It's been a long winter. Not a frigid winter, maybe a little on the wet side. And, is it just me, but do the winters seem to get longer the older one gets? Unfortunately, this was a winter of loss. Many of my friends left this corporeal plane this winter. I also lost a truly great four-legged fur friend of thirteen years. And while I don't suppose any season is a good time to lose someone, winter seems to add extra heft and chill to a loss. However...
Spring is, as they say, around the corner. Robins continue their reign as the iconic first signs of spring, and, I suppose there have been several around, but I'm not impressed with the robin, as a whole. Sort of a plain bird that shows up after a drenching rain to snag the worm on top of the ground. Lazy, if you ask me. Sort of a starling with a red breast. Just not a whole lot there.
My first sign of spring is the return of "my" mockingbirds. I hear them before I see them, their song kicking the world wide awake. Loud and brilliant. This morning, I spotted them. They have a favorite bush they like to build in. It's protected by those irritating, sharp-as-needle leaves, and, on top of that, it's inside the cat-proof fence around the pool. No dummies, my mockingbirds.
They will spend the next few days taking turns grabbing grass and straw, some loose string, maybe a wad of paper...whatever they can spot...to prepare their nest. They're monogamous, you know. Marriage is a lifetime proposition for them. So this isn't their first rodeo. They've built nests together for a few years now so they're pretty comfortable with each other's work habits and engineering abilities. I can stand at my kitchen window for hours and watch them work together, seeming to know the exact meaning of their partner's tip of the head, shake of shoulders, flap of wing. Seeming to know instinctively exactly what their mate is going to do seconds before it's done. Synchronicity at its best. They never seem to disagree or argue. If they do, it's out of sight and in mockingbird talk, so I wouldn't be able to understand it anyway.
(Now, usually, it's just about here when I start building an analogy. Trying to tie in this limited subject with life in general - trying to expand the small into the large, the mundane into the magnificent. Going for the BIG PICTURE.)
Sometimes it works. Sometimes not.
Well, not today. Today is different. In 1965 - now that was a very good year - Hal David hooked up with Burt Bacharach and composed "What the World Needs Now Is Love." Thankfully for you, I'm not going to try to draw an analogy to that. That would be corny, wouldn't it? And predictable. You would expect me to quote parts of the song that I think apply to current times, like "What the world needs now is love, sweet love; it's the only thing that there's just too little of." And then you'd want me to make a big deal of "...not just for some but for everyone." I know you. You expect me to be the usual sentimental fool I've always been. You want me to draw comparisons to cornfields and wheat fields and sunbeams and moonbeams. Admit it. You want me to be smarmy. So you can just sit back and cluck to yourselves and say, "That Doug...he's a smarmy character, isn't he?"
You just aren't going to get your way today. Now...while I do believe that what the world needs is some love...I'm not going to go there. What I really believe is that the world needs more mockingbirds. You can have your robins. In fact, I'll give you a dozen robins for a single mockingbird. If we could just saturate our world with mockingbirds, their songs would drown out all the silly noise that surrounds us everyday. With more mockingbirds, we could raise our heads from our electronic devices and observe how creatures work together for a common good. With more mockingbirds, we could ponder the many strengths born of natural integrity and simple, similar, but important, goals.
More mockingbirds would bring less stress, less worry, and less infatuation with the mundane of this planet and things we simply can do nothing about.
But, like I said...no analogies for you today. If you want analogies, cook up your own. I do have one small request, though. Sometime today...
...listen to the mockingbird.
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