Antoine de St. Exupery, author of The Little Prince, said: "The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude toward them." He then goes off a bit attempting to nuance the word "attitude." I don't know that he needed to do that — how about simply an attitude of joy, of delight, of gratitude, of awe, of having our breath taken away.
I'm the caretaker of a public garden adjacent to a nearby railroad station. It's a pollinator garden where all the plants have been selected to attract assorted bees and butterflies. It's also a bird haven — these days bright yellow finches arrive daily to breakfast on coneflower seeds.
During these hot and dry summer days I go over to the garden early in the morning to drag out the hoses and water everything by hand. Sprinklers waste water. While I had the hose trained on the summersweet, a lovely flowering, sweet fragranced bush, a young catbird essentially flopped out of the nearby witch-hazel and into the stream of cool water which was pouring out of the nozzle. He then disappeared into the hydrangea leaves. When I came around to the back of the garden he appeared again out of the bottom branches of the yew and into the water. Then turning around he went off in the direction of the yellow coreopsis. I thought, "This bird is playing with me."
May we pay attention these August days, when nature is in full flood — its last big push before autumn. A morning will come when we won't hear the birds again till the spring. Catbird will have headed south, to Mexico and the Caribbean Islands for the winter.
