City Mouse Meets Tufted Titmouse

     Living in the midst of pinewoods is a joy that for me came too late and lasted for far too short a time. I have always considered it unfair that I should have been born with such a deep love for the glories of nature, yet have grown up and lived in urban areas. And now, after having tasted the myriad delights of the woods, I must, due to circumstances, once again live in an area that has no delights whatever, except the birds that sing in its stunted trees and soar over its depressed streets, and the few Chinese tallows that, given sufficient rain, remind me there is indeed such a thing as autumn.
     Even the birds in my particular neighborhood are limited in breed. On a regular basis, I see sparrows, finches, mockingbirds, mourning doves, martins, starlings, the occasional bluejay and cardinal, and of course, those ubiquitous grackles that must spring fully grown from oil slicks. Hawks cruise constantly, casting great shadows on the pavements and brittle fields. In summer, hummgingbirds come.
     In the woods of Lufkin, I saw my first woodpeckers, my first siskins, my first tufted titmice (titmouses?), and believe it or not, my first robins (hordes of them!). Host upon host of migrating birds would stop in the monastery woods on their way south, drinking from our pond and resting in our trees. All these new wonders inspired me to write passages in my journal such as the following:

11 February 2005   It was such a glorious dawn today! A sheet of little puffed clouds, lined up in formation, arose from behind the pine trees -- not quite a mackerel sky; not that tightly packed -- and all their undersides glowed a neon salmon color. Stunning and almost surreal, a Maxfield Parrish kind of sky. As I stood gazing at this magnificence, I suddenly heard a great whoosh of wings from the north, and I turned to see the hugest host of birds rise in unison from the woods on the other side of the monastery, covering half the visible sky. The birds swept in one graceful, undulating, enormous wave over my head to the south. I have never in my life seen that many birds in one flock -- flying, that is; I have countless times witnessed the deafening, chattering, squawking hordes of starlings that infest the trees and line the edges of roofs in downtown Houston right about dusk at certain times of the year. They are truly Hitchockian, and leave behind Pollack-like splatterings all over the sidewalks. (I wonder if that's where he got his inspiration???) They are frightening to see and their aftermath is disgusting; but the flock of whatever type of birds I saw this morning left me breathless with the wonder of God's Nature. What instinct did he give them that makes them move in such perfect unison? Humans try in so many ways to imitate that kind of precision: drill teams, corps de ballet, soldiers, the Rockettes, and of course, the "wave" that fans do in stadiums. Yet more examples of how we humans try to recreate, in our crude and imperfect fashion, what God has already created in glorious and incomprehensible perfection. We keep striving, consciously or not, to be God. To be like God is commendable -- it is our very calling as human beings and creatures of our Creator. But comes a point when one has to admit one's shortcomings.