A Robin

Good Sunday to you. A small piece today about a small bird on a small nest, and a wide bit of wonder.

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Under the eave, behind the gutter, in a round nest over oval eggs, sits a Robin, sailing like a soft boat through a passage of heightened time. Around her hovers the bell-tone of silence that hovers over all nativity. When you walk by you sense it, you slow down, step lightly.

I try not to stare when I pass, but in my many glances I’ve noticed there are times when she holds her beak up as though sensing a note of music, or even expressing one. It seems a posture gained by something felt by her, as though it’s not just she lifting her beak, but the nest she sits in and the eggs she keeps warm, and the spring afternoon that’s humid with the exhalations of leaves, on a planet that still manages to hold up a livable climate. A trillion uncountable exchanges must go on for it all to keep working, for a brooding Robin to lift her beak.

Beaks and how they tilt them is one of the charms of birds. But there is also the nest. Is it possible to imagine a more concise and humble home? No guest room. No utility room or cluttered garage. Just the little by which the whole can enter, barely enough room for the bird and her brood, but able to hold the world. Perhaps the key isn’t size but shape. “Birds build their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours,” said Black Elk.

That we might all have a religion that learns from birds, that has a small woven nest at it’s heart. That we might have a science able to step away from it’s scopes and models and certainties, that fronts the world anew with fresh humility and emptiness, that asks all over again the old, still beautiful questions.

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