What's Making Me Happy: Amal El Mohtar on Mundane Miracles and Looking For Birds

[raven_cromwell]

Not gonna spoil much of this one for y'all, because it's very much an essay whose beauty comes from watching it unspool in all its thought-provoking glory But here's a taste:

I’d found my birds. And the happiness I felt — bubbling over into tears, the gift of it, the miracle of it — wasn’t a reprieve from pigeons, but just the company of birds: the sight and sound of them, darting, singing, the shape and flash of them moving in the world. Sounding, and sought. Hidden, and found. The sudden awareness of how long it had been since I’d just stood and stared at birds, for the love of them.

I probably stood there for another ten minutes, thrilling in them, before walking home — thinking how much I wanted to tell my friend of what I’d seen, and then write about it, about New Years and the stories we make for them, the stories we’re always choosing for ourselves but want desperately to be chosen by. I feel like I could make any number of elegant auguries: I could say, I saw three birds that have eaten from my hand; I could say, I refused an easy answer, and found reward in seeking. I could spin these out into significance, build patterns to challenge and excite me for the next twelve months.

But I want more than anything to tell you how I didn’t feel the need to do any of that. I want to tell you that shedding the weight of a borrowed pattern was its own vibrant grace, and an encounter with common winter birds in a green tree beneath a white sky breathing snow was a gift that asked nothing of me, that slaked thirsts I’d forgotten I had.

It just makes me feel luminous with joy