The Blackbird Must Fly

Every morning, a red winged blackbird perches on the branches of a mock orange bush just outside our bathroom window and every morning, does exactly the same thing. He looks at his reflection in the window, opens his mouth in a two-note loud, insistent song, and flies directly into the window, smacking himself in the head. Over and over. Every day.

He's been doing this consistently for four or five springs and although he abandons the behavior by the time midsummer comes around, it's peculiar behavior nevertheless, almost disturbing. On some level, though, I kind of get it. Who of us hasn't done the same? Faced the same circumstances every day, declared loud and clear its perfection of purpose, flown off to accomplish it, and hit our head repeatedly only to do it again the next day?

I have.
And, regarding this particular purpose, this particular window, I'm stopping. Today.

You see, I am a writer. And that is a lovely thing to be, but it also presents a problem.
Writing, I have found, is not living. It's not.
Writers are observers. Their craft demands a certain amount of detachment. One cannot both fully experience something and at the same time retain it for possible later inclusion in a work of literary art. At least I can't. So I have spent the last years, during which I have tried to concentrate more on craft, at arm's length from life. I have butted up against life with a mission, and have banged my head against its glare, but not entered in. And have decided that it's not worth it.

Life, after all, is the gift. Sure, the ability to write is a gift, too, but life.....well, life was given to be lived. I should have known this from the beginning. I named the blog after the concept, the overriding demand life makes to be experienced:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees...
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains...*

Breathing is not living. It's true. Neither is watching it, cataloging it, or reporting it. Little remains of this life to me but what does, I want to live, not just write about..

 —you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods...
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die... 
 Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.*

I don't know yet what the striving might look like, but I know it doesn't look like this. This daily push to relate significance on a schedule. The blackbird must fly.

Thank you, though, for reading. I pray that you have gotten at least some word that encourages you on your way.
May we meet again in the seeking.

Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson