From Bird to Spirit
While smoking a cigar in the backyard, I had my two dogs, Bowie and Nala, with me. Bowie, the smaller one, is a Cavalier King Charles, like Disney’s Lady in Lady and the Tramp. He knows he was made to be hugged. In fact, his breed is also known as the Love Sponge. The official name of it came from the fact that a certain King Charles of England couldn’t go anywhere without a bunch of dogs like Bowie.
When I think that this world has room for breed- ing a being made for love, I have to believe it is a good world after all. Bowie measures up to it, but he also thinks he is a hunter. When I take him on a walk, he tries to pounce on anything that moves, and the autumn leaves taken by the wind make him try snatching them right and left, zigzagging all over the place like a pinball. Between chewing ants and leaves in his way, he also tries to catch butterflies, but is not very successful.
Nala is older, bigger, and has learned to control her preying instincts a little better. Her kick is to jolt at other dogs during our walk and bark like there is no tomorrow. It is easy to imagine the effort needed to walk them out together, and that is why that time I gave myself a break and took them to the backyard. But in a certain moment, I saw Bowie sniffing around a tree, and pretty soon a little bird popped up from behind it and flew close to the ground to hide in the shrubs by the fence on the other side. He must have been a bird recently out of the nest, and as he dis- appeared in the vegetation, I found myself there in the same instant I saw Bowie go that direction and stick his snout in the greenery with frantic resolve.
Fast and flexible, he can leap like a rabbit, and as I grabbed the leash around his neck, I was prepared to disentangle a hurt bird from his teeth, or to see the remains of it on the earth. In that fraction of a second, my heart jumped in my throat and images of taking a wounded, tiny, winged being to an emergency vet while holding its agony in my hands and seeing it go before being able to get help inundated my mind. But I had to face it, and taking a deep breath, managed to wrench Bowie out of there. Nala remained where she was and watched the drama from a distance.
The sight of the little bird in one piece was a revela- tion. It was a robin, and one of its wings was still half-opened as it lay on its side in the bushes with the surrender of despair. I heard no crying peeps and sighed with relief, holding Bowie by his leash with one hand, and catching the little bird with the other. Tearing myself in two, I kept it in my right hand while holding the dog down with my left, wish- ing and screaming for someone to come out of the house and take both the dogs in.
Pretty soon, I noticed a few robins perched on the fence there and thought they should be the family of the endangered baby bird. Still keeping struggling Bowie to one side and holding the bird up to the other, I saw all of it very quickly: A tiny face among them was looking at me with determination, the two sparkling dots in her little eyes, the eyes of a caring mother, highlighted by the terracotta color of her round, smooth head, transmitting the profundity of her being and the height of the sky over her in one, like an encounter of spirit and love launching itself with rectilinear determination into my soul. In the golden gratitude of eventide, her gaze had a mixture of joy, purity, and reassurance. Under a halo of sun, in the languid luminescence of the end of the day, the mother bird was blessing me for rescuing her baby.
More robins landed on the fence as if waiting for me to return their little one. I stretched my body a little more and managed to lift my right hand high- er, so the baby bird was able to jump from it on the fence right next to his mother.
In psychology, birds are a symbol of spirit. From the survival point of view, they are either prey or predator. But what I felt by saving the baby robin, when other winged beings, colors, light, and elements of nature conspired in its favor, was, much beyond re- lief, an intense liberation.
Predator or prey, animal or symbol, the bird I saved also saved me.