Cardinal:
1. (noun) a leading dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church.
2. (noun) a New World songbird of the bunting family. The male is partly or mostly red in color.
3. (adjective) of the greatest importance; fundamental.
It was the end of a long and satisfying hike, one of those Elena and I sometimes take when Jorge has a wedding and will be gone sunrise to sunset. We’d been roaming for hours, scaling trees and rocks, getting muddy, scraping mud from the bottoms of our boots, eating endless small crunchy snacks out of endless small snappy containers, taking long breaks by little creeks. We were making the near-vertical ascent out of the park toward the Environmental Center when we saw the cardinal.
In the first days of spring, that scarlet gleam amid so much gray-brown is a joy. A heart flutter. “A cardinal!” I cried out like a child, and Elena duly noted it, mmm-hmm, making her dogged way up the slope. Then the cardinal swooped from its perch in a young dogwood to a gully beside the trail, where it hopped around taking little sucks in the mud. Now it caught Elena’s attention. She stopped, watched it. It did its little dance, hop, skip, peck, flit, and she inched almost imperceptibly closer to it. I stayed still. Closer, and closer, hunching down as subtly as she could to achieve its height without causing alarm. I was lulled into a stupor by the new spring warmth and hiking fatigue and had half-dozed off when she said, “I touched it!” She was giddy, her face alight with surprise. “It let me touch it!”
“Wow!” I said, enthused for her. It had flitted off now into the brambles. I started to make my way up the trail. But she instead followed her bird, scaling the scrabbly slope first quickly, then very, very slowly. She crouched in swirls of sticker bushes and watched the cardinal. 2 minutes, 3 minutes. With mini-steps of her small sneakers, she snuck closer. Scooted her body so that it could have been a rustle of wind, a shift of leaves. Watching her, I understood that this was a gift. The gift of sinking into another kind of time, another kind of attention, another kind of presence. Closer, closer, so that the spring day on that hillside ceased to be a spring day with people coming and going and plans and polite chatter and tilted instead into the quiet, the devout.
When she was within arms reach, she knew to sit for a minute longer. Not to rush it. I watched her as she watched the bird, both of us absorbed beyond our breath, beyond this hillside and moment. She reached out her small hand and gently, firmly, with confidence and kindness, petted the cardinal. Petted a wild bird. She stroked its broad purplish-crimson back and then she made a soft arc all the way from crest to tail. It did not flinch, did not move, absorbed the touch. There was a kind of tension, a precariousness, an incredulity in the air, as if we’d all punctured a barrier taken for granted all the time that suddenly proved a mirage. The barrier shimmered, and disappeared, and we were for a second part of a wild world.
It is no exaggeration to say that it was everything. It is no exaggeration to say that for a moment I got it, that everything else in life from school to work to dinner to phone calls to coffee and dinner and books was revealed as a mere arbitrary pleasantry or distraction and that really we live in just these few moments of connection.
Elena spent almost twenty more minutes in the brambles, her hat and coat covered in stickers and torn, her hand bleeding, sitting with her cardinal while countless couples and runners and families passed, while I watched her with my heart in my throat. I want nothing more for my child than this: the ability to be possessed by wonder. The desire and curiosity to know – not to own, not to dominate, not to control, but to observe without ego – the world around her.
The day tipped toward evening and she began to get cold, and she shuffled her feet a little bit and shivered, and I said, “Ready?” and she nodded. I had to climb up and extricate her from a thick sticker bush, wipe the blood from her hands. I spotted the cardinal mere feet from her, nestled in the safety of the heavily fortified bush but still within reach. Goodbye, cardinal, we said. Thank you.
On the way home we were giddy. The day was going that pale purple of early spring and we skipped along the sidewalk and she kept exclaiming, “I touched a wild bird! I touched a wild bird!” She was alight with it from within, and the whole rest of the day, through play date and dinner and bedtime, she had that glow. She’d reached into another realm and she knew it; she was moved by it in ways she couldn’t recognize, probably I can’t fully recognize, the most important ways that reshape our humanity. She went to bed and I meant to write about it but the moment was still so red-hot, still such a lump of feeling in my throat, that I didn’t. I let it sit. All week, I returned to it as a touchstone. The bird in the brambles. Cardinal. Of the greatest importance. The way the human spirit, so distracted and confused by a million desires and dissatisfactions, can then sit still and watch, wondrous, another creature, can reach out to feel a feather, can crouch in the damp cold brambles for no practical reason beyond curiosity, and feel the mystery of the world we’re living in, who’s here with us, the moment of connection when our smallness finally dissolves.
Recommendations:
I wrote a thing! Finally! It’s about pretty much all of my favorite subjects: travel, women, power, motherhood, and feminism! Read it on Lit Hub. Jorge and I loved this show and binge-watched it in a few days. Really enjoying this series on The Daily, which reveals as much about the failures of the American school system as it does about the particular challenges of the pandemic.
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