Turning Aside to Look

Day to day, I pay close attention to dozens of things necessary to life. Are the dogs almost out of food? How long has it been since it rained? The bird bath is stone dry, and the new ferns in the shade garden are drooping, so it’s past time to pull out the water hose and give them a drink. The horses are being bitten bloody by flies. There’s nothing in the refrigerator for dinner. Where am I on charitable giving for the year? What bills am I most behind on, and when is my next quarterly tax payment due?

There’s nothing out of the ordinary on this list, so I’m not complaining, exactly. I’m just wondering why I keep putting myself at the center of so many needs and piling on more the minute a vacancy opens up. I can think of plenty of reasons that we won’t talk about right now, except to say that my favorite one is not true. Life does not require these things of me. I do them because the consequences of not doing them are unacceptable to me.

If you have read Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, you may recognize his influence here. Among many other things, he points out that none of us will ever complete all of the items on our to-do lists. There will always be too many important things on them. The available time for doing them will always be insufficient. We will always be finite creatures in an imperfect world. This means that what we have embraced as a difficult task—getting everything done—is actually an impossible one, and the sooner we let that truth sink in, the sooner we can start focusing on what is most worth doing in the limited time we have.

I decided to give that a test run last Friday evening. After finishing a years-long project at 6:30 PM, I packed a carry-all with my Dopp kit, my favorite pillow, a nightie, and a pair of binoculars. Then I drove seventy miles across the top of Georgia in the dark, eating a six-pack of Captain’s Wafers for dinner on the way, and checked into a dismal motel near the place I would meet seven strangers for a birding trip that began early the next morning.

When we had all gathered at the designated meeting spot, our guide went around the small circle, asking each of us what bird we most wanted to see that day. She started on the far side, which gave me time to register how accomplished these people were—six women and one man—with shoulder harnesses that held their binoculars to their chests and such clarity about the birds they wanted to see that I decided right away not to lie. When my turn came, I said, “All those birds. They all sound great to me. I can’t wait to see one.” This was followed by a kindly silence. Then we piled into three cars and set off for eight hours of birding.

I was so tired from my late-night drive and poor sleep in the dismal motel that I stumbled over a lot of roots at first, getting used to the way my companions named the birds they heard (sotto voce) as instinctively as I said, “Bless you!” when someone sneezed. They did it even when they were in quiet conversation with each other, which to my ear sounded something like this: “Yes, I was at the (Red-Eyed Vireo) workshop (Wood Thrush) in Blairsville (Great Crested Flycatcher) last weekend. Wasn’t it (Red-bellied Woodpecker) fun?

“How do you do that?” I asked one of the women who was doing it. “Isn’t it distracting?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s just another layer of sound going on at the same time, like a waterfall or children playing. When I first started hearing birds by name, it changed my life.” As the day went on, I began to hear my fellow birders’ voices the same way—as a low, amiable layer of sound that joined the music of the forest, waking my ears up to harmonies I hadn’t heard before.

After a while, I gave up trying to see everything they saw overhead. Someone would say, “There’s an Ovenbird at about ten o’clock in that poplar,” or “I have eyes on a Blackpoll—wait, it’s a Black-and-White—on a high branch of that dogwood tree.” As fast as I’d whip my binoculars up to point in the same direction, all I’d see was a canvas of green leaves, which was still pretty beautiful. Then, just before the birds went into energy-saving mode for the early afternoon, I heard someone give a soft cry of rapture just before she whispered, “A Blackburnian Warbler, right here above my head. You can’t miss her.”

And I didn’t. While we had been searching the woods for members of her species, she had chosen the tip of a low branch hanging right over the road to build her nest. I lifted my binoculars, and there she was, hopping in and settling down so that only her yellow head and black eyes were visible over the edge of her nest. It makes me sigh right now to remember how she wiped my brain clean of anything but her.

There is more to tell you about that day with seven people I didn’t know: the way we identified different wildflowers for each other, the quiet sharing of food, the vote we took on whether the baby possum we found was old enough to make it on his own. (When we left him, he was climbing a tree.) I didn’t get anything necessary done that day. One could argue that nothing was accomplished, except that I started the day empty and ended up full. On a wing and a dare, I stumbled onto what was most worth doing in the limited time I have.

On the last stretch back to our cars, when I knew my neck would be sore for days, I thought about Moses turning aside from herding sheep to take a closer look at a burning bush. I thought about Jesus telling his disciples how important it was to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. He didn’t say anything about whether they should do this alone or together, but last Saturday, I found a way to do it with other people whose attention was so tuned to the life around them that they made mine seven times keener. I wasn’t living in the present with them; I was living in the Presence.

The next time I go on one of these trips (because the consequences of not going on one are now unacceptable to me), I’ll be ready when the guide asks me what bird I most want to see. I’m going to shrug and say, “I’m up for anything. I just like being with birders.”