Week 3: BIRDS

A Million Wingbeats

Who wouldn’t like to see the sky dark with a passing flock of birds? And not just a momentary flicker as wingbeats come between you and the sun, but minutes that stretch on and on as throngs of flying bodies block your view of the sun. This is how numerous passenger pigeons were once. How the sound must have thundered.

Just now out the car window I saw a flock of small black birds—starlings maybe—spiraled out above a field. The birds flew in a long formation 50 or so birds thick that corkscrewed slightly like half of a double-helix. I drove east and they flew west and the line continued for nearly 30 seconds as I sped along its length at 80 miles an hour. And in that last 5 seconds when that line of birds just didn’t end, I felt a stirring of awe.

But these moments, when my heart jumps at the fecundity of the world, cannot compare to the overwhelming awe a person must have felt watching millions of birds pass overhead at once. The stirring would have time to magnify and turn into a kind of wonderful dread as the wingbeats continued like pouring rain and the sun did not even flicker behind the bird curtain.

I would like to learn to see the way the world is still this huge. A million miracles pass unseen before my eyes each day. I would like to learn to see the immensity of this beauty and to fall down in gratitude and even in fear