The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
At some point during the pandemic—far enough in that everyone had moved beyond sourdough, feeling the weight of duration—my son and I happened upon an egret, while walking through Central Park. It was perched serenely on a root that stretched out from the edge of the lake, its white feathers glowing in the afternoon sun, waiting patiently for a fish to cross its path. It seemed unbothered by the congested city, visible just beyond the tree line, or by its own fragility. Balanced on impossibly thin legs, long white feathers extending off its back like lace and reflected in the water, it stood perfectly still and focused.
I’ve since become somewhat entranced by birds, especially the wild birds that unexpectedly find homes in our hard and imposing city. Birds are among the most fragile of creatures, with their hollow bones and their hearts that seem to beat just beneath the soft feathers of their protruding chests. And yet they are also among the most powerful, able to launch themselves above the pull of gravity that keeps the rest of us tethered to the earth. This impossible combination of strength and frailty seems even more notable in the midst of a city where the presence of wildness is always a little improbable and startling.
I’m not alone in this fascination. Birdwatching surged during the pandemic and has continued to grow, especially in cities like New York, where being surrounded by concrete and car horns creates an understandable hunger for the natural world. As the nature educator, Richard Louv, writes, “Reconnection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, wellbeing, spirit, and survival,” and yet we have so little of it. Connecting with nature, Louv explains, establishes a sense of knowing that we are not alone in the world.
And it is surprisingly easy to feel alone in a city bursting with people. While we brush past each other on the sidewalk each day, our encounters with nature remind us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, and certainly bigger than our daily hustle. It is somehow easier to pause and stare at an egret and to find wonder there than to do the same with each other.
But I think there is also something more specific to our fascination and feeling of connection with these moments in nature that has to do with the mirror we find when we observe strength and fragility in close relationship. Nature is full of examples of this dynamic, but birds are especially good ambassadors.
For aren’t we all this fragile, if less gracefully so? Aren't we all just trying to keep our focus and our balance and hoping we will have the strength to propel ourselves forward, when necessary, with some degree of dignity?
When New York collectively mourned the recent death of Flaco the owl, after a year of fascination bordering on obsession, much was written about the connection people felt to his drive for freedom. I wonder though if the fragility, which ultimately claimed him, was the more vulnerable whisper of connection we really felt, lurking beneath our proclaimed admiration of his grit and resilience.
For the entire year that he captured the city’s attention, observers fretted online over the many potential risks to the wellbeing of this apex predator—an indication perhaps of our sense of shared precariousness, perched at the top of the food chain. And indeed, even after proving his strength and determination, mastering hunting and soaring against the odds for a creature held captive for so long, he was ultimately just as frail as the many delicate warblers and thrushes that run afoul of our manmade world each day. And I suspect we also recognized that he was as fragile as we ourselves often feel, fumbling in our human way through the world, despite the fact that, unlike the birds, so much of what makes the journey harsh for us is of our own creation.
In the documentary, All That Breathes, which tells the story of two brothers who care for sick and wounded birds amidst the thick environmental and political smog of Delhi, the brothers explain, “One shouldn't differentiate between all that breathes.” These men and their small crew quietly care for bird after fallen bird, despite the fact that these animals don’t have the unique story or celebrity of a creature like Flaco, and despite the very real personal hazards and violence that constantly press against the walls of their makeshift sanctuary. They persist in care for its own sake.
Individuals capture our attention and our hearts. We can feel our connection and commonality with those we’ve given a name and whose story we know. But it is difficult to hold onto this feeling and extend it more broadly once the individual story ends, and it is even more difficult to offer it to those we can’t ever seem to slip easily into a personal narrative that we recognize and relate to.
And yet, imagine what would change if we could do this more easily—to extend our ability to see others as just as frail and yearning as we ourselves are. The brothers in Delhi go on to say of their work with birds, “You don't care for things because they share the same country, religion, or politics. Life itself is kinship. We're all a community of air.”
This capacity for expansive care is one that I find comes surprisingly easily to children, though it is often challenging for adults. The ability to extend compassion and to embrace a solutionist mindset is not necessarily a skillset we readily associate with childhood, which is often viewed through a lens of egocentrism. And, certainly, children falter in their compassion, just as we all do. But I have found that children do often leap much more quickly from an individual story to an instinct for collective action than we adults do. I’ve seen this many times in the classroom, as an awareness of suffering quickly elicits ideas for big, bold solutions. Even when discussing large, seemingly frightening events that extend well beyond individual stories, children are often ready to jump into action from a very young age.
Several years ago, when talking about the impact of Hurricane Dorian with a preschool class, the children quickly suggested ways to rebuild houses, plant new trees, and provide essential supplies. And they didn’t just want to collect these things or send money, as we might have done and as they’d surely heard adults discuss. They wanted to either go there themselves or invite the people who had been impacted into their own homes. More recently, I was talking with a kindergartener who had heard about beached whales and was insistent in explaining why we need to protect “all the whales.”
This willingness to connect a single story to large scale, meaningful actions is often hard for us adults. We carry responsibilities that lead us to prioritize, first and foremost, keeping the wheels of our own lives moving. We are quick to think practically, which often leads us to reject bold ideas out of hand. And we have the calluses earned by having navigated more of life—calluses that can easily make us more numb over time.
Children, on the other hand, live in their imaginations, often making their ideas inherently more expansive and radical. They bring their fantasies to life every day in their play, and so a world that is dramatically different from the present reality may not feel so impossible to them. The psychologist Alison Gopnik says,
“Very young children can use their causal maps of the world—their theories—to imagine different ways that the world might be....Eventually they enable even adults to imagine alternative ways the world could be and make those alternatives real.”
In addition to being more predisposed to embrace imaginative ideas as real possibilities, I think children are also more comfortable with frailty. After all, they are accustomed to being vulnerable and reliant on others. While this can certainly make children more prone to fear at times, it also allows them to relate to fragility without shame and with greater recognition. Our thickened adult skin makes us sturdier, but it also makes us more resistant to acknowledging our own frailties and more inclined to distance ourselves from anything that opens these wells in us. But children live in wells of need and so they readily identify with the needs of others and view those needs as deserving of care and attention, just as their own needs are met by those who love and care for them. This connection to vulnerability is more distant for most adults, as grown-up life usually requires us to meet our own needs independently and move through challenges with at least an air of fortitude.
And yet, there is still the powerful draw to connect with the egret and the owl. None of us is really so far removed from the fragility of childhood, or of any of these wild beings in our midst, not to find some sense of kinship. It is cathartic to see ourselves in these vulnerable creatures as they thrive, despite all the challenges that make their thriving improbable. And it is equally heartbreaking when they fail, because we see ourselves there, too. The question then is how to open our adult hearts to more of these moments and how to expand both our compassion and our care more widely, as children frequently urge us to.
In a poem written in the voice of birds,
councils,“Rubble the walls between yourself and everyone until you’re sure the scenes of strangers’ lives will pass before your eyes when you die. If that doesn’t make sense right now, it will one morning, when you wake at sunrise, walk out to your porch, and see a flock of ten thousand starlings circling above your head. There I am, you’ll think, looking up at us. There I am.”
Of course practical experience and knowledge are important, and the magical thinking that helps young children develop such big and powerful ideas is usually not sufficient to create real solutions outside of their fantasy play. At least not without our help.
But, if we are going to get closer to a world in which we are all a little less fragile, I think we adults will have to somehow become more at ease with entering the mindset of children from time to time—more at ease with the comfort children have in their own vulnerability and that of others, with their expectation that needs ought to be met, and with their capacity to view imagination in close relationship with reality, as something we could bring into being.
Wishing you egrets and flocks of starlings,
Alicia
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