
Caution: Family Crossing

WE TALK TO ANGELS…
Call me Saint Francis of Suburbia.
My back yard is an official Natural Habitat. It’s easy. Go online, check off: Feeders, Water, Trees, and the like, pay $25 (yard flag) up to $100-plus (a bronze plaque) I went with the mid-sized $50 model.
I love my birds. So near, yet unreachable, like my distant grown children or my dead parents.
Click click clicking, like a prehistoric tribal language, my Cardinals wake me every morning. Monarchs, their reign pre-dates my dozen-year residence here. At this moment, 20 feet away, the blood-red King pecks a beak-full of seeds from my “Super Songbird Station.” He inches over, snuggles his baby’s tiny head to a nurturing kiss – mouth-to-mouth feeding.
So mysterious, these birds. So many questions:
1. I’ve heard that Cardinals mate for life. Is that true? Why would they do that? Haven’t wildlife suffered enough?
2. What is their lifespan? Are these the SAME dozen-year-old Cardinals, or am I watching a succession? Is the hungry Princeling next year’s King, after the father, having served his subjects, passes on? Should I, as protective saint, declare: “The king is dead, long live the king,” and all that?
3. Are birds REALLY dinosaur descendants? How does a teeny bird evolve from creatures the size of LeBron James, who “ruled the earth” for 140 million years? How can ancestors be annihilated 40 million years ago by a cataclysmic event, then reincarnate at a bird feeder?
I looked up those figures, but don’t expect me to research anything else. If you know the answers, let me know. I’m free at last of the accuracy demanded by journalism, my now-extinct career. Mirroring the internet, my blog runs on opinion, bait-and-switch tactics and astonishing misinformation.
My 20-year-old daughter can’t wait to see the new (second, third or fourth?) “Jurassic Park.”
She lives her life in lines – on line, party lines, text lines. I live in circles, within circles. Dreams within dreams. Seasons. Reincarnations. On and On. Round and Round. Alpha and Omega. Yin and Yang. Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity. (Remember the “Ben Casey” show opening?) Of course you don’t.
This morning, teaching yoga, I said “loosen up, y’all. Yoga should be more dance than rigid statue.” It’s not the be all, end all, as some gurus teach it, NOT that I am one. Yoga is one of many paths that overlap and circle around faith, hope, love.
Tolerance may be spin out of organized religion’s orbit. How can any Religion insist on itself as the One Absolute Truth? How do people buy that? By asking the question, am I being intolerant? Probably.
Still. Organized Religion seems part cultural dictate. Like a Tier One college. A good job. You may hate it, but you need money to get married, have at least two kids, buy an overpriced home in a neighborhood with good schools that lead to Tier One colleges. Round and Round.
“Love me all the time girl. We’ll go on and on. Someday when I’m lonely, wishing you weren’t so far away, then I will remember things we said today.” See: “Things We Said Today” – the most under rated Beatles song. Source: Me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPnTy0Ef2G0
Re: Children: Like baby Cardinals, they’re so helpless, vulnerable, so OURS, that we feed and protect them.
Everyone smiles at them. How old are they? How adorable he/she/it is. As producers of mini celebrities, we beam with delight. Give them our souls, round the clock. Can’t imagine life without them.
Summertime and the living is easy. Daddy’s rich and the kids are good looking.
Then they grow. Into Crows. Pigeons. Perigrine Falcons. Vultures. Velociraptors. Predators, that bite, target the weak, eat carrion, transmit disease. Assuming we’re still in tact, their targets may become: US!
Show me a mother with grown children who hasn’t gone through pure hell at some point, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars. Well, may a hundred. Kahlil Gibran is right (see poem) We don’t own our children. We are delivery devices/vehicles for species evolution.
Silly old me. I thought our love would go on and on. My love did, for my parents and children. I didn’t count on such radical changes.
Whoop. Text just came in. From my son, who may be in a manic, paranoid, schizoaffective state, or some combo of all that and more. I won’t stop to read it now. I know it will be insulting. He rejects my help.
But oh, man. The night he was born. Physical agony combined with bliss of a near-death experience. Less than 24 hours after birth, middle of the night and wide awake, the Angels spoke to me. “Go to the nursery,” they sang. Feeling, yet not caring, that my insides might splatter the hospital halls with each step, I went on, as in a pilgrimage of Sun Salutations over Tibetan mountains to the Dalai Lama. There, among the dozens wrapped in swaddling clothes, I knew him. Him. Widening circles of Faith, Hope Love. And the greatest of these is love.
Okay, Carnac. “And the text says:” Remember “‘Carnac the Magnificent'” from the Johnny Carson Show? Of course you don’t. I read:
“Mom, I trust you to an extent, but you can’t live my life for me. Do you believe in Aliens? They are the Angels. Light Beings. They are but being covered-up. As usual.”
“Yes,” I write back. “I believe in Angels. All around us.”

Faith Hope Love…
On Children by Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
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