“Birds with Human Souls”

    A delightful book called Birds with Human Souls, A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Beryl Rowland, 1978) was given me by a dear friend (Cindy! You!). Amongst many a wonder, it tells of ancient Athenian coins on which “a chubby, smiling goddess with a plain helmet appeared with a well-groomed, self-confident owl.”
    It mentions the great flock of owl coins produced from the Laureotic silver mines, and quotes the most charming depiction of financial prosperity I’ve ever read:

Little Laureotic owlets
Shall be always flocking in:
You shall find them all about you,
As the dainty brood increases,
Building nests within your purses;
Hatching little silver pieces.

              ~ Aristophanes, The Birds, c. 414 BC

May many dear little owlets roost with us all during the coming year...

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Dance Upon a Chimney Pot

    Sitting in the coffee shop window this morning, thinking and planning and worrying, and drawing on a napkin, I looked out and saw against sky two pigeons silhouetted on a chimney pot.  It is a bright, frozen day, with only a distant chill whisper of spring, but one pigeon was doing his bowing dance to the other, circling and bobbing, rounding his chest, no doubt cooing his burred song.  He made me smile, and watch, and forget my thoughts.
    Soon, his lady flew away.  The pigeon paused in his dance.  I thought he would stop, or fly away, too. But after a moment of looking this way and that with his tiny head, he began his dance alone against the clear blue, turning in a pattern which, however instinctual, was a very song of delight, of joy in being, of love without care of return.
    No cramping fear of the morrow, though one pecks a meager living on a sidewalk, no shadow of foiled desire, no shame in the perception of others, indeed in a small gray bird a pure call to cast one's very soul upon the waters.

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Forget-Me-Nots for the Dodo Bird


"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."
                                                                        ~  William Beebe


(With thanks to Bob Bills for the quote above.)

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