It's like having a good view from a
pyramid's top.
*****
BARN SWALLOWS & BEETHOVEN
One day this week I sat in my
rocking chair in the barn door while the usual late-afternoon storm darkened
the sky and growled. As I watched swallows cavorting over the Loblolly field,
on the radio Beethoven's wonderful Eighth Symphony was playing.
The symphony's first movement is
often dark with wrathful emotions, yet every now and then there are bursts
among the bassoons and drums that have always struck me as very like laughter.
The whole piece is on the one hand deadly serious, yet, throughout, there are
unmistakable explosions of horse-laughing glee. It's very like swallows playing
in a stormy summer sky.
History tells us that when
Beethoven wrote the good-natured Eighth he was ill and profoundly disturbed by
the political events and wars of his time. In the same vein, whenever I hear
the Dalai Lama speak, he seems to laugh a lot, despite the plight of his people
under Chinese domination. When I was in India I met several holy people and
their faces always glowed with cheerfulness, despite the poverty and
degradation in which they lived. In this world of collapsing ecosystems and
ongoing mass extinctions of species, The Creator populates the darkening sky
with playful swallows.
As the storm broke and the Loblolly
field heaved beneath wind and rain, those swallows took their time getting to
safety. And I could only look on dumbly and feel ashamed that in my own life
maybe I have been too slow at catching most of the jokes around me, and too
clumsy ever to dance.
*****
BIRD THERAPY
Though quite possibly I am the most
contented person I know, I have to say that anytime I look at a healthy, free
wild bird it makes me even more cheerful. Just seeing the Tropical Mockingbird
with the blue sky behind him, perched on the gracefully arching, yellow petiole
of a fan palm next to my door swaying idly in the summery afternoon wind makes
me smile all inside.