I have a kind of love/hate relationship with birds. I’ve written posts about them working together as a group, eating from our bird feeder, and terrorizing our gutters.
I love the idea of them—their beauty, their gracefulness, their little birdy tunes whistling through the trees—but I don’t want them too awfully close to my personal vicinity. I decorate my home with whimsical paintings and lamps and ceramic figurines of songbirds, but the real ones need to stay outside.
Maybe I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds at a formative age and developed a real aversion to them. Or maybe having birds fly down our chimney and enter our basement as if they’d unknowingly flown into their worst nightmare when I was growing up has made me assume they would peck my eyes out if only given the chance.
When I was in elementary school, our librarian rescued a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. She brought it school where it lived in a little cage that sat on the checkout counter. I remember observing the tiny bird that was mostly pink skin and frail bones. Every so often, Baby Bird would let out a pitiful squeak, and the librarian would prepare the bird’s food, filling an eye dropper with some whitish, liquid concoction. She would squeeze a few drops into the open bird mouth, and the food would almost instantaneously come out the other end. Needless to say, Baby Bird didn’t make it.
When my husband and I were first married and living in Memphis, we spent a lot of time with other newlywed couples. Most of us didn’t have kids yet, but a few had pets. One couple had two cockatiels— “Mr. Tumnus” and “Prince Caspian” which they adored. When we would gather at their apartment, they would let the birds fly freely around their living room. Such a treat, except for my crippling fear of eye-pecking and bird-pooping.
I’m not sure why I have this conflicted relationship with birds. I admire them, fear them, eat them and appreciate them all at the same time. I look at the amazing things they’re capable of—making nests out of twigs and fluff, laying eggs and caring for those babies, warbling their lovely birdsong, displaying their marvelous and colorful feathers. Still there is something that makes me nervous when I’m near them. Their actions are seem unpredictable, and this scares me.
To be honest, I find myself having conflicted relationships with people, too. Humans are also capable of so much—kindness and cruelty, beauty and destruction, love and hate. Sometimes we’re as frail as that baby bird in the library. And other times we are regal and free to fly (and poop) without restraint. And still they are times when we are afraid, flying into a new place and attacking those trying to help us out.
We are also like birds because we go through seismic changes throughout our lives. Birds go from egg to flying creature, and we (hopefully) go from immature child to wise adult. These changes are necessary.
According to C.S. Lewis (whose literary characters some people name their cockatiels after): “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
Let’s be willing to make these changes so we can have the opportunity to soar!
