Hummingbird in Holding Pattern

It had been a long time since Hummingbird had written in her Feather Book. Complacency was the worst kind of ailment. In the Big Bird book of knowledge, complacency was known to cut off blood, love & idea flow and it was also the leading cause of bird deaths by cat.

It wasn’t that there were not 1000 thoughts fluttering through her tiny brain --there were always. But the want? The energy? To put on the page? To take her quail quill and etch them in the sandy dirt near the feeders? The motivation to express and even to experience had waned.

Was it age? Some kind of seasonal disorder? Her diet? Her flanks were consistently achy. Her skin patchy. And her crop (where she digested her nectar) was always rumbling, unsettled. There was this weird mix of complacency sprinkled with havoc..

Okay, part of it definitely was age. Hummingbird, who only slept approximately 2.5 hours a day, filled the rest of it with fluttering and chirping and chirping and fluttering. It did not matter if such acts were performed alone—chirping and fluttering were not used to just socially engage they were her being, her essence. Yet lately Hummingbird found herself sleeping 3 hours a day, sometimes even 3.5 and upon waking to this discovery—--she would fly into a panic, “Squawk! I have missed 30 minutes of the world today, this is tragic. Life is not for dreaming it’s for doing.” And off she would go searching for new flowers, flapping over new terrain, and trying new fly twists and turns.

And where was Cardinal in all this? Well, Cardinal was very much still in the big picture, but in the little picture, the everyday snapshots, the candids he was elsewhere. Cardinal, a master nest-builder and operator spent his weekdays in another latitude, a long way away. He always returned regardless of rain, snow, winds and other flight delays to spend weekends with her and his friends and family. And she welcomed these returns though admittedly it took a moment to reconnect, to figure out how her wing fit in his, to shift from her more solitary existence to one of a shared time and space.

"If we lived in the same nest, it would be much easier." Cardinal would consistently sing. Yet, his nest still had sticks and twigs of a former life (holding it together), and her nest was filled with well, just stuff, part-hoarder and part-hoper, Hummingbird to no surprize lived a scattered existence. How much of the past to discard in order to move into the future? Hummingbird, always in a perpetual state of worked-uppedness (it's her biology, after all) felt that if in order for there to be a shared nest there had to be planning, troubleshooting, "we have one shot" she squeaked to Cardinal, "and we have to consider everything so it can withstand even the strongest of storms."

The fact that there was some bird in her life she even wanted to nest with was significant, but she worried that her fears (of change? of judgement? of failure? of moving into someone's nest and feeling like a visitor) would overwhelm any flight of possibility. Hummingbird knew that some birds never even get to have such an existential crisis that many birds never make it to a place of love, having been thrown from trees, swallowed up by storms or worse suffering from some malady (like head mites) delaying or denying their ability to fly, explore and live.

And as the days grew shorter and colder, decisions would need to be made as change (like the seasons) was afoot, and thus something would have to happen in order for Hummingbird and Cardinal, a love story for the ages to continue and thrive.