Sometimes there are no more words to say. You have a conversation that you’ve had a dozen times with a person and it is as though one of you is speaking Greek and the other is singing in DNA sequences C-G-A-T-C-G-A-T…You not only are not on the same page, you aren’t even in the same library. And yet the desire for the other person to understand not only what you are saying, but to really see it from their perspective and that suddenly some light of awareness will come on…that desire is so strong that you try to present the same case again and again and again. In the end, of course, nothing is resolved and often both parties feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. This is why revisiting (and rehashing) the past is futile. Somehow you have to let it go and move forward. This is a lesson I would do well to learn.
Tonight I am grateful for the robin’s song. I didn’t realize that robins sang at dusk; I don’t know that I’ve experienced it and if I did I sure don’t remember it. But a robin sits in one of the trees outside my window and sings. I’ve known the robin’s song my whole life. It is familiar and comforting. When I moved to California from Michigan I left behind the much-loved song of the cardinals and blue jays–they don’t range this far west. And while I’ve grown accustomed to and have learned to appreciate them in their own right, particularly for their funny “eeping” calls to one another, listening to the scrub jays has a different impact on me than the comfortingly familiar song of the robin. She’s quiet now that it’s full on dark, but I thank her for her song nonetheless.
In times when little else seems to make sense, the wonderfully normal beauty of nature still brings me a measure of comfort. The robin’s song, so simple and normal, was a salve for my soul tonight at just the right time. I am truly grateful for that.
~~~~~~~~~ If you’re a fan of birds, the ornithology lab at Cornell University has a great website called All About Birds. (You can visit it at http://www.allaboutbirds.org/Page.aspx?pid=1189) You can search for birds by name, listen to their calls and songs, watch videos of them and learn interesting facts.