Look at the Birds of the Air: Epiphany Moments in the Company of Birds

Epiphany moments come as gifts.They cannot be contrived, rehearsed, controlled or repeated.

They are unique moments of insight, seeds of wonder, which grow into praise, thanksgiving and a humble surrender to the beauty, the surprise, the daily miracle of life.

My earliest years in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire gave me a love for birds that is now part of who I am and how I see the world. I notice birds, their songs and sounds are signals and summons to attention. I trekked for miles, risked life and limb, read books and remember the first pair of old binoculars given to me by the farmer who was my father's boss. By secondary school age I was an amateur encyclopedia of evidence based research on Scottish birds. If there had been a Higher in Ornithology I'd have done it in half the time and upset the invigilator by walking out early.

To this day the sound of the curlew, the whirring of the snipe's wings, the oyster catcher's alarm, the mimicry of a starling, the concerto of a skylark, the song of a mavis, the aerobatics of lapwings, the choreography of starlings before roosting in the hayshed, the white flash of a looping pied wagtail, the miracle of motionless flight that is a kestrel balancing in the wind, the ned-like behaviour of magpies, and the gossipping chirping of house sparrows, remind me I live in a woerld that I share rather than own. And that the voice of the birds is no lesser voice than my own.

And some of my epiphany moments have come from a surprise encounter with one or other of those other residents of this country whose right to live, have a habitat, be free of pesticide contaminated food, and whose contribution to the richness of our lives is also essential to the welfare of our country, and our spirits.

One of these was in 1982. Thirty years on I remember Sheila and I looking out the window at the wall along the garden that retained a fastflowing burn. The water was frozen during a long spell of frost. And sitting within 20 feet of us, bathed in frosty sunlight, was a kingfisher, hoping for a thaw soon. It is one of the most beautiful moments of our married lives which we still remember as vividly as the colours that vibrated with light and seemed to cast an irridescence across the space between bird and birdwatchers.

That memory is an inevitable hermeneutic to this poem, which sits way up the modest list of poems that are themselves capable of being epiphanic.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

   As I said at the start.
Epiphany moments come as gifts.They cannot be contrived, rehearsed, controlled or repeated.
They are unique moments of insight, seeds of wonder, which grow into praise, thanksgiving and a humble surrender to the beauty, the surprise, the daily miracle of life. Praise God.