When I am feeling too squeezed on the ground, exhausted by everything in my care, I look for a little sky. There are always birds flying back and forth, city birds flitting around our human edges, singing their songs.
I needed the birds worse & worse as I got older / as if some crack had opened in the human scheme of things / & only birds with their sharp morning notes / had the sense for any new day
A cardinal in a slant of winter sunlight goes straight to the bloodstream like brandy, and the heart leaps up like a startled stag.
Can’t say what made me take a frisk so uncommon of late years, as to write verses of free-will. I suppose the same impulse which makes birds sing when the storm seems blown over.
I decided it would be better to be a bird. Birds are very busy at one period each year caring for babies, but this lasts only a few weeks with many of them, and then their babies are grown and gone. Best of all, they leave their houses forever and take to camping for the rest of the year. No wonder they are happy.
I wonder who we would be, in the soul of the species, if we could fly—really fly, the way birds do. . . . You and I shall never know the open sky as a way of being—never know the touch of a thermal or the taste of a thundercloud, never see our naked shadow on a mountain or slice a cirrus with a wing.
The more I work with birds, the more I believe in the undreamt, the things we are not given to know.
In solitary moments magpies will perch on a branch and mutter soft soliloquies of whines and squeals and chatterings, oblivious to what goes on around them. It is one of those things, I suppose, intelligence now and then does, must in fact now and then do: must think, must play, must imagine, must talk to itself.
He learnt to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios, and a fair bit about berries.
I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.
What a terrible, wonderful curse we [bird-watchers] suffer from, to find joy in chasing flying cigars through town to witness the impossible by the light of ordinary streetlamps; what ridiculous fools we must be.
Today, perhaps more than ever before, we thirst for community; we hanker for transformation; we long to reconnect with the incandescence of life. We need to make those inner journeys. But what if there are no bees or butterflies or hummingbirds to accompany us?
I find penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a penguin.
I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.
How had I allowed myself to become so busy? How long had it been since I’d spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake? Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my own beloveds, listening to birdsong and wind in the pines?
Neither the land nor the birds yield their stories all at once. You have to come back again and again.
