The Bird

We try to make sense of our lives. It’s what we humans do. In the face of the unexpected, we often say “Oh, there must be a reason that happened. One day we’ll know why.” Some explain it as God’s plan, others as a universal law, and so many of us just believe it to be true without thinking why. In the depths of the most sorrowful or seemingly tragic situations, we look for meaning to balance things out. If something horrifically unfair has occurred, how can there not be an ultimate reason for it?

When I stepped away from the work-a-day world of K-12 education, I was 28.5 years toward a 30 year pension. Something tragically and horrifically unfair had happened and while I did have a choice to keep working, it would have been at great cost to my sanity. Within a little more than a year, I quit my job, left a big chunk of pension on the table, sold my house, fit my life into a small storage unit, and began living in my retrofitted RAV4. All wondrous and beneficial things to have emerged from my so-called tragedy. But, were these the reasons why the bad thing happened, the explanation for it all? Not quite.

The other day I found out why the terrible no-good thing at work had happened. Read on…you know, if you believe in that kind of thing.

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Living in a horse barn, no matter how rustically renovated, presents a different type of living. You know how your house creaks at night? Magnify that by a horse barn’s worth. Critters getting inside? Yep – the sounds of scuffle and scurry are a definite in a large barn. And birds? Well, there’s a reason they call them barn swallows. It’s not every day that a bird gets in the barn here, but since I’ve arrived it’s happened three times.

The first time, the bird made it’s way out with the help of our resident monk.

The second time, I was alone with the bird and tried every which way to coax it out. I talked to it. I meditated right next to it, trying to will it to trust me. I put out a bowl of water. And then I tried to capture it in my hands. Oh – the squiggles I felt deep under my skin. I would get so close, the bird would be still, but as soon as I got my hands close enough, it would flap around and my nerves would jerk me back. On and on this went until I finally gave up with the realization that my gutsy-ness only went so far. As we are pretty much off the beaten track here at the center and don’t get very many drop-ins, it was a downright miracle when a yogi showed up out of the blue just to say hi about an hour later. He had the bird in hand within about two minutes and off it flew.

The third time a bird got in the barn revealed to me on a deep, biological level why we must do all we can to protect the life of other beings. This bird. Oh my god, this bird. It got trapped in the barn in the middle of a very hot day and it just didn’t appear very smart. I loved it straight away. It stayed up so high, and then it would just flutter about, bumping into things. I tried all my old tricks. I talked to it. I spent quality time with it. Finally, it was getting late and I didn’t want to bother anyone else. What to do? At dusk I watched her perch on the uppermost sill. She stared out the window at the rush of evening birds and to me it sounded as though they were calling for their friend. Throughout the night I would wake and go out in the hall to see her, forlorn and forgotten, shrinking and ragged. By the next morning, she was hiding in the eaves, her back to the world and running out of time.

Not much later that morning I went to the hardware store and bought two nets on poles. When I returned, I attached one to a very long piece of wood with duct tape. A friend happened to stop by at that time, and together we were able to sort of corral the bird between the nets. She was “caught” but she wasn’t going into either net. Somehow and after some time, we managed to use the nets to get her low enough that I could take her in my hands. My friend held the nets while I got a scarf, and with more courage than I thought I had, and after several tries, I gently collected her in my hands and took her outside.

It happened so fast. When I opened my hands it was as though my heart, my beating, human heart, flew off with her – she went so far, so fast, and I could feel myself fly with her. And, in that split moment, tethered by a thread of I don’t know what, the bird’s joy became a part of me, and I felt that almost nothing I had ever done had mattered quite as much.

Where the bird flew

Yesterday I thought I saw the bird as I was walking back from the pond. She was dancing in the air around me, doing a funny back and forth thing, chirping away. I’m sure it couldn’t have been her. But, either way, she didn’t return the piece of my heart that had soared away with her. And you know, I’m more than Okay with that.

It’s the perfect trade for learning how to protect a life. And the best reason for anything happening at all, tragical or otherwise.

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Acclimated

As a young child, perhaps age 6 or 7 or so, I became hyper cognizant of my many imperfections. Perhaps I just didn’t like who I was very much, or maybe I was already beginning to see how I thought other people saw me. Whatever was going on in my little mind, I developed a simple (and secret) system for improving myself.

To my young self, it seemed that out of all the kids I knew in school, there were two girls who embodied Perfection. They were super smart, their movements seemed measured and careful, and all in all they didn’t appear to have unwarranted bouts of immaturity or over-emotionalism. Ah – I had discovered the solution to my personality dis-order. All I needed to do to fix myself was to stop whatever it was I was doing – stop cold in my tracks – and mouth the words “Karen Weber” or “Judy Hill” and I would get an instant reboot. Just the sheer force of their names would conjure some mythical purity and give me a do-over. I could start fresh and strive harder to be just like them – until the next time I messed up.

This went on for months if not years. What a notion. Little Mary going about her day and then suddenly she stops, her gaze leveled on a horizon of hope, and mouths the name of a girl she thinks is better than her. In reflection, I was quite young to already think something was innately wrong with me and to believe that if I only stopped being myself, if I could manifest qualities I saw as external to me, I would be “better.” There were no traumas in my youth, nothing weird about my childhood that would suggest any disassociation or need to substitute my "self" for another. This was just run of the mill childhood perception filtered through the lens of a society that manufactures judgement and comparison as a hobby; a deeply ingrained human response. I had arrived at a verdict: I was not enough. And, even at such a young age, I had given the world around me permission to agree.

We will never know why my particular brand of low self-esteem required such a maneuver. So much of what we believe about ourselves and the world seems to come to us through some sort of osmosis. Indeed, we buy into the collective agreements about so many things. And yet, how often do we question our beliefs or examine our thoughts?

How did all that stuff get into the mind of a little girl to the point where she thought she needed to be someone else?

Let’s fast forward to my mind of a few months ago. When I arrived in Ocala, Florida this past January, I was surprised, if not a bit alarmed to discover how cold the nights could be. The temperatures dipped down below freezing more than once, and that was enough for me to decide I needed a small outdoor thermometer for my car. My friend Mama Donna, in the way only a true friend can say it said – “why? So you can let it tell if you’re cold or not?”

Yep. Pretty much.

Well, I did get the thermometer but I also began to really pay attention to my relationship with cold. If you had asked me six months ago, I would never have said yes to being able to sleep in a car in below freezing temperatures. “I like to be hot,” I’d say. “It’s not warm until it’s in the 80s.” Just to make my point, I’d most likely add, “ I’ll take the heat and the humidity.” In fact, I’ve organized my new life primarily so that I can be warmer.

But, as I watched the thermometer tell me it was mid-30s sleeping weather yet again, I could feel my mental habits begin to change. Perhaps it happened because I naturally adapted or because I was just there and wasn’t going to leave Ocala (Florida for goodness sake!). Perhaps it was because I became mindful of my relationship to temperature. But as the nighttime temps continued their steady and stubborn 30something-ish-ness, something in me acclimated to the point of not really minding it. I began to find it comforting to bunker down under seven layers of blankets, buried in layers of clothing, and learning ways to make my space smaller to retain heat. And then there was the slow morning crawl toward coffee as each part of me greeted the cold in its own restrained way.

Now, I am back in New York State decamped in a renovated, albeit unheated, horse barn for the interim. I am not startled this time, however, to find that the nights hover frequently in the 30s and 40s late into spring. I am, though, amused at my own changing mind as I find the temperatures don’t really bug me that much. It may take a minute (OK 5 or 10) longer to take the plunge out of the blankets in the morning, but the fact is, I would never even know it was 45 degrees if I didn’t check.

Habitual patterns of thought, no matter where they come from, surely do shape our response to the world. Hang on while I zip back in time and tell that little girl she is perfectly pure all on her own.

Don't think I'll need to take a coat.

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Be sure to subscribe to the blog here.Please note: Amazon affiliate links are links for which I may get a small percentage if used to purchase something. Thank you! :)

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p.s. for m ..since you bought the t-shirt and everything ; )

Unmoored

When I was seventeen, I couldn’t wait to leave my hometown. As a November baby, I was in luck – beer, boys, and yes some studying took me to a college just far enough away when I was still quite young. Brief visits home only confirmed my heart’s desire not to be there. It wasn’t so much my family that I wanted to get away from as it was the town. I often referred to it as the place you drove through to get somewhere else. And, there was the fact that we were non-affluents living in affluent suburbia at its best. It just wasn’t quite the right fit.

Suburbia not suiting me, I returned to the area after college to try my hand at living in the city of Buffalo for a few years. Not owning a vehicle until I was close to thirty, I flew around the city on my mountain bike, belting “Moon River” at the top of my lungs and always, always making it to the bar before day’s end. It was a time of short-lived jobs, punky boyfriends, and the absolute confusion that only the unsettled restlessness of early adulthood can bring about. And, it was very, very windy. My egocentrism was so tethered to taking things personally that the wind itself seemed to be out to get ME. Once again, I moved on. This time to a colder, albeit less windy part of New York State.

Fast forward a few decades to earlier this month and we find me a good 1,200 miles from New York State, sleeping (and sweltering) in Cracker Barrel parking lots on the gulf coast of Florida, and, for the first time since my travels began– beginning to feel a bit unmoored. Now, having made the ultimate leap to avoid all things unpleasant by selling my home and living life in my tiny RAV4 Ramper, I had made it possible for me to run away anytime to any place. Except, well, who was this I that was running and just where the hell did it think it was going?

Before I had set out on this grand adventure, I asked my adult daughter many times if she was Okay with me selling her childhood home and leaving to travel. Her generosity and love came out in this simple (and final) statement – “sigh…not to be cringe, mom, but home is you.” True enough. When I expressed my feelings of homesickness to her from a parking lot in Hillsborough County, Florida, we both felt the pull of home and I returned to stay with her for a while. Where was that you might ask? Oh, about 20 minutes from my hometown. And, the dance studio she is opening this summer? Yeah – on the street where I grew up.

Turns out if you can’t go home again, your children might do it for you.

One of my aspirations is to truly understand what impermanence means, both intellectually and experientially. This being so, I have set my intentions to not plan ahead and don’t book campgrounds or make firm plans more than a few days beforehand if possible. My visit with my daughter was open-ended – however, as with most hip-pocket mother/daughter relationships, we do need to separate in order to keep close. When it came time to leave this past week, my only plan was to come back to the meditation center I had been attending for the past couple of years for a weekend class. I had investigated places to stay around New York State, but hadn’t settled on anything. After some time, letting the idea sit and gel, I risked my nerves and asked.

Where am I now and hope to remain for the summer, you may wonder? Oh, at the dharma center about 40 minutes from the house I just sold.

Before leaving last December, my dearest spiritual friend and guide here at the center met with me and relayed the following analogy, which here I will fumble to paraphrase. What I had done by selling my home etc, was like jumping out of an airplane with no parachute. One’s instinct is to be frightened of crashing into the ground. But, when we can let go of the fear, we realize – there is indeed no ground. And, I will add, we may begin to see there is no fear either. My plan of no planning has been like drifting down through space and searching for the ground to meet me, of reaching around me to search for the parachute cord that just isn’t there. I have become habituated to landing…and to finding home.

Now, I have let go a little and I find myself once again on this familiar and beautiful land in a place of vast and profound serenity and love and know that this is perhaps the ultimate homecoming. With no expectation, yet with devotion and gratitude, I wish to stay here awhile. But, as my daughter said – home is not a place.

I am coming to understand that home is where my precious teacher is and ultimately it doesn’t matter where or when I am…I will always be at home.