Monday, March 25, 2013

Evensong

Every evening at dusk, I hear a bird singing.

There is a small huddle of garden and trees the next building down. In their midst sings the bird that I cannot see.

This is my favorite moment of each day. I open my window to the night and listen.

Can you hear him?





I can't tell you why a bird singing at dusk brings tears to my eyes. Something about joy, something about sorrow, something about the world and how beautiful it is...how exquisitely, heart-piercingly beautiful. 

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world, said E.B. White.

The bright living of birds is one of so many, many reasons to love the world. 

The songbird lightly carries the weight of so many of our hopes and dreams on its small wings, thrumming with life and the promise of spring, even in this untimely cold. Ever and always, spring after spring, since the dawn of the world. 

How do we spend so much of our time each day ignoring how incredible this is? This repeating cycle of joy and hope reaching back for millennia? The entwined and interdependent lives of winged ones and crawling ones and swimming ones, two-footers and four-footers? It is a bird singing in that tree, and it is I singing.

Inside myself I say, thank you for letting me hear this and say this and feel this, World. Let your singing be always in my heart.



2 comments:

  1. I didn't realize how much I miss bird song until I moved back near trees. There is something deep and evocative about listening to a song the earth has heard for thousands of years... and you write about it so beautifully that tears stung my eyes when I read about your evensong experience. Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful life and world.

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