“Men have trouble multitasking,” she said.
At least, I think it was her. I wasn’t paying too close attention, so I could be wrong. Anyhow, something caused me to take a battery-powered electric razor into the garden when I went out to look for signs of drought-related stress on the viburnums. I was buzzing away on my stubble and glancing up at the droopy leaves when I noticed a hummingbird hovering about 10 feet above my head. I snapped off the razor and he drifted back into a wreath of leaves. I say “he” because years of watching shaving commercials during televised baseball games leads me to believe only a male humming bird would get its dander up over the buzz of a Norelco. I flipped the razor back on and the bird resumed his position above, and then I flipped it off and he backed away again. Something about this filled me with anxiety.
Could it be there really is a butterfly effect, which means seemingly tiny things we do have large and distant consequences that can turn on and off like one and zero in some large, invisible computer? When the already rapidly beating heart of this small creature elevates still further and the wings buzz a bit harder, could governments topple or small swells turn into tidal waves? Or when the razor stops, might waves of bliss head out through the Kuiper belt and on across the galaxy? If matter, at the quantum level, is constructed of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence, mightn’t God — viewed here as a grizzled older gentleman only because the writer has spent too many hours watching the commercials that accompany televised sporting events — mightn’t God be shaving in his garden and what strange hummingbird might he be dealing with? Or perhaps this cosmic hummingbird is God revealing herself, like Krishna to Arjuna, to some great and dimwitted constellation of Shaving Man?
But I digress.
I think my anxiety over this intermittent hovering bird has more to do with looking up, something I keep forgetting how to do as I grow older. Looking up at this beautiful apparition takes me back to a time shortly after a freak accident took my legs out from under me, put me in a wheelchair and then in months of therapy exercises that involved lying on my back in this same garden and looking up while counting my steady breaths and leg lifts, as regular as a prayer drum.
It was then I became aware that we live at the bottom of a great sea of air filled with layer upon layer of creatures and phenomena, lights and shadows, visions conversing with visions whether our eyes are open or closed. Without this little medical catastrophe, I might never have known that a layer of dragonflies swims hundreds of feet up and guards my home as steadfastly as any Cold War submarines, or that hawks and eagles patrol even higher, and above them swim the vague shapes of even more distant creatures. This ocean supports parachuting spiders as diverse as jellyfish, swarms of non-English speaking ladybugs, and countless drifting seeds ready to repopulate the ocean trench wastelands if given half a chance. Anyone who has ever taken flight in a dream can tell you it is really more like swimming, frog kicking through the air to get that dreamy perspective on the great coral reef that is human culture. Is it any wonder that my Celtic ancestors saw great ships in the sky, sailing west?
“Okay. But, did you notice if the viburnums need water?”
“Sorry, I forgot to check.”
“Did you finish shaving?”
“No, not quite, but I can do it in the car on the way…”
