The footfalls on the crunchy fall leaves near the lagoon startled the Great Blue Heron. He flew away and found a tree in which he could ruminate, as herons are wont to do. Eventually his mate sailed past and he joined her; they made figure eights in the sky together.

Footfalls on crunchy leaves startle herons.

A distinguished reader of this blog brought the Mockingbird to my attention the other day. It’s a favorite bird in the south and known for its ability to sing the songs of other birds in addition to many common noises such as a car alarm, cell phone, creaky door and so many others.

Here’s the best video/audio I’ve found so far of a Mockingbird singing at night. The bachelors sing at night until they find a mate.

Here are some of the various sounds the Mockingbird makes in the video: CRICKET at (57 sec.), FROG at (1min. 7sec.), WOODPECKER, some kind of HAWK and possibly a LAUGHING HYENA at 5min 3sec.

A bird map indicates the Mockingbird visits southern Wisconsin in the summer so I sent a text to a friend who is a bird expert to see if she’s ever heard one here. She has not.

But there’s hope: I now have family in Texas and the Mockingbird is the state bird in Texas so I may get to hear one someday after all.

I gotta stop falling for birds that don’t live in Wisconsin.

There’s nothing like marital conflict to focus the mind. Or, alternatively, to make one feel numb.

The song Numb by U2 is about the numbness caused by the bombardment of information in our society. It’s also about marital pain and the numbness that makes you shut down and unable to respond.

Bono (the singer and songwriter) says the song captures guitar player Edge’s state of mind after his divorce. Edge sings the vocals in this song and drummer Larry Mullen sings the first “I feel numb” chorus, as you see in the video. This is probably the closest U2 has ever come to a rap song.

Here are some of the lyrics (complete lyrics are here):

Don’t move
Don’t talk out of time
Don’t think
Don’t worry
Everything’s just fine
Just fine

Don’t grab
Don’t clutch
Don’t hope for too much
Don’t breathe
Don’t achieve

Don’t project
Don’t connect
Protect
Don’t expect
Suggest
I feel numb
Don’t project
Don’t connect
Protect
Don’t expect
Suggest
I feel numb

These lyrics remind me of the inner dialogue one can have in times of stress, in that numb state when you’re trying to remind yourself of what you think you’re allowed or not allowed to do. This song pops into my head whenever I hear someone say “I feel numb” or when I’m in the midst of that overwhelmed state.

More and more, it seems, things like a song, poem, a bird story, etc. will resonate with and encourage me far, far more than a lifetime of lectures and sermons would. Hence posts like these.

Their neuroses fit together like gloves.

********************

The above is a line from Nora Jane: A Life in Stories that I tweaked into a six word story.

If you like fiction I recommend this book, which is a collection of short stories and one novella about Nora Jane. The author Ellen Gilchrist wrote  the stories over a period of 20 years. The first story begins when Nora is a little girl and ends about 35 years later.

A side note: The two main male characters are best friends and see each other almost every day, even though they are married and have kids. It’s a sub plot I found interesting, because it’s unusual to see male friendships like this both in stories and in everyday life. At my physical last fall my doctor asked me “Do you have 3-5 friends you can confide in?” He said he begins every physical with questions like that because he thinks those questions are even more important than things like cholesterol numbers. He told me men always answer the friendship question by saying they have zero or, at most, one friend to confide in.

Anyway, back to the book… the book isn’t heavy on character analysis but the characters are charming enough and the plot interesting enough that I found myself staying up late reading it and then wanting to read it again first thing in the morning. Sometimes you need a book like that.

After reading my post about bullfinches, a friend of mine emailed me a cool story about how her vet once rescued a baby robin and taught it to speak words and sing non-robin songs.

In discussing this with another friend today, she surmised that birds simply imitate what their parents sing but they have the capacity for so much more. She went on to say we parents can learn from this by encouraging our children to not just sing their parents’ song, so to speak.

This same friend once told me another cool story about a robin. She knows a man whose favorite bird is a robin. She was surprised such a common bird was his favorite so he explained what the robin meant to him. It was his grandmother’s favorite bird and, on the day of her funeral, he spotted a robin in the snow in her yard. This was a January day and robins don’t normally appear until late February or March.

This spring we had baby robins in our yard and it was very fun to see how they ate grape jelly from the Oriole feeder.  I was greatly surprised to see baby robins again in early August. I didn’t know they have two families every summer. They head south in late August or so. It only takes two weeks for the baby robins to grow up. I enjoyed sitting in the shade of the tree and watching the mom feed them and tidy the nest (a euphemism for “whisking away the excrement”). Then one day the birds were gone.

The orinthologist I mentioned in the bullfinches post said that when he was a boy his father chastised him for wasting his time studying birds and said he should learn about things that would make him money. He resolved right then that he would show his father that the study of birds really is a worthy pursuit and he went on to become a well-known orinthologist. The more I learn about birds and hear cool bird stories like these the more I see his point.

He hit her; truck hit him.

I’ve been reading my way through the James Hollis books at the library but dragged my feet in getting around to Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves. It seemed like a good topic to avoid. Ahem.

I finally read it this weekend and am glad I did. To my surprise it contained a lot of material about relationships. He lists 4 questions to ask yourself as you ponder your relationship with your spouse/partner (or Other, to borrow his term, even though that makes me think of the show Lost ).

I’ll list those questions below but first I’ll mention some of what he says about the ethical challenge of relationships, which he defines as keeping your own needs from dominating the other person.

As we mature we learn more that we are responsible for meeting our neeeds, not the Other. The more we take on this project, the more we can live with ambiguity -as individuals and as a society – the freer and more worthy of the name of love the relationship becomes…

I do not see that relationship in which people ‘take care of each other’ as worth of the name of relationship, at least not a loving, mature relationship.

Dependency is not love; it is dependency – it is an abrogation of the essential responsibility of each of us to grow up.

Here are the four questions he gives us to ponder. It occurs to me that some of  these questions could apply to parents or other relationships as well:

1.  Where do my dependencies show up in this relationship, and what must I address to cease being dependent?

2. What am I asking my partner to do for me that I should be able to do for myself, if I am going to be a self-respecting adult fully charged with the conduct of my life.

If neither one of those questions made you say, “oops,” perhaps one of these will:

3. How do I repeatedly constrict myself by reimporting my history, with all its charged reflexive responses, into this relationship?

4. Am I truly supportive of my partner while not taking on his or her responsibility to grow up and be a free adult?

I learned long ago that “nice” in the ministerial context means “please be the willing repository of our projections and abuse; that’s part of your calling.”

In the lay context it means much the same thing, or roughly equivalent to “please be a well-behaved girl and keep your mouth shut.”

Neither one appeals to me, and I do not place “nice” on the top of my list of Qualities to Aspire To. “Nice” has not a bloody thing to do with love. It has to do with conformity.

Which reminds me of what author and psychologist James Hollis says about being nice:

Being nice has ceased being nice.

When ‘sweet,’ ‘nice,’ ‘amiable,’ easygoing,’ repeatedly apply to someone’s life, the consequences to a person’s inner life might in fact be ugly.

And:

If I am repeatedly nice and compliant, rather than authentic, then I have ceased to be a person of values.

Exactly what the Vicki the Biker in me needed to hear.  I guess I should let her out more often.