woodcock blessing

When I was a little kid, around age five, I caught a lesser known kind of bird: a long-beaked, short-tailed brown bird with markings on the head that, to my way of thinking, makes the forehead look square. I was later able to identify it as a woodcock

Since it is unusual to catch a bird -- that was the only time it ever happened to me -- it left an intense memory all through my being. Getting close was exciting. Actually catching it was amazing. It was very light weight, like it could have been hollow. But the part I am remembering now is that phase when I realized I was closer than I normally get to birds, but I had not caught it yet. It was like crossing into another realm of being. And since my intentions were kind, it was a very blessed state of being.

Holding the little bird in my hands I walked straight home to show it to my mother. I say the bird was little because it was small, and fit easily in my hands, but it was full grown. All I remember my mother saying was, "You have to let it go." And so that is what I did. We both walked out to the green lawn. Somehow the green of the lawn is particularly vivid in my memory. It was a dark green, but since it was the green of grass, it was a living green. I set the bird down and stepped back, and immediately, the bird flapped its wings, and if a rapid flutter, it darted away, flying low to the ground, but powerfully. It was in good health.

I might not be telling this story at all except for what happened much later in my life. I was 34, Cindy and I had just moved to Lansing, Michigan, and I was in the back yard when I saw another woodcock. I gazed at it, and for a time, it gazed back with its black eyes. I did not move, and looking back, I notice that I did not even consider trying to catch it. For the time the woodcock was there, it was like that blessed state of being returned. Oh how wonderful to commune with a particular species, and a particular individual in the wild.

And so it was a day of deep mourning for me, later that season when a woodcock, maybe that same individual, died on our front lawn. We do not know how it died. We just found it laying there. I was, as they say, "freaked out." I wanted someone else to bear witness. So I had a burial service with one of my neighbors, Richard Lee.

A note about Richard. He was a very fat man who served tea and cookies whenever I visited which was a lot. He had a round, layered, almost toad-like face. And he loved to pray for the healing of sick and ill people. He hosted a prayer service in his house every month. He thought he had some magical powers to heal. Maybe he did. He even tried to teach me some of the magic, but looking back, I see my prayer work, not as magic to change things, but as compassion to change our relationship. I work with the assumption that my wishes do not change other people's condition, but if they get worse, I feel sad with them, and if they get better, I feel happy with them. Prayer changes me by allowing me to feel with them more deeply. But prayer also protects me from taking on their condition as my own. In prayer, I can be in a blessed state of being, regardless of whether it is a time of joy or sorrow.

I wanted Richard to be there with me that day when I buried the woodcock. He understood my deep emotion when I told him that it felt like the little bird had died coming to visit me. It was so innocent and harmless. I dug a grave for it right there in the front yard, and picked it up with my hands and placed it in the ground, and covered it with earth. And that was over.

But it was not over, because, when we moved to Baltimore, during our first week in our new house on 31st Street, another woodcock came to visit. It was flitting around in our back yeard . I called Cindy to come look, and she saw it too. I watched for a long time, maybe 10 minutes. This place is blessed.