The world is very cold today.
It’s five below zero as I write this, up two degrees from when I awakened this morning. Oh, the sun is fully up, make no mistake: Its glare is bright and harsh and even garish, but its power to warm the earth on this day is faltering.
I awakened also to reports of the death of a pop icon, someone whose music marked the days of our formative years. When I went to bed last night, the news was still dismissed as a hoax, but now the artists’s newest work, released only three days ago, assumes a whole new tenor: neither premonition nor prophecy, but sure and simple knowledge of what is, and of what is soon to come.
It has left my mood this morning bleak, the sun’s brilliance in this hard-edged cold a bitter cosmic joke.
And so, as always, I turn to the birds.
The red-tailed pair paid us a rare joint visit yesterday. The female was already seated comfortably in her perch in the dead cottonwood this morning, oblivious to the icy air. She is patience itself, unwilling to be nudged from her spot until just the right moment. Her flawless eyesight and comprehensive worldview are her best guides, and she lives her days accordingly.
We have no such perspective to inform our path.
We spiritually small and landbound creatures are afforded only the occasional glimpse: bits and pieces, sherds and slices of the broader world in which we walk. From our vantage point, it is often a beautiful world, to be sure , but never one that permits us to see it whole and entire.
For that, we must rely on the guidance of other spirits, like her own.
On days like this, life itself feels like a glimpse: something so small, so brief, so lacking in fullness of perspective and experience, as though the arc of human existence is always destined to be foreshortened, both in vision and in fact.
And yet . . . .
The artist who left this world last night, who now travels cosmic paths of stardust and follows the path of the hawk in flight, whose spirit now flies “free, just like that bluebird,” his existence remains a discrete, concrete, tangible thing. His legacy possesses physical form: not merely an imprint or an echo, but something that lives on in the senses of those still here, and those still to come.
It is, perhaps, a bit like the effect of the red-tailed hawk taking flight: a sudden flurry, motion and soft sound, just the faintest glimpse of power springing onto the winds.
And, if the world is fortunate, perhaps a single feather, shed as a gift for those who remain.
~ Aji
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