating ethereal ease, do we not also see them as targets and attempt to dominate them by hunting quotas and trapping? Do birds live only in our imaginations as free spirits? Do we attempt to bring them down to Earth one way or another to fulfill the Biblical prophecy that “man” shall dominate all creatures?

The bird I observed over many days was at once an anachronism in its fallen state but at the same time in a state in which all humans will find themselves at one time or another—impermanent and subject to the forces of natural transformation, decayed and recycled. I think the bird I studied reminded me of the great forces of life that include not only great freedom of flight, of high virtue and of grand color and song, but also great dignity and accommodation to the forces of death. And it is in seeing death in this body of life lying so still that I was brought back to my own sense of still living. It didn't seem complete enough to relate to the freedom and beauty of flight without also seeing how all things change and all living beings will eventually die and how this is how it should be.

Now, when I see a balletic murmuration forming and reforming over the tawny fields of grass on a fall day, I am with them in spirit as they rise and fall just as I was with the fallen bird in spirit. But it was more than an observer and the observed. There was more to the association than science is able to describe. My consciousness is now able to comprehend in a mysterious way flight as spiritual flight.

How to think about a bird is about how to think about myself as capable of free flight but also capable of becoming something else in a natural transformation of cells and atoms. But just as I will become recycling material, I will also retain in some amorphous way the freedom of flight—because I experienced it and the flight of any bird will be the flight and freedom of all beings caught on the wing. It is an arising. And if God notices the fallen sparrow, will he not also notice me in my loneliness, my cancer, my grounding, my death? Will I not rise with the next bird spirit that takes wing from the branches of the tree outside the bathroom window?

Imagination intrudes into these thoughts about birds and mortality and my life. I know only my imagination allows me to experience the flight of birds and to somehow or other identify with them whether they perch, sing, dip and soar, nest in peace and security. If I can project onto birds virtuous traits, then do I do so because I am not able to find them as defining traits of the human species? Are these traits humanized in birds? Or were they originally theirs and for us to borrow, “avianized” as it were?

There is so much about the flying and Earthbound beauty of birds to return us to the great beauty and miracles of this world. What am I to make of the fallen bird? I refer to the metaphor of the fallen bird as an expression of mortality, shattering the iconic bird living in eternal spiritual flight. But if interdependence means anything it means that all living things and beings will at some time perish. It was interdependence that came to mind as I studied the fallen bird outside the window. It was about rising and falling, it was about living and dying, it was change and transformation, it was about body and soul, about light and flight.

There was a great amount of comfort for me as I reflected on how much and how deeply I related to the dead bird. I noticed its death. And, in the noticing, I recalled the Biblical passages that told me about God seeing each little bird in its life and death. And about God caring about the bird and about me. There is nothing more isolating than physical illness and disability. The world contracts down around the pain and suffering that disease brings to all of us. We tend to isolate ourselves as separate beings from those around us as we focus on our ailing minds and bodies. Our pain even separates us from the mental and spiritual lives that might have played such an important and fulfilling part of our lives. It is only natural that this happens as a way for our bodies to heal. I think I was more susceptible to the little fallen bird and what its life and death beheld. This was a way, in some small way, to escape from the burdens of my diagnosis and physical pain. And isn't this what we naturally do when we yearn for healing from physical and mental illness? Do we not crave flight, even spiritual flight?

It was not such a great stretch to incorporate the metaphor of the fallen bird in my thoughts to include, also, my reflections on the meaning of life and death in the person of Jesus. In the story of the life of Jesus there is also falling and rising. There is the spiritual flight as well as the enacting of great virtues on Earth. Jesus was God's bird. Even the image of Jesus on the cross brings to mind the spread of wings before flight.

Play of the imagination allows for a wide variety of associations and allusions. Metaphors abound in the realm of the imagination. Metaphors in this case of the fallen bird were healing for me and helped me reconnect with a fuller life beyond diagnosis and disease and pain. Metaphors of grace and beauty are healing. It is possible that metaphors do, in fact, represent a reality beyond mere association. They may emerge from the principle of interdependence. We may live inside the lives and bodies of creatures considered lower in the hierarchies of taxonomy. The fallen bird was giving up its body to the Earth from which it came. And the same is true for our species. However much we try to push thoughts of mortality from our minds, we, too, will one day give ourselves up to the Earth. For me, realizing this was meaningful and meant an eventual intermingling with a cosmic realm that contains all things and beings that have come before me. This made the plans for a green burial all that more meaningful.

If my life has been motivated in part by a desire to serve others, then what could represent such service more than giving my cells and atoms back to the Earth for recycling? Many of us think that end-of-life “strategies” are complete when we have signed papers and made arrangements for distribution of property. But the real contribution to the world in which we live is to lay ourselves down in the Earth once we have fallen from our human flights and to give ourselves over to the wisdom of the Great Mother from whom all of us have come. And for us to release our spirits, as if a bird in flight, to the eternal spiritual beyond.

Now, when I see even the smallest murmuration, I am held in a cosmos of such vast dimensions and I know that when I fall I will be as the fallen bird outside the bathroom window—noticed and released and embraced.
 

HOW TO THINK ABOUT ANYTHING

If the effort in writing and, thus, thinking are to make sense of a complex world, then it seems valuable to develop a way to think about anything that occurs in all of the complexity. It also seems valuable (but maybe a bit more ambitious) to have a simplified model from which to work. It seems to me that there are many mental models proposed by folks who are intent on what I am trying to do and that is to make simple work of something that is innately hard. It is hard to put pieces of a puzzle together if they are scattered all about and then to see what meaning there is to the puzzle itself. It is in the order of things these days to comment on how dizzying the pace of life has become, how distracted we are in our daily lives, how we are challenged to make connections when we are so driven. I think all of these things are true but they don't obviate the opportunity to make some sense of the puzzle.

I begin my own puzzle-making by setting the intention to be curious. Curiosity is really all about inquiry, asking questions to frame out the context and relationships of what it is that puzzles. Or it may be a situation that is the basic point of interest. No matter what the context is, it involves human behavior and human responses, for it is humans caught up in the tangle of uncertainty. I have asked myself what mental model would fit the need I have to solve the puzzles that occupy me? What simple formulation is available to assist me? This leads me to a very familiar source, the Buddha.

The Buddha taught many things about existential life but the most helpful for me are his Four Noble Truths and where they lead. The Four Truths state that: There is suffering. There are causes of suffering. There is a method to deal with the suffering. And the method is the Eightfold Path. This seems very simple but, as with many simple observations, within it lie all the considerations one might make of human behavior. He is, after all, addressing his monks and nuns in the context of their lives and how they might address the needs of the people they will be serving. Over the millennia he continues to address the faithful Buddhists but also offers his teaching to anyone willing to listen and absorb it.

His observation about suffering is a universal given. In these days we pair suffering with the pain that precedes it. So often we do not get beyond the pains of our lives and get stuck in a fixed mindset. We are beset with the pain and cannot move beyond it or the suffering we bring to it. Pain is also a universal given for human beings. Pain will come into everyone's life, be it physical, mental/emotional, or spiritual. There will be suffering as we layer onto the pain our complicated emotional responses within the context of our individual lives. The Buddha suggested a few of the causes of our suffering that include greed, anger, and delusion. But one could make a very long list of those human behavioral characteristics that cause suffering, including those that on their face appear to be desirable reactions. There is a Buddhist teaching that there can be two arrows afflicting us in any event of trauma. The first arrow is the pain of the experience. The second arrow is the suffering we concoct because of the pain. The first arrow is a condition of human existence. The second arrow is optional. We get to choose how to experience our pain and can decide not to take the second arrow, one we inflict on ourselves.

The Eightfold Path has just a few steps on it, each one connected to all the others so that someone traveling can step forward or back no matter which step he takes. They are in an order that begins to make sense and the order begins with Right View. Here I want to suggest that what has traditionally been a reference to “right” is not really carving out the duality of right and wrong. I don't think the Buddha would have been so dogmatic. What makes sense to me is to use the word “appropriate,” as that references context and relationships, just the way I think it helps to discern the pieces of any puzzle.

It is helpful to use an example that is right at hand today. We are in the middle of a string of very hot weather with temperatures nearing 100 degrees on some days. What has been called climate change is really climate disruption and its true nature is a complicated puzzle for scientists to unravel and interpret. Unfortunately, it has become a political football that has ideological and economic implications for some people and especially the people in power who control legislation and the financial means to work on climate disruption mitigation (if that is still possible). What it means to me is that the heat causes pain and suffering. In times past, I have been greatly affected by heat. It has never been a situation in which recreation is possible. The pain of the heat has stimulated reactions of frustration and even anger that it had to occur in the first place. It has resulted in thinking about investing in air conditioning for this old farmhouse or about where in the country one might move to escape the heat of summer. Each day that heats up now brings the suffering of mental torpor and physical sloth. When this happens, I feel guilty for having wasted precious time and I am more aware as I age how time is shortening and how I want to insert into time various projects that seem important to me, like this blog post. But this thinking has me bypassing the first step in the Eightfold Path that could give me a different perspective, a perspective that in the long run will lead to and support a growth mindset, the opposite of a fixed one that has me wallowing in suffering.

What is an appropriate view of heat and climate disruption? I think such a view eliminates all the emotional reactions that lead to suffering in the context of the heat and natural processes. It seems clear that human activity and ongoing choices are bringing us to this global environment that has disrupted the natural processes of the jet stream and also the magnificent and little understood oceanic tides. This is an appropriate view of the context and relationships of what we experience as a hotter Earth. What this means to me is that, instead of reacting against the heat by adding to the problem yet one more home appliance with energy-sucking technology in the form of air conditioning, it is more important to think about ways in which I can learn to live with the heat and, perhaps, learn to condition my body to adapt to it. So, the suffering is gone and in its place is an intention to work within the context of weather patterns to see my own place in the natural world as someone who can adapt rather than as a victim of forces out of my control. It may be that climate disruption is now beyond human abilities to alter its path, but that isn't clear to me yet. What I do know is that climate disruption and this string of very hot days is part of my present context of living and I can choose to willingly participate in adapting to it and not railing and ranting about how little is being done to “fix” it.

It sounds naive, and it is, to say that I now sit in front of a fan that uses far less energy than air conditioning would and, while I still sweat and dial down my physical pace, I hydrate better and do not feel victimized by the heat. It is summer and if summers in the future are to be more like this one, then it seems prudent to learn better ways of adapting to them. If nothing else, it is a bit liberating to be able to see a previous pain with its suffering in a new light and to feel that I still belong on this Earth with its own patterns and changing responses to environmental forces and pressures. I will not be able to fix global climate disruption but I can contribute to its mitigation and at the same time alter my own perception of how humans can respond to it without pain and suffering.

Having said that, I believe there is another way to interpret the Buddha's Four Noble Truths. He does note that our lives are universally afflicted with pain and suffering. He assumes that all pains will be accompanied by suffering and so offers his Eightfold Path as a methodology for relief. But my questions are: What if we really accept the idea that the suffering is optional? What if the universality of painful events is coupled with joy? In a cross-spiritual reference, I am thinking about the life of Saint Francis and how his life might offer a different way to view the common human existential condition (and maybe this is an “appropriate view,” in the Buddha's formulation). Saint Francis lived a life of radical love that was simple and pure. The physical pains he experienced were not accompanied by suffering, inasmuch as it blocked a more expansive expression of his love. The love he aspired to was his interpretation of the love he was given by the God who animated his life. When he experienced the worldly pains of physical and emotional traumas, he returned love. His greatest joy was in being able to bless the perpetrators for bringing him back to the path of pure love, the love that he felt was channeled through him. He did not think of himself as special or chosen or powerful because of this relationship, but tried ever harder to include the most cruel and evil as well as the most displaced and marginalized and oppressed humans in his universe of love, for he believed that all things and beings were creations of God and so embodied God's flame of life and love.

So, I think it is possible to re-do the Buddha's initial formulation and replace suffering with the joy that Saint Francis offers as an expression of pure, simple, and radical love.

I think over time thoughtful human beings have dealt with pain and suffering in millions of ways, perhaps billions of ways. Because it is a universal state of being, they come to all of us in one form or another. I am curious to learn how individuals whose lives can be publicly accessed have defined the context and relationships that have led to a growth mindset. I am thinking of poets and those I call “notables” in my painting sketch project. I am eager to see what I can learn from their unique perspectives and how they spent their lives in “appropriate livelihood,” another of the eight steps on the Path.

So, my intention is to highlight those individuals who illustrate how to think about the world in which they live/d and to see where that led them. In a way, it is to see how they might have managed pain and suffering as a path to personal growth. I think this is what intrigues me about my own life and think it must also be true for so many others. The present times are an incubator for how a growth mindset is possible when so many puzzles lie before us and we find ourselves confused and tangled in fact, fiction, technological changes, social disconnections, distractions, temptations, and exhaustion. The Buddha continues to offer a methodology for tackling the pain and suffering that weigh on all of us one way or another. In the back of my mind I have the intention of offering these little essays to children in my grandchildren's cohort when they are faced with the conundrums of discernment and their personal agency in a world that is continually changing and challenging. The stories to be told about the Buddha and by the Buddha are intergenerational gems that can be treasured as a resource for engaging in a turbulent and sometimes fearful (but always joyful) world.