Birds – Under the Hood 2

I haven’t always paid a lot of attention to birds. One of my clinical placements in grad school was at a strictly inpatient VA hospital out in the country. My clinical supervisor there, Dick – a very sweet, introverted man – was an avid birdwatcher. I don’t think that I was totally sucking up when I bought a pair of binoculars and started, after work, to stalk the wild avians with him. I think his passion for these little creatures genuinely infected me, almost immediately

Since then, birds have been, for me, a source of endless fascination, wonder – and mystery. Inhabiting, as they do, the space between earth and heaven, they have more and more seemed to point towards connections between those realms. (Bear with me here. I know this is starting to sound pretty flaky, but it is an awareness that has gradually grown over many years.)

At the very least, birds draw our attention to an aspect of physical reality that is less static or stationary. They are in constant movement – hopping around, looking around. We don’t see them stay put anywhere for long – and we never see them sleep. They sing. (I love our mockingbirds.) And they fly!

Sometimes the aspect of reality towards which they point us is not visible. At this bucolic VA hospital, when we would sit in the large dayroom of our psychiatric unit, my supervisor liked to identify – by the sound of their calls – the various birds in the big field outside.

(This made for one of the most confused moments of my tour of duty there. When new patients were being processed into the unit, part of this process was for them to be interviewed, in this same room, by the unit’s psychiatrist – with all the rest of the staff watching this obsolete, humiliating ritual. Dick would amuse himself by trying to guess what diagnosis the psychiatrist would give the patient. One day, as a new patient was being interviewed, Dick leaned over to me and whispered, “Yellow breasted sapsucker”. I spent a moment of complete disorientation before I realized that he was diagnosing a bird, not the patient.)

Before meeting Dick, I would probably not even have “heard” these birdcalls from the field behind us. But especially when I knew what the identified bird looked like – and even more when I had seen them live through my binoculars – the sound of these birds filled my ears with wonderful, interesting, sometimes beautiful sounds. And my mind’s eye with movement, form, and color – including the beautiful meadow, which would not otherwise have brought itself indoors for me. The otherwise solid separation of outdoors and indoors, man-made and natural, mostly logical/conceptual and organic/esthetic – all these separations got mixed up and mooshed together.

Another incidence of the kind of invisible seam that birds were for me weaving into the seeming empty spaces around me, occurred during this same period - when the world of birds was so much coming alive for me. My classmate Harold and I were walking across campus, when I heard the unmistakable chirp of a cardinal from the dense bush by the building in front of us.

“There’s a cardinal in there”, I said.

Harold, the good New York City boy that he was, asked, challengingly, “How do you know?”

“Well, they like to hang out in bushes like that, and that’s the chirp they make. When they’re up in the treetops, especially in the springtime, they just sing their little hearts out – but down in bushes like this, they chirp.”

Harold eyed me suspiciously, abandoned his premise that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and dropped back to his real bottom line. “So what?”

In New York, where Harold had grown up, you were bombarded by so many stimuli that there was no way you could keep up with them all – you had to filter them or be overwhelmed. So the primary filters became, “Is this dangerous to me?” or “Has this got something that I want?” If that stimulus did not meet either of those criteria, why would I want to bother focusing on it? So what?
The “so what” for me was that this sound suddenly populated my world with beautiful stimulation, not over-stimulation. Something that I could not even see made me feel instantly connected with the natural world around me. It filled some of the “space” that is necessary to feel separate.