Hummingbirds love the colour red.

Hiking with friends in the East Kootenays of British Columbia, I came face to face with an inquisitive hummingbird who thought my red T-shirt was a big, juicy flower. She suddenly zipped out of nowhere and hovered directly in front of me, for a moment of wonder that took my breath away; a visitation from realms unseen.

Moments of wonder are the rest notes in the musical score of our lives. That quick intake of breath, void of word, thought, analysis or speculation, invites sacred attention and deep listening. Such moments are critical to the balance of light and dark scores in human experience. Without receptivity, however, these restorative pauses get missed; the dynamic balance between activity and rest is lost in a blur of static busyness.

Flight of the Hummingbird: a parable for the environment, tells the story of Dukdukdiya, the courageous little hummingbird who picked up beads of water to drop on a forest fire – because that was what she could do. The moral is that everyone can do something and many people together can make a difference.

When you think about it though, a tiny bird who weighs as much as a post-it note, carrying beads of water to a forest fire, is no small feat.

Anna’s hummingbirds are year-round co-habitants where I live. The males have bright iridescent head feathers that flash like strobe lights from the tops of trees that we planted 30 years ago. They can be fiercely protective of particular feeders, so I put up several to make sure that males and females all have access to one! From the stone front on our house, they gather spider web for their nests, feed on small insects, and occasionally rest in the shade. They drink at pools of water in our garden and are the first pollinators of Spring flowers. We have a reciprocal relationship.

So it is clear that in this single image there is interbeing of cloud, rain, sunshine, trees, humans, hummingbirds, ..and vibrant aliveness of the Earth. All are reciprocal. enriching, heartening.

I didn’t know any of this at the time of my visitation with the hummingbird in high alpine 40+ years ago. But somewhere inside me that knowing was waiting to be fertilized by that moment of wonder; that rest note in the score of my inner being, as yet unexamined in my search for meaning.

The covid pandemic ushers in a new phase of human search for meaning – questions about what is “normal”, or “real”, and where does true value really lay. It’s what happens in an existential crisis and we humans are unique, as far as we know, in our capacity to reflect on the conditions of our own lives. It’s a capacity not to be wasted on egoic shows of wealth that most of us have fallen prey to in one form or another. We can learn where true value lay – in relationship to ourselves, one another and to the sentience of all life around us.

Being in relationship requires receptivity to moments of wonder – and the courage to tell about it. I suspect it also requires a worldview which holds that all life, whether it crawls, flies, slithers or walks, has inner consciousness relative to its nature. The pivot point toward shifting paradigms, as we search for meaning, is movement away from a hierarchy of human-derived economic value to awareness of intrinsic value within and between all life.

* With eternal gratitude to Master Thich Nhat Hanh for his story of Interbeing – Clouds in Each Paper. https://www.dailygood.org/pdf/ij.php?tid=222

Before anything different can happen, before people can sense, hear, relate, and imagine differently, there must be a clearing. a decluttering, an initiation into the unknowable; and a letting go of the desires for certainty, authority, hierarchy, and of insatiable consumption as a mode of relating to everything.

~ Bonnitta Roy ~