Even in this ice strewn, mid-winter's kingdom of quiet and stillness, you can hear them; the birds are back. Perhaps the Jays and Cardinals, the Titmice and the Finches never left, but were under the same spell as I, waiting in obedient silence, like a bowed peasant before their God, under a dim sky whose winds whip freezing lashes. Even this morning, as the valley woke to a slick crystalline sheen that closed schools and burst pipes, the trees were full of song. The seed I threw out for them was gone in minutes, as many shades of feather dove from the heavy limbs to the moonlike backyard vista for the kernels which are the best offering I can make.

As a child, it always saddened me that I could not walk up to the birds without their quick-minded taking to flight. Later, as the innocence gave way to curiosity, I chased them so I could watch them fly, and maybe one of those Gulls was I, for a moment of fantasy caught between desire and a dream. I'd find a feather on the beach, and hold it between my fingers, and would wonder for a moment just how many I'd need to grow in order to dance circles in the air around the sun. I waited, longed at the edge of my nest, looking around me with awe and caution, knowing that my little feet would soon push off, and pray in song that I would make it.

We, as humans being in body, need a form to shape our soul, to give it a direction and a purpose that has more heft than our dalliances with two-dimensional knowledge. I reach my finger out to the birds, still and breathless as the guide of my soul alights there. I choose the clever beak, the fleet dark eyes themselves navigated by the stars and moon to their home, the downy breast, the source of the oldest music and Earthly language. This is the shape I plead that the nameless stuff that animates my organs and my deepest yearnings will take. It is I who wish to peek in through this window while scurrying for seed, and find the man watching me, with a chirp, ascending.

These beings, borne through the will of the wind, teach me daily. One swoop from perch to perch could be contained in a thousand volumes of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria. One soar on an updraft could be a golden tenet of a millenniums-old monastic faith. The act of nest building, the gathering and weaving of a spiral, the shape of life, is a gesture that could contain every human attempt at art. A Golden Eagle or parking-lot Sparrow knows this world in ways that override our most beloved of calculations and formulae. I may be anthopomorphosizing those flickers of feather that dart amongth the surrounding trees and through my heart, but nothing is more of a muse to me than one second of breathing the same air as these creatures that inspired our first conceptions of angels.

Leonard Cohen wrote a song, that once heard, emblazoned upon my heart an anthem for my love of birds; "like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way, to be free." His words not only speak to my avian spirituality, they speak to the daring we all crave to release ourselves from our forms and soar into the freedom that is ultimately pervasive in this Universe. If anything is true, it is freedom. Yet we must strive for it. We much somehow eclipse the bonds we've been wrapping ourselves in, or be immolated by them, and rise with the passion of the Phoenix into a sky that supports the glide of our wings. Freedom is the basis and the law of nature, and when a bird entices my eyes to follow, it's a call of something deeper than the bird; it's the call of the intent of the primal and noble Earth.

It is little wonder that in many cultures the birds are the messengers between the people and the gods. Not only is their realm so clearly heaven, but in their nature they express our wildest hopes; to soar above it all, and see for once the totality of our world, to see God in perspective. The Hindus have Garuda, the Patagonians had the Skua, and the Americans have the Carrier Pigeon. The myth and the reality of the allure of flight criss-cross all boundaries and nations. From the Raven that pulls up the first sun with her beak, to the Eagle landing on the moon, birds live in our subconscious iconography and in our common wish to attain the highest ideals of life. Yet, we foul that lesson far too often by ignoring these messengers, mistaking them for a commonplace species with which we share our cluttered days, mitigating them and all other life to the realm of 'animal,' effectively casting all other conscious creatures outside our bounds of acceptible knowledge about this home we have such difficulty sharing.

Tomorrow, more seed for our winter holdouts. I'll wait by the window, senses open, allowing for the flutter to fill the parts of me which I cannot see. I'll take it within, exposing that darkened harbor of the dream-mind to a tongue that plays so freely with sound of light, the bright song that has carried on and will carry on for countless days through the hoop of time. Somewhere in that continuum, atoms that are or were me or preceded will catch a ride from the nest to the sun, from the sun to a holy vantage where the infinite, the universe, is in clear view. And that is the ultimate freedom.

It begins with a handful of seeds…