The Man’s attentive and concerned involvement with Broken Wing continued throughout December and into the darkest and coldest time of the winter, while at the same time, he learned to step back, distance himself, from the little bird’s struggle to survive.
While it was indeed the darkest and the coldest time, the center of winter, it was also, to The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains, the brightest and best time of the year. The snowbanks along the sides of the road grew higher and higher, and the mercury in the thermometer dropped lower and lower—some nights down to 25 or 35 or even 40 degrees below zero—and on those nights, the blue-black dome of heaven revealed a myriad of constellations, across which flowed that dense river of stars people call the Milky Way. And if the sky was that clear at night, then usually the days, even though they were short, were brilliant, also. Light flooded through the windows of his little house and filled The Man’s days with an intense clarity. Oh, how The Man loved these days of deep snow, sharp, stinging cold, brilliant blue skies and blinding white light.
The intense cold and deep snow isolated The Man and his bird friends from the outside world. This made The Man happy, not fearful or sad. The woodshed had ample wood for the wood stove; he could stay warm through the coldest time, and there was plenty of food for both himself and his feathered friends. The Man felt as though he and his bird friends were cut off from the rest of the world, hidden in a secret place far toward the interior of a strange land of cold and snow, and these notions made The Man happy. The insularity and solitude that these winter days brought filled The Man with an odd and quiet joy, and because of the isolation and remove of these deep winter days, The Man knew a kind of relaxation during this time that he knew at no other time of the year. He enjoyed himself and the short days, the long nights, and the world around him with a renewed, intensified, and quiet pleasure.
The sameness of these days, the cycling of light and dark, blended as the days passed one into the other, following each other seamlessly except for an occasional storm that came to add another foot of snow to the already snowy landscape. In the sameness of these days, The Man found not only pleasure, but greater focus and an intense passion, as well; for now, he could attend to his inner thoughts and to the endless turning of day into night—in other words, both his inner and the outer weather—and, of course, to the birds he loved so much, who kept him company just outside his windows.
In this time of pensive reflection, this time to watch and wonder, full of stillness and light, The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains one day sat down to write another letter.
Dear Howard,
That time of darkness and light, cold and emptiness is here. I want to tell you about what happened yesterday. Another bird story.
I got up before sunrise—which isn’t very hard this time of year, since the sun doesn’t come up around here until well after 7:30—and went about my morning chores. I started a fire in the stove, put the water on to boil, went to the bathroom and peed, brushed my nappy hair, washed my face, and brushed my teeth. Details! Details are important! When the water boiled, I made a pot of tea.
Sometimes, on an especially cold winter morning, I like to get back into bed with my tea and not stand at the window. While the fire warms the house, I drink my hot tea under the warm covers, and I watch out the back window to a different birdfeeder and wait for the dawn.
When dawn came yesterday, or just before the dawn, when the morning light had begun to overcome the darkness, a single chickadee appeared at the feeder and began her breakfast. In less than ten seconds, a dozen of her brothers and sisters and cousins were at the feeder, also.
This morning, as I watched the little birds, I wondered at the way they always seem to arrive together in a group, or very nearly. I know chickadees don’t sleep together, but rather roost, each to him or herself. How, then, did they all get to the feeders at just about the same time? Is someone the leader? Does she wake up the others? Does she sing a few notes? Do they “sense” the dawn while their heads are still tucked in the warmth and absolute dark of the down beneath a wing? Do they all get hungry at exactly the same time? How do they all know to get up and come to breakfast together? Are they simply social creatures who enjoy each other’s company, and would never think of eating breakfast alone? And where does that social, collective impulse, this ability to act and be together, come from? These questions got me to wondering about other kinds of birds.
Lately, in the afternoons, there has been a large flock of redpolls—in other winters, it might be a flock of pine siskins—sometimes as many as fifty, pecking and scratching across the surface of the snow beneath the feeders, finding whatever it is they find in the husks and hulls and refuse from the feeders above. They look, for all the world, like a flock of tiny chickens as they hunt and peck and bob—but then, so un-chicken-like, suddenly—away they all go, all together in perfect unison, up into a nearby tree.
Sometimes, this upward flight has an obvious cause, like a threat from an approaching shrike or the yap of a dog; but often, there is no apparent cause for this flawless, unified and simultaneous rising up together. How does that happen? How do they do that?
I’ve often seen the same thing driving down a wintertime dirt road, as snow buntings who have been pecking along the surface of the road gathering sand and gravel for their gizzards get up and blow away in a swirl, as if they were a little bunch of dry leaves caught in a dust devil.
Much larger birds do this, also—like the wintertime flocks of evening grosbeaks who visit the dooryard feeders and who can, it seems at will, display this perfect-unison takeoff from the branches of an apple tree. And in the spring, large flocks of blackbirds, starlings and grackles and red-winged blackbirds, literally fill up the naked branches of a poplar tree—hundreds of birds together in one flock—and then, suddenly and simultaneously, all lift off and exit at exactly the same time, as if all these birds were really one bird with many wings.
And, in a way, more amazing is the same phenomenon among fish. Many times I’ve seen huge schools of fish, sometimes thousands of individuals in one school, moving together this way and that, up and down and away, waving back and forth like a fan, like a relaxed hand, in the water; again, as if these thousands of fish were a single individual.
In all of these examples, the group moves together, simultaneously, without a leader—or so it seems.
How do they do that? Is it that they have some kind of collective mind or soul that lives outside each individual body? And if this mind-soul does live outside, away from, each individual, if it lives in the space between the individuals of the group as a whole—whether it is a flock of birds or a school of fish—and if this is the consciousness of no particular individual, but rather the consciousness of all, of the group—if all of that, then: are these individuals not really individuals, but only parts of a larger individual? Are they only the arms and legs and fingers, fins and wings of a bigger individual called the flock or the school?
Can it be that the mind-soul of this larger individual really does exist in the empty space among and between the members of the flock, yet controls the entire flock from that empty space?
And how can these birds be individuals one minute, sitting on a shelf feeder, pecking open a single sunflower seed and arguing, fighting with each other; and in the next moment, lose, or give up, their individuality to the group, to that larger mind-soul, that bigger individual called the flock? How can they do that?
Could I, could you, give up my, your, own individual self to a larger flock of humans, and if you or I did that, what would that be like? I’m not sure about you, but I am, I fear, too much the solitary individual to ever be able to do such a thing.
What I’m talking about is why I’m so attached to Broken Wing, my rusty blackbird friend. As my bird book says: a secretive and solitary bird—they seldom occur in very large flocks, and do not, as a rule, associate with red-winged blackbirds or grackles. We are two of a kind, he and I. Both of us cast adrift on this white and foreign sea. And, well, as you know, birds of a feather flock together, even if only to remain apart. Another loner, like me. Which is the problem. He and I are loners, and yet we’re both also more than that.
Each bird is an individual first, and a member of a flock second, just as you and I are. Yet some individuals are more inclined to be members of flocks, like grackles; or like you, Howard, living there surrounded by others of your, and our, kind, while some individuals, like Broken Wing and I, for whatever reasons cause us to be that way, are more solitary and less inclined to be members of a group or flock.
Yet now that I say that, I know that although it’s true, it’s also not true. You and I both know full well that each and every single bird or fish does not give up its individuality to the group, at least not all the time. Rather, I think what they do and how they move so perfectly in unison together is not by abandoning their individuality, but rather by some kind of higher form of communication within this group of individuals. And this higher form of communication is something most, almost all, human beings never experience.
But you and I, Howard, have experienced it. I know you already know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about when we used to play music together, you and I and our friends.
I think birds in flocks are like we used to be, when we played together, how we could jump into a tune and play it—without any discussion before we began of what we were going to do—because we all could communicate so well with each other on our instruments, we all understood each other so well musically, that there was no need to talk.
And once we really took off and entered that other world—call it the Tone World, which is what William calls it—once we were in the Tone World, there really was some kind of collective personality that took over, that made us one being, a flock of four or five, like the birds and the fish; and we, I’m sure, appeared to those listening to us to be a single, new and different person, a single instrument playing—which, of course, is exactly what we were.
And yet none of us ever gave up playing our own individual instruments or playing out of our own personal and individual lives, and because of that, each of us played our own individual instruments out of some deep place in our own personal and individual selves. We were, each one of us, absolutely different from the other, yet all of us, while we were playing together, made together a single song. We made a new and different person while we played together. We were, at those moments, just like the birds and the fishes, don’t you think?
It’s not that flocks of birds or schools of fish or groups of improvising musicians are, when they are together, a single living thing with a collective personality, or that they are always only separate individuals who are just great at communicating with each other as they play together; it’s that they are both of those things and both at once. At least, we were at those times when we really did leave this everyday world and pass over into the Tone World.
The thought of being my individual self within the group, yet also joining the group, becoming part of that larger mind-soul, that bigger individual called the group, the flock, the band, and thereby knowing a kind of higher communication between individual souls, the thought of all of that, the thought of being there with you and the others, of sharing life and music with all of you: all of that sounds so good to me!
Oh, Howard, I’m so homesick! Thinking about all this makes me so lonesome for you and for the others, for the street, for all those people, all those sounds, the noise, the music of the city, our neighborhood. I’m homesick for those times we played together. I want to do something, make something, create something with a group, with our group, and not always, as I do here, alone. Alone. Alone. I’m not meant to be alone.
Well… I read a poem the other day by a Chinese poet named Hê Chih-chang called “Coming Home,” which, by the way, was written more than a thousand years ago::
I left home young. I return old,
Speaking as then, but with hair grown thin;
My people meet me, but they don’t know me.
“Stranger, where did you come from?”
You see? What if I did come home? Who would know me? What good would it do? No. This exile is my home now.
I know you and a lot of others back there think I was out of my mind to come here all those years ago, way up here to this cold, white world. And staying here all these years has just proved to all of you that you were right! But I couldn’t help it. I had to come here. I had to leave there, I had to leave home. I couldn’t stand it there anymore. When I came here, I was just trying to be who I am, and not who somebody else says I am, and that’s what I’m still trying to be.
Do you know that great quote from Thelonious Monk? “A man is a genius just for looking like himself.” Well, it takes a lot of courage and work to look like yourself, “simple” as that may be. And Howard, sometimes the sacrifices I have to make to look like myself are almost more than I can stand.
I know another poet—I can’t remember his name right now—who got it right when he wrote:
When I was young I dreamed of home
And in my dream
I saw a place remote and in the mountains.
Now I’m in that place
And I call it home,
Yet home is still nowhere I can find.
It must be nowhere
Is the right place,
And when I get there I’ll be home.
And until I get to nowhere, I’ll be here.
And yet, so much of the time
I am so sad and blue.
So much of the time I am so lonely,
Sad and blue.
And sometimes, sometimes I just
Don’t know what I am going to do.
Your friend,
The Man finished the letter, put it in its envelope, sealed it, addressed it, and put on his outdoor clothes, and as he walked down the lane to the road and the mailbox, his eyes welled up with tears.
He opened the mailbox door, put the letter in, closed the door, put up the flag, turned, and headed back up the lane and toward the empty, silent house.