Battering Wings, Panicked Hearts

Today I wrote some words that will see print.
Maybe
they will last forever and that someone will read them
there,
ink making a light scratch on his mind or
hers.

I think back with
greater satisfaction upon a yellow
bird,
a gold finch
that had flown into the garden shed
and could not get
out,
battering its wings on the deceptive light of
the dusty,
warped, shut window.

Without much reflection for once, I stepped
to
where
its panicked heart was making
commotion,

the flared wings drumming, and with
clumsy,
soft hands pinned it against a
pane,
held loosely cupped this agitated essence of the
air,
and through the open door released it like a
self-flung
ball
to all that lovely, perishing
outdoors.

As a birder, I am drawn to the powerful image of the yellowbird struggling against the pane. They do soar all around banging again and again into the windows, not understanding why they cannot reach the light they see. Everything done to try and help them, only frightens them more.It's the same with us. When our own circumstances find us closed off from any sense of a solution, hopelessness starts to creep in. You can only bang up against what you had hoped was the answer, so many times. Often something in us knows there is a way out, but our desperation clouds our perception of the path. It is a terrible, frightening place to be.

Listening to the news or dealing with family struggles it is very easy to come away believing that we are all captured in the garden shed and will forever be frantically banging against the dusty windows until we fall in exhaustion. Those are the times when it is good to remember these lines from Paul Eluard, "There is another world, and it is this one." What is happening right now is important and demanding but it is not all there is to life. Yes, it does profoundly impact us, but we still each have our own lives, within and without. And those garden sheds, are still ours.

A panicked heart is a terrible thing to have in your chest. When we shut ourselves down and listen only to our minds, when we forget to circulate what we hear through what we believe and know to be true, our hearts seize up. We get tunnel vision. Our options in life dwindle. Our mind ruled world often forgets the true power of this beating mass of muscle, but inevitably life manages to balance the scales but we need to stop fluttering in front of the same dusty window and sit on the sill to rest and catch our breath. When we do we might find someone will join us, or share their own story and how they coped. We might notice that the door to the shed is open and that the world beyond is still beautiful.

The last stanza of this poem is my favorite. Through his telling of capturing the 'agitated essence of the air' by cupping the bird against the window, Updike eloquently conveys the experience and power of the mysterious to occur in our lives. His words witness the existence of grace and its ability even in the most desperate times, to provide another way out. We may think resolution can only occur one way--yet time and time again, grace has shown there are countless ways we have not even imagined. Thinking of the fragile, practically weightless little songbird being flung back into the great wide world, still fraught with danger and difficulties is exactly what life is about. We do get trapped sometimes, panic and struggle and then out of some unseen place in ourselves, or others or circumstances, comes a rescue, so we can be flung in astonishment, back into life to experience more of the same. We aren't saved from life, we are given back to it.