Unseen Beauty: A Journal

The Pulse of Life

They have returned. Every year they come, flooding in from parts unknown, passing through on their way to other places. I knew they had arrived when I got up this morning, stumbling bleary eyed out to the kitchen to start the coffee pot, and I heard them. The sound filtered through the windows and the cracks, the cacophony of the voices of nature: the robins had come.

The little corner of Florida that I call home has, as of yet, evaded the hustle and bustle of the tourist trade and the majority of the wealthy residents of northern states moving away to warmer climes. We’re still a pseudo-country town only moderately plagued with the disease of suburbia, still enjoying the luxury of the small pleasures in life like squirrels, raccoons, foxes, and a plethora of mockingbirds. But we don’t have many robins, at least not like we did back in Pennsylvania…usually. It seems, however, that our little country town is a robin rest area directly on the migration route, and, twice a year, the robins come en masse.

This morning they blanketed my back yard, a moving carpet of avian life, pecking at the dull blades of grass and unearthing juicy tidbits hiding under the leaves and detritus from the sudden brown and burgundy onslaught. Above the sea of movement, the squirrels dashed back and forth across the power lines, seemingly unsure of what to make of the invasion of their territory, their harsh barks lost in the waves of twitters, chirps, and birdsong filling the air.

When I went home at lunchtime, the robins were still there, dissolving into invisibility as I swung open the car door and headed toward the house, but leaving their opinion and legacy all over my roof and rear window in my absence. As I drove back to work, however, they were all around me, wheeling in the skies above me, their black silhouettes sharp against the flushed twilight sky. I almost wrecked twice on the drive, my eyes continually drawn away from the road by the chaotic dance of life above me. The robins were everywhere, springing from the barren tree branches in the hundreds, their wings beating the clear air, whirling in beautiful disorder, filling the air with life.

I regretted I could not have simply stopped and watched them. They appealed to me in the way that all miraculous organic nature does. Like the brilliant flashing life of a fish tank, like the pulsing fireflies in the velvet blackness of a summer night, the robins represented the throb of life, the ineffable miracle of nature, forever ordered, forever beyond the comprehension of our straight-lined, geometric world. That beautiful orderly chaos calls to me; it draws out some primal instinct, some memory of what should be beyond the straight, white plastered walls and the hum of the air conditioners. And yet the people around me drove without an upward glance, never seeing the ballet above them, not caring about the pulse of nature, thrumming around their fragile iron shells.

By the time I got to work, they were gone, left behind in the woods and the yards closer to my home. I came back here, to the grey cubicle of my office world, and I watched the light slowly fade outside the windows of my office, gradually giving way to the inky blackness of the overcast Florida winter night. I’ll go home tonight, and wipe the robin’s legacy from my car’s roof and rear window like a good suburbanite. But, secretly, in the wild part of my soul, I will hope that when I stumble out of bed tomorrow, the birdsong will be back, seeping in through the straight lines of my walls and bathing me in the balm of nature’s mystery.