Loud cry from the sky —no, wait, from the rooftop: nifty house wren niche
The house wren, fiercely territorial, belongs to the family troglodytes which means “hole dweller”—this hole happens to be, fittingly, on a Dunkin’ Donuts building.
I cannot say, Child, what you might be experiencing within, but I can tell you I dreamed that we were sailing along a river with green overhanging boughs and that the waters before us were only troubled by a succession of indentations made by tiny feet running rapidly across —a little Jesus lizard, there in the recesses, trying to catch or, on second thought, cavorting with, a dragonfly which shimmered and skimmered away just as the swan drifted into view, its white feathers transforming as it neared, changing from white to gold flushed with crimson and then the eagle, gliding low over the glimmering water, huge, like life itself, its curved yellow beak closed, its sharp eye affixed on us, not on the hunt, merely acknowledging our presence and so we drifted on and I didn’t even realize until the shore loomed before us, rocky and steep, that we’d been riding in a little wooden boat that navigated the river by its own power, not ours, to land us right where we needed to be, and that we’d be able to navigate this embankment, too, for there amid the stones and earth were steps perfectly placed for our climb.
do it anyway acts of faith are rewarded refueling the soul
One little ruby-throated female visited the feeder this afternoon. Although days had passed without a hummingbird sighting, I refilled the feeders and left them out anyway, in case…
—A crow’s endearing pose? To give them their due, crows are highly intelligent; they use tools. They play. They mourn. And this, from the Corvus entry on Wikipedia:
Crows have demonstrated the ability to distinguish individual humans by recognizing facial features. Evidence also suggests they are one of the few nonhuman animals, along with insects like bees or ants, capable of displacement (communication about things that are not immediately present, spatially or temporally).
Not tiny and fairy-like, but certainly enchanting…furthermore, as I finished this post and went outside, a crow called —caw-caw—from the pines…
Crows, historically associated with death, are highly intelligent birds with powerful memory. In folklore they convene to determine capital punishment for wrongdoers—a murder of crows, apropos. Yet they mourn their dead and will even place small sticks or other objects around a deceased fellow crow, in a sort of funeral rite.
On Sunday morning, crows perched atop the steeple cross at church as congregants arrived. Harbingers of death? Casters of judgment? Consider the cross, an instrument of capital punishment, particularly of someone “who knew no sin” offering himself as a sacrifice for all the wrongdoing of humankind…For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved (John 3:17 NKJV); For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV).
So sit the crows on the steeple cross a judgment passed a death sentence cast yet overturned and overcome so long ago —one wonders what the crows know.