For the Birds

My writing workshop instructor says to let go of all the lists you are making in your head at the bus stop and instead write in your head. This was always my thing – I often write in my head – but my head is crowded with so many competing voices these days – whether it is the board minutes for SISTAWorks, the dojo newsletter for NOLA Aikido, the race and parenting blog, this blog, my manuscript, emails to friends, social media (three Twitter accounts, two Facebook pages, three Google+ pages, Ello, Pinterest, Instagram, Linked In), a journal I keep on relationships, notes I take for the Welcome Table, research I do on big media and the fraccing industry or corporate intelligence work – I’m writing in and out of my head at break neck speed to the point that meditation is the only S.T.O.P.

That is why this morning I walked and thought about Stella, who is still being leash trained, who is still want to pull off in an errant direction when there is a dog across the bayou. Walking is a meditation. Stella has brought me back to my morning walks around the bayou and to City Park, in this one act, she has reconnected me with birds. This morning, a Great Blue Heron sat patiently by the banks of the bayou until the jingle of Stella’s collar made him extend his far reaching wings and glide across the sunlit water. A nearby Great Egret stood like a statue, with a barely perceptible nod of his head, aware of the source of sound, but unwilling to depart just yet.

It’s the birds that have tugged my mind to greater things than me many a time. For them, I am grateful to hail from New Orleans, Sportman’s Paradise, where we are home to birds of many feathers.

From the bayou, I see two mallards perched on a concrete wall spying on the new pool a friend put in her side yard a few years back. Seagulls criss cross the sky blue sky calling to one another. The shadows of different birds glide in formation across grass and water. The trill of a hidden songbird echoes from the massive oak tree.

I am always writing in my head – working out the next chapter that I have written four times already – four being my lucky number – and this morning I was also writing another manuscript in my head; the one that takes a bird’s eye view of the worst version of myself – another book gestating. My writing chops were again stimulated at the Tennessee Williams Festival where I heard Jim Grimsley talk about his realization that he was a bigot and is now a recovering bigot, or Mac McClelland’s PSTD after reporting from Haiti, and about how readers push Laila Lalami to represent all Islam, all Muslims, all Morocco, as if it were possible for the one to stand in for the cacophony of the many.

I sit at the writer’s table every day; while I walk, a piece of my mind is constantly writing and rewriting, but the rest of the time my mind searches for the birds – it’s their song that beckons me out of myself.

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