sonora2sonoma

Ever since I was a young man, I’ve pictured myself sitting on a porch in a rocking chair spending my twilight years thinking profound thoughts about the meaning of life, freed at last from my labors and able to reflect deeply on things beyond the reach of those who have yet to log the hours necessary to develop “the long view,” the wisdom, that experience and introspection make possible.

While I’m hopefully not quite in my twilight years yet, I have been sampling what it feels like to sit on that “porch” and what I’ve found is that, like all such imagined destinations, the reality of a place never turns out the way one pictured it. My imagined porch, it turns out, is instead a perch by a large sliding glass door from which I can watch the neighborhood birds come to my back-yard garden each morning to take their daily baths.

It turns out that birds have routines just like people do—habits, or habitual patterns of behavior ingrained through repetition. And I, it seems, have incorporated watching their comings and goings as a part of my routine.

What this means in the big scheme of things isn’t entirely clear to me, but what is clear is it doesn’t really matter what it means. Watching these birds is a delight unto itself, and that’s all that counts.

Tim Konrad

October 29, 2020