Bird on the Roof after Rain
Yeah, we’ve got to stick together, even when we’ve got the urban blues. After years of living in beautiful remote places - near the Canadian border in Eastern Washington, in the mountains of northern New Mexico, in the Sonoran desert and along the banks of the Guadalupe River in the hill country of Texas, I find myself living in an urban apartment. Hopefully, this is a temporary situation. My nature mystic soul is longing for more earth touch than I can possibly get here but there is a unique charm about this situation.
With my nature connections so sparse, each one becomes a treasured moment. I have lived in this apartment for 3 months now. I am a devotee of informal bird watching. The birds of the air are my deepest soul connection. For the past three months my only companions have been the urban gangs of grackles and pigeons with the occasional modest sparrow or two thrown in. With two magnificent exceptions. One day when I was on the phone with a dear friend and she had just shed some light on a question I have been grappling with for years and in that moment of aha! a red-tailed hawk swooped past my second floor window! Whoosh!The second time I was having a passionate conversation with someone I am very close to and a great blue heron flew so close to my window his wing almost touched it. I gasped and it totally changed the course of the conversation. I took the picture of the little bird looking at his reflection from my bedroom window which looks out on the roofs of the buildings of the shopping center across the alley. Another precious moment.
I think about my grandchildren and how their lives will be so different from mine. I have been privy to the lushness of nature in all her abundance. I drank from rivers when I was a child. I walked on beaches for miles with no sign of human presence or contamination. I was able to walk in the last vestiges of a world rich with birds and animals and plants - the last unspoiled wildernesses. My grandchildren will live in a very different world. I want them to know that each bird counts.