Flights of Fancy (43)

I have begun entering writing contests. It is part of my new commitment to my writing work. The first one I entered was not offered by a literary magazine, but by the Celebrate Urban Birds section of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The contest was called "Flights of Fancy" and asked for photographs, videos, artwork or writing. It called on us to, "Go outside and notice the wonder of flight. In some creative way, document the way birds take off from a branch, fly in flocks, hover, dive, frolic, and land." So, I wrote a little piece in response to this prompt. And because it is the first writing contest I have ever entered, I am counting it as a new thing and posting it here.

Bird Wings
I begin my qi gong late today. It's the first day of the spring semester, and I devoted extra time to answering questions online, to replying to my new students' introductions. I lost track of time, tore myself away from my laptop, headed back outside. But I am lucky in my timing. The late afternoon sunshine is still splashing across the patio when I begin. I place my bare feet on the sun-warmed cement facing north. My right kidney has been hurting, and north is the direction of the kidney. So I face north, and I move through the ancient Chinese movements.

The San Jacinto mountains are on my left, steady companions in my efforts. The sun disappears behind them early in the winter, but today I bask in the last of its light. I am not rigid about looking straight before me. I take in the sunlight on the mountains, the way it filters through the pine tree, falls on the patio, across the open doorway. At one point, I notice I can see a tiny, distant me, across the living room in the mirror behind the kitchen sink. I stand just so and grin at my reflection. A hummingbird visits the tecoma blooms by the front windows. I move through each exercise, and the teaching world recedes. When I turn to look at my arm stretched out behind me, the dragon looks at his tail, I see between the edge of my body and the sweep of my arm the crinkly papery blossoms of the white poppy that opened this morning.

The last exercise is a standing pose, knees bent, elbows out, arms raised across my chest--the dragon stands between heaven and earth. I close my eyes and breathe. I can hear the mourning doves passing between the tray feeder at the corner of the house and the pine tree in my landlord's yard. The pittery sound they make is unmistakable, not their voice as I'd once thought--declaring their passage? trumpeting their arrival? a kind of happy muttering?--but a sound created by the flapping of their wings. They don't fly close to me; they give me a wide berth, this woman who feeds them but who is unpredictable, prone to sudden moves. I can hear the hummingbirds flitting past. They fly close to my head, their whirring wings and high-pitched calls both familiar and dear. They become second nature, like breathing. The house sparrows fly close to me, too, darting back and forth between the pyracantha, their sounds a quiet backdrop, their wings soft feathery brushes in the air.

When I am lucky, a raven will fly above the courtyard, the slow, strong strokes of his wings loud, a sound from another world. I will turn, wide-eyed, almost startled into ducking, always awed by the big black wings and how near the noise of their flapping, like a creature from my dreams. But today there are no raven wingbeats. Today I keep my eyes closed and my knees bent and breathe the feathered air, and the birds fly back and forth behind my eyelids. The sparrows are almost more presence than sound, their darting flights above my head like shadows crossing between me and the sun. They gather on the ground beneath the feeder. When they startle, they take flight in unison, lifting in a blur of motion, 40 wings whooshing to the shelter of the hedge, one large feathered creature. Then they drop from the pyracantha again, one after another, sinking to the ground like autumn leaves from a tree.

Today I keep my eyes closed, and I breathe. I can feel the sun on my calves. The cement begins to cool beneath my feet. My still form becomes a part of the garden, and the way the birds flit past me, the way they fly near with no fear lifts my heart. Today I keep my eyes closed, and I breathe bird wings.