On the Front Lines of Spring

I walk to work. Birds sing for a while and then disappear behind the drone of vehicles and grinding, and when the war begins anew, I duck my head.

Dogs bark at me. Vehicles fly through stop signs without looking. There are digging machines and mud mountains and pits. Beggars yell. A siren screams. By the time I get to work I’m detached and exhausted and wishing only for a weekend.

So one morning I hold a recording device in my hand along the way, to capture the experience for a friend. The special, dire experience of a free soul being suffocated by society. Of drifting away from symphonies and being sucked into a crushing vacuum.

“Listen to it,” I snarl with a sneer, “there are all these birds at first, and peace, and then the horror of the waking world gradually drowns them out. It’s very ugly and really metaphoric.”

After listening to it, a controversial reply: “I don’t get that at all. You can still hear the birds, even behind all the cars and garbage trucks and angry homeless people.”

“Ridiculous,” I snap, buried alive by a ground-gazing grimace so tight my shoulder tips disrespect the very scars of lost wisdom teeth. I play the recording to myself just to spite the suggestion.

In it I discover truth.

Behind the growl of logging trucks chirps a light, airy tune. Sliding delivery doors and rattling air conditioning units lurch across the low end, but high above flits a little harmony. It dances, unbound, communicative. To each other.

And, instinctively, to me.

Their songs, hypnotic hieroglyphics, offer a glimpse into something greater. Relax, it urges. Listen for the music. Look UP.

A foreign finch surprises me, suddenly guiding my gaze. I glance heavenward and loosen my shoulders.

And in an instant I am outside again, and the world has grown green.

These oaks. These veterans. Scuffed and scarred, chipped and chiseled, simply for being. For standing as they are, where they are. Friends gone, homes thinned, bodies soaked with waste and wickedness.

Yet here they are. Brighter and bolder, stronger and older than anything and everything around them. The finch alights in a nest, and the nest has been there for generations, and it has withstood hurricanes. Hurricanes.

The weight of that massive thought is perfectly punctuated elsewhere by baby sparrow-song, physically fragile but brilliantly hidden snugly among the network of branches and new leaves in a sublime coexistence that is the product of a wiser wisdom, one that has evolved slowly and silently across continents. And millennia.

I realize with a sudden clarity the essence of error. Silly, silly human.

Our mortal minds are seekers. They hunger. And we feed our minds not with what is, but with what we want to see. What we expect to encounter.

As another vehicle rushes by through the mud, something different lifts my fingers to acknowledge its driver. Something whole. The driver is himself a veteran, a seeker, hungry. His fingers acknowledge back.

The dogs bark some more. I note the conflict beneath their voices. Penned, unsoothed, so very hungry, and I nod to them in sympathy. They stare back, their volume vanishing. We are - all of us - mortal, fragile, alone.

Garbage compactors and sirens, grinding machines that dig and wild nations that spasm, all form a wall of warfare in between the soft person who entered and the leathered person who will depart. To stand as I am, where I am - to see above the wall and witness the great network of Nature and the perfect indestructible miracle of a homemade home (built by beaks!) - feeds not on desire or reward or planned pleasure, but on the nourishment of music, the fortune of fellowship, and an endless patience of self.

I understand once more, spelling out verses of gratitude to all who choose to listen. From the celebration of swifts to the restorative vision of allies. There is no weekend; there is only today. I stop and speak to the homeless man, whom I discover is toothless and, after a meager helping of gas station macaroni and cheese, no longer angry or compelled to yell. Stay out of trouble, Leon. 

And be safe.

May the transmission of this message be to the spirits of others as the ancient oaks are to mine. May my song guide the gaze of another from the struggling shoulder-suffocation of society to the subtle healing harmony in between, melodies made by a seemingly ordinary seasonal metamorphosis of the most divine design. May its signature be etched on my mind and scribe a transition within my own heart, to one of understanding and patience, so that we may - all of us - walk onward.

A wondrous and eloquent warmth of green has found this land. And it can, in one moment, cure it completely of conflict.