Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense
Rumi
Humans call this species the American Goldfinch. What does the bird call herself?
To our ears her name would sound like a song.
Politics is tough right now in so many places. The USA recently had an election, and it is hard for many to see the beauty in their neighbors who seem so different from them.
For this reason, in our recent Bird Walk we reflected upon how we can spend time with birds in the fields, and to get beyond division and difference. I call this place birds beyond words.
No matter the rancor and politicized stances, there is always the beauty of the birds, as captured here:
There is a left wing and there is a right wing. It’s all one bird.
The lice on the right wing were always arguing with the lice on the left wing.
Meanwhile the bird soared on.
We may think there is a line between “them and us” with the “them” being fundamentally flawed. There are tragic decisions and the corruption of politics all around, yet the line is not so clear as in these words from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Musical meditation reflecting on how beauty and tragedy is always present in all
We go to the woods and fields to erase the lines between us and other species, and in fact, between us, all others and existence. We go to be with birds so that we can listen to the web of life that is made of lines that connect us and do not separate us.
Yet, and yet…
This is not all. For there is good we can do now, and harm we can diminish. We must listen, but we must also make it possible for others to hear the call to love and to act, as in these words by Marwan Makhoul:
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
I do not have the answers to how we still the guns of war and the fractures within our own hearts and lives, but I know that by connecting to beauty in the moment we open ourselves to transformation.
To enter the process of transformation we open our lives to the beauty and lives of others, so that we get beyond how our lives have been politicized. By politicized I mean how the media, authorities, and those who have and confer privilege in this world have spun a false narrative about how life is simply comprised of one group against another, or that all humans can be characterized as either oppressors or the oppressed. But no matter who we are or where we are, beauty is the ground of experience where these polarizing stories can fall away.
Here is one such sentiment that I believe we can let go, as in these words from Aristotle. He wrote that that man is either a political animal (the natural state) or an outcast like a “bird which flies alone.” But we know that birds to not fly alone and there is more to this one world than politics.
In these troubled times, we find ease even if we do not know the right way forward or the future. For after all, a bird does not sing because she has an answer, but because she has a song.
If you are (or will be) in or near Des Moines, Iowa, come join us on our Bird Walks so that you let the beauty you love be what you do.
To register for the Bird Walks and find out more, go here.
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