Every April, it seems like some kind of miracle. Birds so small they weigh less than a nickel (I often mistake them for a carpenter bee) fly sometimes thousands of miles from their warm wintering places to more northern spots to nest.
Just last week, we stood at our evening window and a male hummingbird hovered outside at eye level and stared us down. “Dude,” he said, “Where’s the goods?”
Frank makes some excellent signature dishes: cuban black beans, red sauce with olives and capers, a crusty seed bread that is impossible to eat without sighing and hummingbird sugar water. So when surprised by the unexpectedly early first arrival, he ran to the kitchen to make a batch of his famous bird brew. Within the hour, the first returning male was eating alone at the feeder.
A day after the emergency feeder filling, this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer dropped into my inbox:
Then What Might I Do?
There is nothing more hopeful
than hearing the whirr of the first black-chinned
hummingbird returning to the feeder,
knowing he has flown five hundred miles
to arrive at my porch within hours
of the same time the black-chinneds arrived last year
and the year before and the year before.
What inner directive is still intact,
despite the chaos that breeds all around?
I want to show up that faithfully.
Want to listen to the wisdom within
that says This is the way, now go,
go, go, and trust I have the strength
to do so, though the way is long,
though the world is vast, though
the trip must be made alone. If
this tiny bird can fly through cold fronts,
headwinds, hard and heavy rain.
If it can wing across vast open waters.
If it can arrive and make a new nest.
Nature, of course, offers wisdom. These tiniest of birds, these expert aviators, follow a deep knowing and trust that even though the way is long and hard, it is where they need to go. They do not doubt that they need to keep going even in the face of incredible distances and raindrops that outweigh them. I can learn from that determination, that unshakable certainty.
And yet.
A week later, there are a handful of males all puffed up and aggressively running each other off the feeder even though there is plenty of Frank’s cooking for all of them. What is it with prettily plumed men and their hoarding of resources?
Soon the females will join them and they will make minuscule nests of lichen and spiderwebs from which they will launch their babies. Then they’ll all be diving at each other – two generations now -- everybody trying to keep everybody else from resting and eating their fill, which each of them could if only they would let each other.
I’d like to have the hummingbird’s hearty persistence through adversity but with less of the machismo and spiteful greed. I’d like to have the self-guiding principles and inner knowing with less of the hoarding and unkindness to my own kind. Even if I am angry at them for leaving us in a shocking mess, for inviting in a ruthless hawk to rampage the neighborhood, I hope I could summon the generosity to let them eat.
They act like assholes to each other, but even so, I love to watch them fly and perch and pause and eat and fly off again. Because I get it. I get the anger. I watch them dive and zoom at each other and I hope I can rise above the reflexive lurch to protect, to hurt back. Can I not rush at you to keep you away from what might save me … even as I fly away from it to drive you off?
May these little bug-birds teach me both what I do and do not want to do at I move through the chaos and cruelty of the world.