Just Wondering

There are lots of kinds of wonder – there’s the kind that lights up children’s faces at the first snowfall, at the sight of someone beloved, or at hitting the ball with a smack that says “Homerun!” There’s seeing a loved one come home, safe and sound, from war, and there’s a new parent grinning rather tentatively at their brand new wrinkled baby. Poet Mary Oliver describes the humble Carolina wren’s bold song as a source of wonder for her.

We catch this kind of wonderful faster than a cold... and then there’s the old fashioned “What the heck was that!” kind of wonder: something falls out of the sky or swirls darkly across the face of the earth making us run for our lives.

Maybe you felt this kind of wonder on hearing about birds falling from the sky this past January. According to one local paper: “Dozens of lawns, streets and rooftops for more than a mile in Beebe, Ark., were covered with the corpses of red-winged black birds. An aerial survey showed that no other dead birds were found outside that area.”

Imagine that – a square mile of bird bodies! How tragic and how weird. In ancient days, angry prophets would have found this to be a sign of some human failing. Some of us, I know, wonder if it isn’t a sign of environmental degradation that’s eroding some animal species. Some of us were grossed out and flipped the channel. The scientific among us wondered if it might have been lightning or disease. And others of us just wondered at it – all those birds just dropping out of the sky- oh my, why?

What shocked me awake was that scientists responded without alarm: they reported that hundreds of thousands of birds die each year – and not only of human-made causes.

A vivid memory: one May in 1970, staying at my grandparents’ in Walpole, I was woken just before dawn by the stirrings and then a symphony of bird song – I’ve never before or since heard so loud, long, or various an orchestration. I was very awake then, sipping my “own cup of gladness,” as poet Mary Oliver put it in “A Wren from Carolina.” My introduction to the spring migration.

It was a true wonder, herald of nothing and everything – the gift of a new day. Every spring since I listen for that symphony: I hear the redwings in the wetlands, the thrushes and robins and myriad others - many just passing through, others settling in and down for the nesting season. I haven't heard such a glorious con gusto chorale since. Grace notes, we can call them, do surprise my spirit into joy and wonder.