I wake to the sounds of birds and wonder if I should get up too. Now that the boys are home for the summer, I like to be up early to steal some quiet for myself.
I roll over to check my husband’s alarm clock but instead see his back. It must too early to get up. I notice it’s dark outside.
Still, I lift my head over his body in a heroic effort to assign time.
4:44.
I like that. Those fours could inspire me to get up and write about the “masculine.”
“4” is the number for Emperor in the tarot, and this is the first full day of summer–the masculine in full expression.
Instead, I roll over and slip back into the soft feminine of dreams.
When the sounds of birds wake me again, the room is lightening and Casey is gone. I can see the clock easily now: 5:40. Nothing interesting about that. I slide back into dreams once again.
Another chorus wakes me later, and this time the bedroom is streaming with light. It’s coming on 7. Casey will leave for work momentarily and if I don’t get up now, I’ll sleep till the boys wake and that would be a steep start to the first day of summer “vacation.”
I force myself into conversation when Casey comes to say goodbye. He tells me that I was laughing in my sleep–hysterically–like he’s never heard before. I can’t recall any of my dreams, but later it comes to me… I was back at Kripalu, with a YogaDance friend, and I was talking with my teacher Megha. My cheeks lift recollecting it now.
The conversation with my husband lulls–as it does when someone is still horizontal. I break the silence with a sudden observation: “Some birds are so repetitive!”
Casey tilts his head to hear the call in question.
“Maybe they’re parents,” he says.
That’s enough of a curiosity to stir my mind, so that when my husband stoops to kiss me goodbye, I am already wondering:
What would a mother bird say to her kids?
On a week of rain like this, she’d be stir crazy in the nest so that the moment the clouds lifted, she’d say, “Get of this nest. Get out of this nest. Get out of this nest!”
Or maybe she has a teenage son like mine who wants to lie around all day and she says, “Go get some worms. Go get some worms. Go get some worms!”
It could be her “nest blessing day” and then she’d call to all of them: “Pick up your stuff. Pick up your stuff. Pick up your stuff!”
Whatever she’s repeating, it’s annoying and it gets me out of bed. Who wants to lie around listening to that call over and over again?
And then I get to thinking, why do some birds have annoying, repetitive calls and others–like the thrush–share deep, soulful sounds that stir me inside?
And right way, I know. They’re just like us. And I know that I want to be a thrush, not a “Pick up your stuff. Pick up your stuff. Pick up your stuff,” mom. That bird sits right out my window on a nearby tree, but the sound of the thrush comes from the forest.
Actually, I don’t know much about birds, except that I hear them a lot living near the woods as I do. The only call I recognize is the thrush–because I’ve always loved it–ever since we first moved to the mountains. But it might not even be a thrush.
I used get excited about hearing a particularly beautiful call, but whenever I’d ask my bird knowing neighbor what it was, he’d laugh and say: “That’s a Robin,” or worse: “That’s a crow.”
Jack Kerouc wrote, “Even if it didn’t happen, it’s true,” and this comforts me because what I sense about the soul of the thrush IS true, even if it’s not her that I hear.
But my truth is interrupted by the scratching of my own “chickadees” in the “nest” above my office. It’s only 8 am. I thought they’d sleep much later on their first day of summer vacation. I haven’t even checked Facebook or Twitter yet or finished telling you about how I want to have the call of a thrush in my heart instead of a complainer.
I listen for her again before I head to the kitchen to make breakfast, but she’s gone. Maybe her own kids are up too and she has to shift her attention from matters of the soul to practicalities–like twigs and worms and lessons in flight. Maybe that deep, spiraling call only comes when she’s alone–in the dark wood–before the kids get up.
When night falls and our children are asleep again, she’ll return–and I’ll be here too.
(June 2009)
The Empty Nest Diary 