Sparrows Falling Like Leaves

The birds have been mobbing the feeder these past few days. I'm not sure why; the weather has been mild and the feed is the same was what I was giving them a week or so ago. All I know is that the usual neighborhood flock -- two chickadees, innumerable house sparrows, a female cardinal (and occasional visits by two males and another female) -- has been visited by a larger array of additional birds.

There is the trio of mourning doves, pinkish-brown-grey with little pink feet and tiny heads, that bob and nod in the gravel of the driveway. A sextet of starlings, all long pointy beaks and sleek glittering feathers, raucously jostle each other over food and mates on the lawn. Two Carolina wrens bounce proudly along the porch rail, arching their eye stripes and cocking their heads at me, looking through the front window glass. A northern flicker pecked holes in the budding silver maple, and this morning a downy woodpecker jumped from porch railing to porch railing on the way to the suet, looking like a spy darting from cover to shadowed cover. There's a squirrel, too, a large fat healthy one, who stares longingly up at the feeder it cannot reach before settling for a meal of fallen seeds.

The sparrows are the most ordinary of the flock, individual personalities submerged within their numbers, brown bodies fluttering up and flying down, rising and falling like a swirl of windblown leaves. They say that God notes everything, even the fall of a sparrow, and I have lived my whole life believing that the message there was centered on the death of a small brown bird, on the idea that you do not have to be great to be mourned.

Yet now I wonder, watching the birds ascending and descending in this feathery, circular waterfall, a kind of avian Jacob's ladder, whether there is another way to understand that passage. What if the falling sparrow was not a dying one, what if the fall was not a plummeting out of the sky and into death, but the falling of a bird descending to feed, the dive of a small feathered body in play, falling down in order to fly up again. What if what God notices is not the deaths of these small beings, but their lives? Not their last fall, but the falling and rising of all of their living days?

The sparrows are falling and rising like leaves, whirling in the winds like we do in the currents of our lives, and surely a deity that notices and appreciates the joy of a small bird playing with lightness and air is one that will also mourn, but at the same time await eagerly the return of that small bright spirit home.

I want not a grieving god, but a laughing one. The god of the windblown sparrow holds out that hope, that my small joys and gladnesses are just as worthy of notice as the pain, grief and death that come at the end of all of our lives, sparrows, humans, all. Watching the birds swarm around the feeder, I feel that hope glowing inside like a soft morning sunrise, warm and glorious and betiding another wonderful day.

Comments

[butuki]

A waterfall of birds... an opening in the belly of heaven to let out the confusion of snow and birds. All gathering at your feeder. I could sit and watch this for hours, I think.

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

Oh! Rana, that made me cry.

On a more prosaic note... if you compare this to your posts of a few months ago, when you were so aware of the unfamiliarity of the landscape, it's clear that you're feeling a little more at home now. :)

[jo(e)]

I love the way you write.

[Phantom Scribbler]

I love this piece, Rana. I think it's my favorite Rana work of all.

[Jane Dark]

What Phantom said.

[Songbird]

Rana, how touching and gorgeous.

[Jill Smith]

My thought as I read this, "Oh lordy. What a beautiful writer."

thank you.

[Rana]

Is it hokey to say that I'm touched that you're touched? Anyway, I am.

P/H - you're right! I hadn't really realized that -- but, yeah, I do feel a lot more in tune with the rhythms of the place (at least as far as my own yard -- the bigger picture is still hard to grasp).

butuki - There's just something so wonderful about a porch full of birds, especially a porch full of birds playing and chirping and eating. Sometimes I find myself just staring out the window in the front door (I'm harder to see there, than when I look through the big window), mesmerized.