What a Little Bird Told Me

Posted on June 2, 2008 by Dave Pollard

photo from Fallingbrook Community Association

As I was thinking about Beth’s Where is Home for You? contest, about the responses to the contest on Patti’s 37Days FaceBook page, and about my own article on the subject, a chickadee landed on the bird feeder just outside my window. It occurred to me that this little creature might have some thoughts on the subject.

I started by asking her name, and the answer she chirped back didn’t translate into any phoneme I know of, so for this interview I’m calling her Unique Chickadee, since I think that’s what her name means:

Dave: OK Ms Chickadee, could you please start by telling me what you do for a living, and what you do just for fun?

Unique Chickadee: What I “do for a’livin”? Very musical expression, but I have no idea what you mean.

Dave: What you do to feed and shelter yourself and your family, then. And then what you do with the time left over.

Unique Chickadee: Hmmm. I do what you see me do. I do whatever I like. As you told your friend the other week, the best way to describe it is to say “I do…this.” I eat stuff that’s tasty. I sleep in the shelter of the trees because it’s cozy and comfortable and just because I like to do it. I splash in the water to get clean, especially with others, and just because I like to do it. I fly, to look around, to meet others, to discover new places, and just because I like to do it. I sing, to communicate, to identify myself, to keep myself company, and just because I like to do it. I play, with others and by myself, because that’s how I learn, and just because I like to do it. I don’t see the distinction between your a’livin activities and fun activities. I do all these things because I want to. They’re all easy, and they’re all fun. As for family, I’m not in a breeding pair, so except for the Time of Newborns, when I help out the parents of the babies, protecting their nest from attack, finding sources of food and so on, I need only look out for myself.

Dave: I thought birds were flock creatures?

Unique Chickadee: I have been a part of several flocks in my life. Like most of us, I’m a bit of a rover, and if I find a flock that needs me more than the one I’m with, I’ll ask to join them. My Purpose is To Be Of Use, but that’s never a burden. We help each other out, but our a’livin is pretty easy and carefree. By the way, we’d love a birdbath out by the feeder. Yes, we know all about your cat — he’s fast and clever, but so are we.

Dave: Not my cat. Not sure he belongs to anyone, really.

Unique Chickadee: Really? Far too pampered to survive without a human keeper. He must belong with one of the other humans in your community.

Dave: Who are you, or what are you, other than what you do, if that isn’t too philosophical a question?

Unique Chickadee: I am who you see. I am me, Unique Chickadee. If you are asking what I believe, what I think about and care about, what I aspire to, what I enjoy, what I am capable of that I don’t do, what qualities I have that make me good at what I do, that is another question. Is that what you mean?

Dave: OK, yes, I guess so.

Unique Chickadee: I believe all-life-on-Earth is wonderful. I think about visiting new places, and I imagine doing new things. I care about my well-being and that of my flock. I aspire to love everyone and everything I encounter. I enjoy intuiting and learning, the fruits of my discovery. I am capable of imagining things I have never seen or heard or felt. I have the useful capacities of patience and attentiveness and appreciation and playfulness. You put too fine a point on this distinction between what we do and who we are. When I am by myself I sing, for the sheer joy of it, and maybe someone else will hear me and enjoy my song or maybe no one will hear. It doesn’t matter. You told your friend you are a writer, a ‘blogger’, and that you’re impatient because you’re not ‘doing’ anything. Can’t you see how silly that is? Your blogging is just like my singing to myself. It’s what we do, it’s who we are, it’s all the same thing.

Dave: Is there something latent in you, something that you need to be or do, or that your flock needs you to be or do?

Unique Chickadee: I don’t understand the meaning of ‘need’. This word makes no sense to me.

Dave: Do you ever feel lonely, or sad, or as if you’re missing something?

Unique Chickadee: Not for a second. This is a world full of love and joy and connection. It is all right here. I am astonished at how you humans have tricked yourselves into seeing this world of abundance as a world of scarcity.

Dave: So you don’t long to be part of a mating pair, to make love?

Unique Chickadee: I ‘make love’ with every creature I meet in different ways in everything I do. Everyone I meet and sing with and play with is my ‘mate’. You said it yourself last week: Love, Conversation, Community. That’s why we’re here. The act of sexual coupling carries with it a huge responsibility, and I don’t feel that instinctive desire to accept that responsibility that the breeders do. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. I don’t want to be that unhappy.

Dave: OK, last question: Where is Home, to you? Where do you belong?

Unique Chickadee: You spoke to your friend recently about how time and place are bound up with each other. We non-humans live in Now Time. Your Clock Time, that passes and is gone and fills you with regret for what was or what might be or what should be or what might have been, it is just an abstraction, a human artifact, designed to keep you in thrall to the other humans who want you to be everybody-else, obedient, fearful, helpless, dependent, full of grief. You have to relearn that all time is Now Time, there is no other time, and that Now Time is eternal, limitless. For the same reason, we live in Now Space. When we nest, when we hibernate, when we migrate, when we move from one flock to another, we are always Home, we can never be elsewhere, this is where we belong. This is it.

Dave: I don’t understand.

Unique Chickadee: I know. I’m sorry. I think your brain is in the way. Keep watching. Pay attention. Listen to your instincts, and to the songs of all-life-on-Earth. You’ll figure it out. You’re pretty smart, for ahuman.

Category: Being Human

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7 Responses to What a Little Bird Told Me

Beth Patterson says:

June 2, 2008 at 23:42

Dave: But I really don’t want to be smart, it’s just a default mode.UC: But when you were writing last week about the 2 parts of you–and you were talking out loud about it and didn’t know that anyone was listening, here at the Bird Bar and Grill…well, I was impressed that you could think like that. However, I was unimpressed that you take it so seriously–your thinking like that. Dave: I try hard not to take myself seriously.UC: See what I mean?Dave: Well, ok. So here’s what I really want to ask you. If home is whereever you are in the Now Time, then why do you always come back to the same places? Why don’t you just keep moving about–always just stopping whereever you are?UC: That’s easy. Having many homes is not the same as not having any home. You see, Daverino (may I call you that?) what I’m trying to say just doesn’t have a lot of word that express it. My connection is with my clan. That is home. My connection is with certain trees I like–for reasons that are too hard to describe. My connection is with certain plants that I like–I like the way they smell and the bugs they attract. Home is something deep in my body–and because there are many places where I feel this feeling means that I feel at home in the universe. It doesn’t mean that I can be comfortable everywhere in the universe. Dave: You are a profound little teacher. Thank you. What’s my exercise for the next lesson?UC: I’d like to have you go visit a city and watch the animal life there. Watch their adaptations, which are every bit as amazing as adaptations to any extreme habitat. I’d like to have you spend some real time experiencing these animals’ lack of judgement about what it takes to live in their environment. And then we’ll talk some more.Dave: …
Beth Patterson says:

June 2, 2008 at 23:43

Dave: But I really don’t want to be smart, it’s just a default mode.UC: But when you were writing last week about the 2 parts of you–and you were talking out loud about it and didn’t know that anyone was listening, here at the Bird Bar and Grill…well, I was impressed that you could think like that. However, I was unimpressed that you take it so seriously–your thinking like that. Dave: I try hard not to take myself seriously.UC: See what I mean?Dave: Well, ok. So here’s what I really want to ask you. If home is whereever you are in the Now Time, then why do you always come back to the same places? Why don’t you just keep moving about–always just stopping whereever you are?UC: That’s easy. Having many homes is not the same as not having any home. You see, Daverino (may I call you that?) what I’m trying to say just doesn’t have a lot of word that express it. My connection is with my clan. That is home. My connection is with certain trees I like–for reasons that are too hard to describe. My connection is with certain plants that I like–I like the way they smell and the bugs they attract. Home is something deep in my body–and because there are many places where I feel this feeling means that I feel at home in the universe. It doesn’t mean that I can be comfortable everywhere in the universe. Dave: You are a profound little teacher. Thank you. What’s my exercise for the next lesson?UC: I’d like to have you go visit a city and watch the animal life there. Watch their adaptations, which are every bit as amazing as adaptations to any extreme habitat. I’d like to have you spend some real time experiencing these animals lack of judgement about what it takes to live in their environment. And then we’ll talk some more.Dave: …
anon says:

June 3, 2008 at 00:11

“I do whatever I like””To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition. . . . This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism–in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. “Happiness” can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper value is whatever you happen to value”–which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.” -Ayn Rand
JIm Kitzmiller says:

June 3, 2008 at 10:41

Great lessons for living. I love it. This is beautiful. Thank you.
DJ Sarver says:

June 3, 2008 at 15:28

I love it.
Siona says:

June 3, 2008 at 21:52

Oh, but Dave. My childhood hobby of birdwatching presents a few objections to your romanticism. First of all, it’s generally just the male chickadees that sing, and they do so for desperately territorial and reproductive reasons; female birds will abandon a mate who doesn’t sing well. The vast majority of of all chickadees die before they’re a year old, either because they’re killed as fledglings or because they don’t survive their first winter, when they’re forced to spend nearly all their waking hours scavenging for food. And how could the chickadee understand ‘imagine’ (which to my mind requires something beyond ‘Now Time’) but fail to understand ‘need’? Those little birds live on the brink of life, and while this might, I suppose, lead to a certain poignant appreciation for every breath and every heartbeat, I’m not sure it allows them to do what ‘they like.’ Is it your brain that’s in the way, or the fact that you have leisure time? Creatures in cages who no longer need to worry about mere survival also go crazy. Not that it matters. Your mythological chickadee (which is you, Dave, you!) is still quite wise, and we would, I imagine, do well to listen to her.
Mariella says:

June 4, 2008 at 17:07

now that my son is studying in “Rotterdam” ( a very far away place from my inner “near places”….) suddenly Rotterdam begins to have the sound of “Home”…. maybe all our homes are where our dear people are. maybe “home” is also a changing process.