Nothing Better to Do Than Listen
Face to Face with the Mystery of a Mockingbird
I was nearly at the end of my Friday midday walk, just minutes away from my electromagnetism-and-artificial-light-filled office when this little creature caught my attention.
This master of imitation set me to thinking.
According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, there are currently more than 11,000 bird species on Planet Earth, and (according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) there are from 50 billion to 430 billion individual birds, or at least 6 birds for every human on the planet.
What are birds? Their major distinguishing feature is their feathers. They are warm-blooded (can control their body temperature internally) vertebrates (have a backbone as do fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals) with a four-chambered heart (like mammals), wings (though not all birds use them to fly), hard-shelled eggs, and strong vision.
There is also a huge amount of variety among birds, including differences in overall size, color and patterns, beak shape and size, foot and talon style and use, vocal ability (such as that of the mockingbird), dietary preferences, and courtship, mating, and parenting styles.
Birds are only one small component of the vast and varied animal "kingdom." There are also the colossal number of plants that cover the planet with their own magnificant variety in appearance and function. And the many manifestations of water, from oceans to puddles to clouds to icebergs to hot springs to urine to tears. And all the features and forms of "earth" itself, from soil to sand to rocks to mountains.
And then there is us, the human beings.
We depend on and often adore all the variety around us. But when it comes to the variety among us? Most of us don’t even come close to recognizing it all. Fewer of us accept it all as valid (rather than as mistakes and inferiority), much less feel in awe of and celebrate it (rather than harm or destroy it).
“The world is a gate, not a wall…. Wonder is an act in which the mind confronts the universe … [and] stands face to face with the mystery rather than with its own concepts.” Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, ch. 9.
[Title of post from Mary Oliver’s poem “Mockingbirds”]