Waiting for the White Bird

I pushed the glass door open and the cold foggy air whispered across my skin. My coffee cup warmed my exposed hand as I walked on the deck. As I sat down and scanned view of the city before me—I saw something peculiar: a white bird balance on a spire atop the music hall across the street. This stood out to me as I normally don’t see white birds in my area of town—they usually reflect the streets: dingy and gray.

At first, I didn’t think too much of it. “At any moment he’ll fall off or fly away,” I thought. But he never did. I sat there for near an hour watching this bird. At times he would fall off balance and fight to stay on. At other times he would balance there with ease. He never gave up.

Why was this bird doing this? What was the point?

We often look at animals as such simple beings: eat, sleep, procreate. But maybe we’ve been missing something deeper to the animals around us.

If we listen and watch closely, they’re teaching us lessons. Through them, much of the complexity of the human experience is stripped away. When we observe people doing similar things, it’s all too easy to wrap our conditioning, beliefs, egocentrism, competitiveness and so on into it. I guess a simpler way to say—we think about human behavior differently. This causes noise and we lose the signal. The message that we often overlook when we see each other. Or maybe, the one I overlook.

Throughout humanity we’ve been closely connected to nature and the animals around us. Countless stories are riddled with the messages they’ve brought to us. Ceremonies with animals & nature have been a right of passage in many cultures and religions.

It’s all too easy to feel disconnected from our worldly roots. Maybe through optimizations, industrialization and advancements we’ve lost something. Our connection to the world that reflects us and gives us a glimpse into our own soul.

So if the white bird is a messenger, who sent it? What was the message? Or was it just a white bird balancing on a spire?

It’s not up to me to choose for you. But for myself, I believe it was a messenger with a message I need to unravel.

After watching to see if the white bird would fall off or fly away for about an hour—I gave up and went back to work. Once I returned after an hour or so, it was gone. A feeling that the white bird will return came over me. Since then, I’ve been waiting for the white bird.