dual personalities

Have you noticed all of the springtime activity taking place outside your homes?

Not the most appealing background, but the emphasis here is on the visitor

I sit in front of a large window at my makeshift telework-space, and we also have a large window in our bedroom and sliding glass doors in our living room. These all provide views of our apartment building’s “backyard,” which is full of trees and active animal life. Now that we rarely leave home, the entertainment these views provide has grown shockingly captivating. I say shockingly because I am not typically a bird person. But there’s something interesting about how intensely the birds are going about their own normal routine while we’re all cooped up inside!

In particular, “our” birds (woodpeckers, robins, and cardinals) are nesting. This is somewhat alarming because they seem very interested in the gutters, but I guess that isn’t my problem. At any rate, they frequently fly very close to the windows when they inspect the gutters, and sometimes it makes me worry that this might happen…

…DN can attest that I have acted like Tippi Hedren in this gif on numerous occasions when a bird flies too close for comfort in my periphery. But I will try to focus on what I find calming about the birds and all the fun they seem to be having.

As I thought about this post, it occurred to me that Henry David Thoreau would have something to say about birds in springtime, so I pulled out Walden. I was right:

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh-hawk sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire,—“et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,”—as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;—the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below.

And then I kept reading.

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.

Of course Thoreau, who truly self-isolated at Walden Pond, would have sage words for us in our present moment. I encourage you to read the full “Spring” chapter of Walden if you have time. Either way, here’s to shades of green and better thoughts!

*Henry David Thoerau, from an 1858 entry in his Journal