A gray, warm morning unfolds.
The woods still stand barren and brown, yet the air thrums with layered song. Robins pour liquid notes into dawn. Song Sparrows weave melodies through budding twigs. White-throated Sparrows paint the air with sweet, ascending calls. Cardinals pierce morning with bright chirps. Mourning Doves offer soft prayers.
Listen.
Crows add rough counterpoint. Red-bellied Woodpeckers tap code on hollow trees. Blue Jays shatter silence with brash alarms. Cedar Waxwings pass their whispered secrets. Above it all, Canada Geese honk as they trace arrows across the pearl-gray sky, marking paths older than memory.
Our minds crave order; they seek safety in names. There’s power here, an illusion of mastery. Name a thing, file it away, and mark that box of understanding. With these labels, we build our maps of the world – valuable tools, sometimes beautiful ones.
But the name is not the thing. No map captures the trail’s damp earth beneath your feet, the pine-scented breeze, the quiet burn of ascent. When we sort and label, something precious slips away. Each robin’s particular voice, each warbler’s unique wing – smoothed into bland categories.
Names would have us experience the world like spotting a pond from a hill, merely recognizing it rather than entering its warm water to the neck. We live in this web of abstractions, our thoughts wrapped in language until we forget any deeper way of knowing.
So, on this gray, warm morning, let us listen. Not to “birdsong,” that pale abstraction, but to this trill, this chirp, this warble. Let us feel this air on our skin, smell this earth awakening. Let us drop the net of names and be – present as the robin on wet grass, the swelling bud, the thawing soil, the deer watching from the thicket.
Here, in this moment’s bright immediacy, we can finally touch what we are: boundless, whole, luminous, unborn, alive.