In the Ashes

“The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.”  -Kafka

Damn the days when the meetings at work go badly, when a family member gets some not-so-good medical news, when arriving homes turns into a big three-way fight, when your first shot at teaching Zumba ends with a sweat stain in a painfully embarrassing place.  Damn the days when you wish you were someone else, when you realize you are no longer young, when perhaps you are not even any longer sexy, when all of your confidence melts away and you are left with a longing for the old days, for nights at the old coffee shop where you and your old pal Ramon served up lattes while dancing on the counters, both of your heads covered in the soap suds from the sink full in the back, when you laughed good guttural laughs a dozen times a day, when last-minute road trips lasted 72 hours and swept nearly the whole of the east coast, when almost every night was spent out on the wrap-around porch, Camel Light and Cabernet to the right, laptop on the lap, the words coming out of you faster than you could type them. 

Now I type 75 words per minute, mostly on student work.  I still laugh but mostly at myself.  Things have changed. Starkly.

But, as my friends reminded me yesterday after one of these bad days, today is a new day, and as an old hero of mine used to say: “It’s fresh with no mistakes in it.  Yet.”

Here’s when I should write about the phoenix, about rising up from the ashes, about the glory of trying and trying again. 

But instead, I’ll write about my robins again, harbingers of new beginnings, of the rebirth of ideas and spirit.   My sweet robins, who I wake to every morning now, who wait for me on both porches, almost seem to watch me out of the corner of their eyes, wondering about me.  They have spirit.  They have joy.  They have kinship.  I know because I watch them as they protect one another, as they dance with each other in the air, as they sing in the mornings and dart high and low into the evenings.  They do not fly as high as the hawks, as the vultures, as the geese and ducks.  They are not as majestic as the eagles.  They stay close.  They need no escape. 

Last year, I watched one of them die.  I held her as the life slowly drained out of her, and I spoke soft words to her, telling her I was with her.  More tired than afraid, she stared carefully at me as I ran my finger over her wing then laid her down.  I was with her as her body seized suddenly, and I watched helplessly as her open eye went dark and her little body folded in on itself.  I cried a few silent tears over her for a while then buried her in the corner of my backyard. 

I wondered, like I so often do, what I could learn from the robin, from her quiet death on my back porch, from the way she waded patiently through those last labored breaths.   And what comes to me is that more important than rising from the ashes is, for me anyway, staying with them, accepting the ashes as ashes, the moments when I’m knee-deep in ashes and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of them, no way to rise, no wings to carry me.  In these broken-winged moments, I must learn to turn my eyes away from the sky and face the moment with the patience of the robin—the bird who has spent her joyful little life darting through the air and singing the mornings into their light.

Sometimes in the evenings, after a broken-winged day, I want to run away, to fly away, to be something else, someone else, somewhere else.  I fear the slow dark days.  I fear the bad news, the sad realizations, the growing old and tired.  Perhaps part of me believes that I can go back to where I have been, that it’s even possible, that ashes can be built back into clean, untouched joy.   But just now, a robin lands on my fence, just outside my back door, and she reminds me that this is the only moment that exists.  And it is mine. 

She flies away as fast as she arrived, but she doesn’t go far.  I step outside after her, to stand in the evening air.  A storm has just passed, and the ground is still wet.  And because there is nowhere else to be, I stand in the dusk alone, forgetting for a second about the new day that will be tomorrow.

Fear of Flight

Near Cowanesque Lake a couple weeks ago, my husband pulled the car over to the side of the road so that I could jump out and stare up at four soaring bald eagles, their wings unmoving as they dove and rose in the invisible currents generated by sun's warmth on the ground or by the interference of the hills to my left.

To soar like this, the very tips of their feathers on the very tips of their wings twist slightly, propelling them until the birds drop from the current, their large golden brown bodies becoming larger and larger to me as I stand wide-eyed underneath them, reaching one arm towards them as if I might have a chance to run my fingers over their feathers before they catch another current.

I know very little about how to fly.  In fact, ten years ago, after a flight to North Carolina from New York, as I gripped either side of my seat in terror during some bad turbulence, I vowed that if the plane stayed in the air long enough to get me home safely, I'd never  fly again.  And I haven't.  Like my sister says, "I've now promised my soul never to die like that."  Perhaps what she means by "like that" is thousands of feet over land, in the control of some combination of air currents, engines, pilots, and gravity without any of your own grip on your own fate.

Oh, how I have wanted to see the world since then, to fly to the places that have called to me--Denmark, France, Colorado, California, Canada, Kenya, Mali.  But the need to take part in my own flight, to steer myself through the currents has stopped me, may always keep me.

My only glimpse is the feeling I get when my chin is lifted so high into the air to watch the birds that I forget I am standing on ground.  When all you can see is sky, you can almost believe you are flying.

The eagles' wings rise in gravity but fall with the strength of their pectoralis muscles.  My own arms, so unlike wings, both stretching out into the sky now as I spin in circles, fall in gravity and rise in my own strength.  My husband climbs out of the car and I run over to him and jump on his back with excitement.  He spins me around.  "Do you see them?" I say.

He laughs and nods.

And then two of the eagles dive towards one another, their talons reaching, clasping the talons of the other, and as we watch, they begin to spin in a shared circle, bird over bird, as if they were one bird falling, falling, so fast that my mouth is open in awe.  Then they let go of one another and screech so loudly that it echoes out over the hill, and we are left with the tingling of our spines as they each catch their own current and depart from one another and then from us, leaving the skies empty.

The two birds were not mates though mates have been known to do this spinning dance in midair.  These were two males, one of them having flown too close to the shared circle of another pair.  This was a dance of dominance, and the shrieks were angry warnings.  Both males were stunning, and I am in awe of their brief encounter.  I turn to my husband and wish for a moment that he would do such a thing if another male came too close to our inner circle.  We are both still laughing excitedly.

My daughter wants to know if she will fly one day, and I always tell her that of course she will, that she can go anywhere she wants.  What I don't tell her is that she will have to learn to let the currents carry her and let go of the need to pilot herself, alone.

As I climb back into the car, I am still impeded by gravity, by how heavily I tread, cling to each step on the earth, each grip  of my hand on something steady and reliable.  I tell myself I am in control, but the birds remind me this is an illusion.

Five miles down the same road, we pull the car over for another pair of eagles, and I leap out of the car to the let the wind hit my face and blow my hair and so that I can stare so high for so long into the sky that I will forget, one more time today, that I am standing on solid ground while the eagles dip and dive, dip and dive, my arms spread out at my sides, my fingers feeling their own way through a current or two, as if they could be propellers.

Who knows.  Maybe one day I'll go with my dad to Kenya and see Kibera.  Maybe I'll go to Copenhagen and meet some of our family who live there.  The longer I watch the birds, the less I forget the fear that I cannot always be in control, that I won't be here forever, and not every current will take me home.

When all you can see is sky, you can almost believe you are flying.  

Spring's Lesson: Letting Go

The dark-eyed juncos are gone from my backyard feeder, and in their place are the sparrows and finches.  The robins, too, are back, pulling up worms from our lawn, performing their darting dances from fence post to fence post.  Unfortunately, the house two doors down that was abandoned for three years is now occupied, and when the new neighbors moved in, they removed the robin's nest from the top of their porch light.  Now our annual robin couple we've come to rely on for at least a baby or two every May has no place to roost.  Already this spring, I've seen the couple--the male and female robin who have come back, expecting their nest to be where they left it.  They land on the metal porch light and slide slowly off, bewildered, mouths full of dry grass.

I'm glad they're back.  I had thought they wouldn't return, not after what happened last year.  They had three babies last May, and as the hatchlings progressively became more alert, sitting on the edge of the nest and flapping their wings, I grew nervous.  If they fell, they'd hit the concrete, and so I laid out two yoga mats and one sleeping bag mat, just in case, as I waited for them to venture out into the world.

When I came home from work one day to find one of the hatchlings hopping across the road, I couldn't help myself.  I went after it, spoke softly and kindly, bent over with my hands out, and it hopped right on.  Slowly, I carried the baby back to its nest, intending to put it back with the other two.

My husband ran inside and came back out with a dining room chair he put down under the nest.

"Take him," I said, wanting my husband to climb up on the chair and put the baby back in the nest.

But something about my husband's hand around the baby's back terrified it, and it began to shriek, at which point all three babies took off into the air, their first flight together, each in their own direction--one under a car, the other smack in the middle of the road again, and yet another under a bush.

"Damn it," I shrieked as a gang full of neighborhood birds flew over to cuss me out, all of them on the parking lot dancing about, as they chirped angrily.  My husband and I had seen this before--birds defending each other like this, especially their babies, the innocents, but we'd never seen such a large group so sorely offended. They were aghast, all of them--sparrows, finches, starlings, and robins.

"I'm sorry," I said, having learned my lesson--that I knew less than they did about how to protect the babies, how to help them navigate the world.  I had interfered and only made things worse.  After that, for several weeks, the two parents had to deliver worms to three separate locations--under the neighbor's porch, behind our back fence, and under a lawn decoration the next block over.  Every once in a while, one of them would perch on my deck and glare through the window as if to suggest that they were exhausted, and I was at fault.  Stupid human.

I'm sorry.

Still, they have returned, and as a peace offering, I ran out and bought them a roosting house, one just like Google says they prefer--with an open front and semi-open sides.  We hung it on our porch, high above the ground, out of the elements.  I wait for them to bring their mud and dried grass there so that I might have another chance to watch the babies hatch and grow, and this time, take flight on their own time.  But as of yet, the robins have denied me the pleasure.  They do not like how often we go in and out of our front door, how much noise we make, the dinging of our wind chimes.

Last week, I stepped out onto the back deck and found a lone white egg on the top of the recycling bin.  It was cracked, a tiny yellow pool beneath it, and as far as I could see, there was no conceivable explanation for its being there.  There is no roof above the bin.  There is no nest anywhere it could have fallen out of.  But still it was there, a mourning dove's loss.

"Maybe it stuck to the bird and fell off of her while she was flying," my husband said as I held it up and examined it.

Maybe he's right.  Yet, I'd like to think of the tiny egg as a sign, a reminder even.  The little life that was inside the egg is gone now, and the cracked artifact of both its beginning and end is left to me.  I let it remind me of last year's lesson, of the importance of standing at a distance, of observing with love and respect, of letting go of control.  And I stand at my front window and wait for new life to return to my doorstep.