In the hurry to get to the bus stop before the children arrived, I left the house in only one layer of clothing. Spring being right-shifted by a few months in our mountain surroundings, I rued my lack of planning. But getting there and back wouldn’t take very long, I’d just need to be okay being cold.

As often happens in discomfort, I was attempting distraction through observation; what shape is that cloud, anyway, and what song does the gravel under my feet resemble? I stood on the lee side of the mailboxes to block as much wind as possible, and as I looked up a bird flew overheard. Neither an unusual or remarkable occurrence.  

But then a funny thing happened.

The bird pulled a 180 and turned itself into the wind. If air was visible, a triangular wake would have formed in the same way boats slice water into expanding triangles until they dissipate.

Through both heroic and strategic effort, the bird maintained its position in the face of 20 mile-an-hour winds for the next few minutes.  By folding its wing a quarter inch and by ducking its head only a fraction, it soared but didn’t move. It made so many tiny corrections without tensing or losing the flow. It did not turn around and make things easier. Not yet.

The bird pointed itself towards the hard thing and adapted. It kept its buoyancy in the face of certain and constant difficulty. It did this in the presence of a major US interstate where horns honked and trucks rattled in the way they only do at high speed. The same wind that held the bird skyward also affixed trash to all the fences; the bits of plastic bags snagging on the barbed wire billowed out like dresses on the golden prairie. The bird noted none of its noisy surroundings, only keeping itself precisely aloft.

To have to work so hard to stay still. This is something I know about.

It’s a feeling shared by anyone who has rubbed their eyes at ten AM and wondered how they would make it through the remaining nine hours. It’s familiar to those gasping for air at the surface of the choppy water of too many humans in their care. I was both in awe and in the depths of jealousy that the bird managed it so gracefully.

After three minutes of balancing the wind’s potency, the bird abruptly turned. The same force it had fought against was now its propulsion. With its new afterburners, the creature flapped its wings and disappeared over the hill.

Whatever the wind is for us, we can fight it gracefully. We can stay in that difficulty but it takes adjustment and alterations to the angle of approach. We have to bend our wings a little and accept a few inches of change.

But then, we can use it to send us on our way. When we do decide to move on, all we have to do is turn around and let fly.

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