Flow with ink, breath, wonder, paper in one of my upcoming workshops, this week in Chicago and Brooklyn. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative journaling or meditation practice, reach out about a virtual 1:1 session. As always, listen to these essays here, and pair your creative practice with a journal or card from Odette Press. This week’s essay pairs with this playlist.
“Listen to the sound of the earth turning.”
― Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings
Listen and you will hear them: flap of wing, a coo or call, the softest landing. A bird in some near distance, or far off, flying. From across the contrast of silent horizon a single robin, sparrow, or cardinal calls. Later, often starling; often sparrow; then warbler, migrating; maybe hawk or kestrel in the city if you listen attentively. Each sound is an arrival, an announcement, and each wing may be landing or departure, each feather a holding place for wind and momentum, and in any case, whether still or in motion, if you open to it, a bird can bring you into beauty, receptivity, aliveness.
Crane your neck up, eyes toward the skyline. Unfurl from the burden that weighs your shoulders, and let go, for a moment, into the wideness of your wingspan. The almonds of your eyelids are buds opening to Spring and windows of sky. Take in song, feeling and sounding, fill lung of breath with breath of air, fresh and exhilarating, and turn the heart of your face toward the aliveness of waking sky.
Kinglets fly into pine and their golden crests are the same chartreuse green as the budding ends of Spring trees. I’ve spent most Saturdays the last year birding, immersed in wonder, morning and beauty, standing in some stillness, some silence tuned into canopies in serene gaze, while the noise and silence of an avian city arrive each weekend. We pack, we roam, we slow; we taking in the flit of wing. Movement draws us across the silence of morning. There is a noted ease and eagerness in the possibility of birding, a language of impermanence, awash in awe of potential and beauty. Starlings and grackles stun in their elegant all black iridescence and to see a hawk soar is a balm of awe in an urgent city.
A year unfolds its wings, and I unfold into the language of bird. Wing and bird become the sense I embody. I crane towards sky, I angle into pigeon, I swan dive forward, I unfold in the complex balance in bird of paradise. I nest, I still, I morph, and I recover the variances in my own plumage.
What’s this? What do you hear? What do you see? We ask, and birds, like song, speak in the language of spontaneity and feeling, and maybe my first love of birds began before me: McCartney, like starling, in mornings of my memory, crooning, “Blackbird” winds around like breeze through my earliest memories. Looking back on the horizon of time, I can remember dirt-laden days of sitting by ember glow of campfire in the Midwest. Dusk, falling, sitting fireside, my early ears recall not black but bluejay. Later, the edges of my fingertips plucked out melodies on guitar strings. A song on longing, on wings, the song coasts into evening, ‘into the light of a dark black night,’ as memory fades.
Throughout Winter along the water I watched as gulls flew head on into high winds; I marvel at kinglets making their way through black nights from the tropics to return back to the city. A bird embodies bird because it was made to bird, and a wing works because of form, of slope, and body made to feather the upward force of air and opposing forces. A combination of feathers, bones, muscles, the slope of wing collaborates with wind. Birds work with the flow of current, of air, traveling across long distances, coasting on the forces of wind. I want to be a hawk I tell a friend in a text. I wish I could see as a hawk sees, I tell another. What I am really saying is: I want the view, the vision, the vantage point. A desire for softness and stretch and strength, to glide on wind. I open soft feathers of thought into a stronger wingspan.
Meditate on the nature of birding and you will soften and loosen the grip of life’s insisting. Birding unfolds you into that which is open, receptive, eager and to be open and receptive is in direct opposition to many of the stories told societally: to harsh, to urge, to grasp. Eyes toward sky unfurls you from harsh ground, and draws you up and out of phone, complaints, and despair, into commune with something larger. Namely, the sky. Namely, the air in your lungs, and the way your front body opens, to soften, when you turn to stand, and arc eyes to focus. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity” as David Whyte writes, and a bird’s presence is made tangible when you hear the sound of astonishment in yourself: an almost involuntary inhale of delight. “Beauty quickens,” writes Elaine Scarry. “It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living worth living.”
Reading sky, as in reading a book, requires a level of receptivity: you take what you think you know, and you tune, instead, to feeling, and you drop down into not knowing and you flow as if your mind is wing on current of thought and you follow the current. Receptive to sky and bird in focus, you find there is nothing to urge, nothing to prove, nothing to assert, and you learn to settle into opening. Alertness, the ingredient of noticing, dissolves from rigidity, and softens you from the grip of thinking. Tune your eyes up; let the knowing sensing body of your heart and skin and senses in all their wisdom unfold, as if leaf, and open, too.
Birds build threads between earth and sky. I dream of hawks, hummingbirds, herons, giant condors stretching wings wide over the tops of buildings, and watch in waking as shorebirds walk slowly in serene wading, tracing lines across shorelines. I call in awe in quiet when warblers arrive, their migrations and plumage, all for their colors, instinct, and variances. Birds come to me in dreams, and their calls pause my own talking, thinking, speaking. Last Spring, for the only glimpse of a few days, black poll warblers immersed nearby parks in their ambient sounding. Turning eyes to sky, I see hawks over Canal Street in Chinatown, and watch as kestrels call across apartments in Astoria. In the middle of a city, anywhere in the world, there is sky, there is ground, equal places for birds to fly. My eyes tune to sky, in awe of these animals who float, flit, soar, sky, nest, whose songs remind of living, and ask for nothing, but give us reminders of dusk and morning in return.
Birds flit around and song and fight, play, and build homes, and sleep, and hunt for food, as we do, and some prey and some peace. Eagles, in an earthward mating ritual, curl talons together around each other as they test their bonds, holding on as they tumble, falling into gravity. Meanwhile ravens mate for life, some, affirm their bond in yearly tandem sky dances. Teaching the language of the sky, of song, of flying, birds as practice give me the language of instinctual understanding.
I am grateful for their feathers. We form shapes, we coast, we wing. We open mouth in awe in wonder as if unfolding bud or leaf. Tight smiles open into the season and birds, like leaf, run, tree, sky have breathed wind back into the lung of my aliveness and I write so as to cherish them: the miracle of color, of light, of flight, the lightness of words, the warmth of sound, the tenderness of bird wing and the songs they call that drive us through the nights and morning.
Birdsong, wide sky, laughter. Both birding and meditation are processes of opening. Embodying openness, softening awareness, you settle, serene, and unfold into allowing. Wind in the lungs, once dense with despair, open out from tucked with, and emerge as Spring, blooming, as laughter howling.
The practices of meditation and birdwatching are two clouds under the same sky of noticing, and each can be balm for the harshness of living through opening wind and mind wide, through softening into the current of wind and play. “How do we work with this tendency to block and to freeze?” Pema Chödrön asks. “If our edge is like a huge stone wall with a door in it, how do we learn to open that door and step through it again and again, so that life becomes a process of growing up, becoming more and more fearless and flexible, more and more able to play like a raven in the wind?”. She Goes on to say that “The wilder the weather is, the more the ravens love it…they challenge the wind” sharing how the elements of fearlessness and playfulness and joy are ingredients for strengthening. “They have had to develop a zest for challenge and for life… it adds up to tremendous beauty and inspiration and uplifted feeling. The same goes for us.”
Wings soar on wind, and Spring sky grows bright, and I whisper thank you into dove dew dawn of morning. I continued to be humbled by wonder, by song, by wing, a presence with life: coasting on wing and wind, opening.
Nourished By, Nourishing:
“The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging” and “Listening to the Language of Birds” by David G. Haskill (Emergence Magazine). Listen to Bird Note. Subscribe to
, the spark of inspiration for this piece, without whom this practice and essay would not have unfolded its wings. NYC bird curious, attend!From a Past Season:
Getting Granular
"To linger longer in the details is an opportunity — a gift savor life and do so slowly. Look wide to the bird, the branch, the blue sky, the thickening leaves, and breathe in, taste the details, notice the broad strokes, the fields of colors, feel the feelings, the tides and horizons..."
Sky Gaze, In Wonder
"When a moment here on Earth feels unsurmountable, I look to the horizon, breathing. When we can, we widen our lens and view. There, colors dance, and sky speaks lessons of long views and wisdom, of wide skies and nights and daylight, and everything changing, how it’s always returning, this undulating wonder of color and backdrop to the birds flying."
Power in Focus
"I think about what I see in nature: about kinglets, hawks, corvids, birds in song and flight across great distances, and the soft feathers that encompass these tender beings, about the adaptability of breath and nature, and the power of practice together."
Dove Song, Heart Mind
"The bird — what does she say? Her song repeats like my own thinking, feeling, breathing; meditate on sound and you will come to know the feeling of the song of the heart of living. Refuge, the place to drop into the moment, into the heart, to hold ourselves."
