The Cardinal

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. – Anais Nin

Cardinal. A constant. Here year round regardless of the cold, the meanness, the tragedy of winter. Resilient.

In this past winter –when the cold was relentless, when it hurt to breathe, when you thought nothing could ever really live again, he appears.

The only color in a world of gray.

They say of the cardinal that they are the perfect combination of familiarity, conspicuousness, and style. Sometimes the only life in the dead of winter.

Who would think that the most obvious is the most possible? Who would’ve thought that the one who stays…who doesn’t migrate his stunning scarlet self to the south or east or west, but remains regardless of the pain, the cruelty, the fight for territory, for truth and for lost time…stays?

He re-nests, taking up new terrains---trading in one hangout for another; finding new places to find seeds or in some cases plant ‘em; spending days, weeks, months reflecting on his own reflection, asking himself, “Why? When? What now?" And eventually works to rebuild, re-nest his life with his own twigs, trinkets (not someone else's), his own weights and beauty.

And wouldn’t you know that flighty, flitty hummingbird gets lucky…finds herself forgetting to migrate (she's always running late), and ends up working out (toning, really) her feathers at the same shrub of the cardinal.

They sit. He sits, she flits. She stretches. He grimaces. She pretends she is closing her eyes-but watches him in moments of silence. He works hard to move beyond expectation, a half-moon wing stretch–eventually finding ease in the once impossible.

Soon they chat and flit, flit and chat. Days and Nights. Late nights and days. Nooners and late late nights. Red bull afternoons and double latte nites--until they realize that she, this hummingbird, a dreamy migratory who kept missing her flight south and west, (kept forgetting to log her miles), and he...this cautious constant who thought his prior nest would never end could need and want the other.

For years, unbeknownst to them this seemingly unlikely pair were a feeder, a friend, a flower away. She would be slurping up nectar (a vegan), he could be seen sunning under its petal; she would be singing some sad song and he knew its lyrics; he would be hanging with his iridescent friends, she knew several of them from flight school.

They, Cardinal and Hummingbird, may have been on divergent paths, their journeys quite different (he had helped spawn a couple kids; she flitted from garden to garden putting on flower plays) yet they were so similar in sense..in spirit. Had drive. Felt deep. Loved hard. Had discussions less about the surface and more about substance

"What do you think of eminent domain," she chirped, "You think some Grackle can just take over your nest even though you built it and they need it...?"

"Where would a bird go ..if they were forced to give away their nest and a new nest would cost so much?," he wondered.

They were connected less in story...more in soul-and they liked it that way.

All constants need moments of randomness and unevenness and migrators (even ones who just dream of migration) always need a constant. It’s chemistry. Two unlikely (slightly unlikely being both birds ‘n all) properties mix it up and end up making a better property, a cocktail of sorts, one with sugar, lemon and vodka.

Harmonic convergence, they call it. And in the middle, they meet.