I could have spent hours sitting with the yellow-crowned night heron perched in the red mangrove just six feet away, fifty yards up a finger channel.
I was out of time. My kayak was due back at the Biscayne Bay visitor center in four minutes.
Why do we become more aware of, and delighted by, birds as we grow up?
I paddled out into the mangroves in the morning because at a national park that is 95% water, one must either float or submerge.
Tethering myself, branch to branch, so I could linger silently by a sleeping brown pelican while a kingfisher called, before a resident osprey cut through the blue sky overhead, was unexpected and deeply enchanting.
Perhaps we hear the birds call to us because we’ve slowed down enough, enough to learn the joy of solitude, to experience the abundance found only through patience.
Irregardless, there is immense treasure waiting to be discovered within ourselves when we venture into a new place with child-like curiosity, on the hunt for delight.
Perhaps, even after horrific pain or loss, we never lose access to this doorway of wonder, the ability to digress into time-bending awe, to find ourselves over and over again amidst the magic of the world.
“Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her; still, she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.” – Victor Hugo
The day after my bird watching bliss in Biscayne National Park, I pay for my own temporary wings, taking flight in a seaplane bound for Dry Tortugas, named for an abundance of sea turtles and the absence of fresh water.
The flight path takes us low over the Marquesas keys, inhabited only by mangroves and wild creatures, and then over the 20-mile stretch of shallow ocean known as the “flats.”
From our bird’s eye view, blue water stretches out to the horizon in all directions, teeming with life. Dark shadows of sharks snake through the sea grass. Yellow-brown loggerhead turtle backs dot the waves. A small pod of dolphins is spotted and we bank sharply to circle over them once more.
Our small party of nine disperses on the quiet island, creating an almost instant solitude. As soon as we sit down at a picnic table to eat our lunch, dozens of hermit crabs emerge from the nearby trees like an army of tiny, claw-wielding pirates, looking for scraps.
Landing on the water, and then taking off through from the choppy surface is strange, and also humorous. We are loud, clunky mimickers of nature, and yet it is intoxicating to be so close, to move on the water and through the air as the birds do, to feel so small compared to the vastness of the ocean, to be reminded of our own wild lineage.
As our species evolves closer and closer to collapse in a futile race to satiate the very hunger that our modern, urban, divisive, anonymous, dog-eat-dog culture fuels, a deeper intelligence in each of us longs for the lightness, simplicity and beauty of casting off such a dystopian world to return to our roots.
Our suffering is built on and mirrored in these returns, in our collective losses of life-affirming habitats, rich with time and space, the support and safety of closely-knit community, the boundless possibility for future generations.
Absorbed back into civilization, symptoms resume. Anxiety. Impatience. Comparison. Body dysmorphia. Depression. Self-medication.
What can we do?
We can know this, and interrupt the critical inner and outer dialogues that were never meant for our tender hearts, freeing up immense resources wasted feeding the cancerous, unnatural specter of not-enoughness.
When we heal ourselves, steeling our hearts against such poisonous propaganda, we can find and create spaces of real community. We can curate pockets of nature amidst the asphalt, and protect what remains of the wild within ourselves and on our planet.
We can actually perform miracles despite the momentum: we can bring grizzly bears and wolves back from the brink, build coral nurseries to restore damaged reefs, and adopt inclusive definitions of well-being and success that reflect our reality: all beings must thrive for any one species to survive.
We can practice living into each day with a little more consciousness, kindness, and affirmation of life, starting with our own.
“Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” – Terry Tempest Williams