Sam Keen - Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds

What lifts the heron leaning on the air I praise without a name. A crouch, a flare, a long stroke through the cumulus of trees, a shaped thought at the skythen gone. O rare! Saint Francis, being happiest on his knees, would have cried Father! Cry anything you please.

But praise. By any name or none. But praise the white original burst that lights the heron on his two soft kissing kites. When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays, I sit by pond scums till the air recites Its heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.

JOHN CIARDI

It is private life that holds
out the mirror to infinity.

E. M. FORSTER

ONCE UPON AN IMPROBABLE TIME, in an unlikely city not given to adoration, an unexpected epiphany occurred. Shortly before Christmas, the only poor but contented residents of a Fifth Avenue cooperative were unceremoniously evicted from their home. The co-op board ordered its minions to destroy the nest of a pair of Red-tailed Hawks that had occupied a small ledge-sited penthouse for more than a decade. The hawks eating and hygiene habits were simply unacceptable to the rich and famous. Too many pigeon feathers and inedible portions of mouse were falling to the sidewalks of New York.

Overnight, the cult of Pale Male and Lola came into being. Hundreds of citizens who were inured to crime and grime flocked into Central Park with binoculars and tele-scopes, hoping to catch a glimpse of the blessed birds. The scene was reminiscent of the appearances of the Virgin Mary on remote Greek islands, which attract hordes of the faithful. Web sites sprang up, chronicling every move of the couple as they terrorized pigeons and devoured mice and rats. The devout kept watch night and day and reported every return, every gesture of affection, every twig carried in hope to the site of the destroyed nest.

A widespread protest of the sacrilege went up from the supposedly secular core of the Big Apple. Suddenly, the honor and soul of the city were at stake. Could New York allow such injustice to go unopposed? Could the modest poor be displaced by the heartless rich? Could the last remnants of the creatures of the wild be banished from the city? The answer came loud and clear: no! The arrogant board failed to understand that it had an obligation to be guardian of the public, communal, and civic space, and that Pale Male and his family belonged to all the people. Avian activists stood out in the cold with pickets until the embattled apartment dwellers were forced to rescind their decision and restore the ledge to the homeless hawks.

With millions of eyes watching their every move, Pale Male and Lola rebuilt their nest and prepared to start over again. When nesting time arrived, anxious devotees kept watch to see if Lola would lay eggs and produce fledglings. The first eggs did not hatch. Many feared that post-traumatic stress disorder had rendered the couple sterile. But in the fullness of time, more eggs were laid, chicks emerged from the shells, and fledglings took to the air. Across the city, the mood of mourning gave way to jubilation.

In their short time in the spotlight, Pale Male and Lola were celebrated on film and in print. Messages arrived on their Web site from around the world: He is a good dad. The one we always wanted It restores my faith in natureMy spirits are high; I know there is good left in the world. You have brought wild hawks into my life and made me think of them and worry about them as a family

Through the ordinary magic of the imagination, the two Red-tailed Hawks were transformed into winged messengers of the sacred. The gift they brought that Christmas season was the revelation that, beneath its profane facade, the prosaic city still believed in the poetic wisdom of Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tunewithout the words,

And never stops at all.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all claim a definitive knowledge of the nature, will, and purpose of God that was revealed to Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed, recorded in scripture, and mediated through cult, clergy, and creed. What the great monotheistic religions neglect to honor are the unique ways in which the experience of the holy comes to indivi-duals. Being focused on the transcendent God, they tend to overlook the sacred momentsthe sightings and peak experienceswhen a solitary self stands in awe before the miracle of existence, is astonished by the grace of soaring Red-tailed Hawks, is moved by the beauty of a trumpeting stargazer lily, or is comforted by a sonorous symphony of frogs on a summer night.

Each person has a unique way of experiencing the world that reflects the multitude of events that make one persons autobiography different from anothers. Our most intimate revelations of the sacred come in odd ways that may seem meaningless or trivial to an outsider. In those pivotal moments when we are struck dumb by the simple existence of a flowering tree, we detect faint echoes of an unknowable G. A brief opening appears in the cloud of ultimate ignorance under which we dwell. Yet, the experience is so private, so idiosyncratic, that we dont know how to talk about it. We stutter in an effort to put into words something that is ineffable. But there is no way we can explain concisely why our self and our world are unaccountably changed by such encounters. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said of this paradox of mystical experience: There are things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

But what is indescribable is not necessarily inexpressible. What cannot be said straight can be told on a slant. The experience of the sacred may be sung, chanted, danced, put into a poem, or embedded in a personal narrative, autobiography, or story. We may point to ways, places, and times in which we glimpsed the Infinite in some finite disguise. Poets have caught a fleeting glance of Eternity in a grain of sand or in a Tiger! tiger! burning bright, / In the forest of the night. Norman Macleans family found in fly-fishing the enacted metaphor of grace and love. Suffering from frostbite, Willi Unsoeld, a leader of the first American expedition to summit Mount Everest, experienced an opening to Eternity when he saw a blue flower coming out of a snowbank as he was being carried down the mountain. For the philosopher Ernest Becker, as for so many parents, it was the birth of a child: I think the birth of my first child, more than anything else, was the miracle that woke me up to the idea of God, seeing something pop in from the void and seeing how magnificent it was, unexpected, and how much beyond our powers and our ken. The history of religion can be seen as a catalog of the ways the Formless One has been experienced in the Sacred Many. It has appeared as a holy man or womanshaman, prophet, healer, avatar, bodhisattvaor as a snake, bear, cow, pig, horse, river, or spring. So a Red-tailed Hawk may become a living metaphor of the Divine.

Each of us constructs a worldview and philosophy of life in which certain persons, places, things, or events take on an extraordinary burden of meaning, assume a revelatory significance in the dramatic narrative by which we make our lives understandable to ourselves and others. Perhaps at the precise moment at which I see a butterfly emerge from a cocoon, a switch is flipped, and what was, a second before, a purely biological event suddenly fills me with a conviction that all life is a miraculous transformation. Think of the slight adjustment the eye makes that reverses figure and ground in the classic gestalt puzzle, so that at one instant we see a goblet, and at the next, two faces turned toward each other. Suddenly, an accidental happening becomes a coded message that speaks directly to our condition.