Bird Bodies, Bird Brains

As usual, thank you to all who visit this weird space—I appreciate you. All subscriptions are free, so please consider subscribing or following or recommending to someone else who like weird things. This post is a little different, but I try to experiment so…

Bird Bodies

For the last two years, a pair of cardinals have nested just outside our kitchen window, allowing us the privilege of watching them build their nest, the female sitting upon delicate eggs, the hatching and feeding of smudgy newborns, with the world’s new birds finally leaving the nest and, hopefully, surviving. Our trees also host owls and red-tail hawks.

When thinking of cardinals, I’d say most images I have seen of them in my lifetime are the males. They get all the attention. They’re red! They stand out! They’re Blue Jays but different! It wasn’t until adulthood that my eyes truly recognized the female cardinal. Female cardinals are far more beautiful and interesting. I mean, look at that photo and those colors! Beyond the surface that is appearance, the female also works tirelessly, as she is the star of the show outside our window. Yes, the male makes appearances, especially post hatching, when he plays the role of nest-dash, delivering food to the mom and chicks. But the female; she is there, sitting in one place but working. There is bravery in both her consistency and exposure.

Are these the same cardinals as last year? How would we know, though we like to think they are a mated pair with whom we share space. We believe that our home, and the land around it, must be nature friendly—we don’t obsessively mow, weed wack, or edge borders into perfect squares. Portions of our yard grow unbothered, fertile for wildflowers and inviting for deer.

If these are not the same cardinals at least our tree is cardinal friendly. We left last year’s nest in place and hoped for their return. Cardinals are back, but they chose to construct a new nest on the branch just beneath. When looking at the tree, this “new nest” approach appears incredibly smart—the old nest provides additional cover overhead, as their new nest, while visible from our kitchen window, sits largely hidden from view when looking toward the house from the yard. I imagine that inside those beautiful bird bodies are deeply grooved, practiced bird brains.

Bird Brains

This will be a jarring transition, but this is my substack so all bird watchers better buckle up. When looking at the female cardinal I see a being whose body and mind exist in harmony. Singularity. I could be wrong, but I don’t see her pale-brown, reddish-tinted head fighting itself with thoughts like, What if I can’t hatch these eggs? Oh, the other cardinals’ nests are so much better than mine. What if I’m a bad bird mom? Do I even fly well? I am a terrible cardinal.

She just does. Her doing and thinking are synonymous when applied to the results. Of course, while worshipping our own specialness, we don’t perceive most animals as having minds separate from their bodies. Maybe Descartes didn’t care about cardinals. If I had written “brains” that would have given biological and bodily connotations, but because we prefer “mind” when being reflexive, we often perceive “brain” and “mind” as different, maybe like body and soul. Hence, we go on about “sound mind and sound body” and how “physical health improves mental health.” That may be true, but I’ll state the obvious (my specialty)—the brain is not separate from the body; it is of the body.

Why do I obsess on this? I’ll start with what will sound like bragging but is not meant to be:

Today I bench pressed 200 pounds for the first time in my life.

Just as I had the goal of doing my first pull-up (just one!) since middle school, picking up this amount of weight, more than that of my body itself, seemed impossible in my lifetime. I grew up in an era when weight-training wasn’t so visible and normal. None of my high school teams, including football, lifted weights. Weightlifting was reserved for guys with gold chains who gathered in single-lightbulb basements and then bragged about how freaking huge they’d become. The flexed in the hallways, ingested magic muscle-building powders, sat at the same lunch tables, and wore muscle shirts to school. It was a clique, not the utterly normal, socially accepted method of exercise that it is today. One of my kid’s classmates asked her the other day, “Was your dad at the Y?” 

***

I promise that this will get back to the bird. Almost there.

***

I asked the guy next to me to spot me, as accidentally killing myself is always in play. I see him there quite a bit and he can pick up everything in the building as well as the building itself. One time I couldn’t find any weights in the weight room. Why? He had them all and was picking them up simultaneously. Cardinals probably nest on his body. I told him I was trying to do 200 pounds for the first time and that this was a lifetime goal—I had lifted 195 pretty well, but those last five pounds weighed like the proverbial straw (camels, cardinals, whatever). As I started to lift the bar, I could feel that I was stuck halfway, and for the second time in a month I would fail. I’d never be able to do it. And my poetry completely sucks. Every. Single. Poem. And the rejections are flying into my inbox like nesting birds. And there is not a single thing I am good at because I lost it. I just don’t have it anymore.  Maybe you know what I mean.

Then the guy spotting me reached deep down into his barrel of a chest and screamed, very loudly, Liffffffft it! Liffffffft! Lettttttt’s go! You got it! He drowned out the music in my headphones. For this, I was thankful.

When you sense everyone turning to look your way, you are the cardinal in the nest. Everyone in the place stands at the kitchen window and asks, “Is this thing finally going to hatch or what?”

So I lifted it. I put the bar back on the clips, stood up, and pretended not to have just stolen fire from the gods. I thanked my impromptu coach profusely, and he simply said, “Next is 210.” Maybe. I don’t really care. Two hundred has been El Dorado since I was a teenager and, many decades later, I’ve finally found the place. I have always been more tortoise than hare, more cardinal than eagle. 

I’ve learned from the world’s offerings—like nesting cardinals—that you can heal yourself, fix yourself. I’ll call this a form of biomimicry. It doesn’t matter if my mind won’t believe I can get healthier and stronger. It doesn’t matter if one-hundred rejections come in for my poems (almost there!). The results come through the repetition and the mind must eventually accept that; then you start to trust and believe. If you do pushups every day, your arms get stronger whether your mind believes it or not. Your mind cannot undo the work done. If you walk a quarter mile, then a half mile, then a mile, you’re getting better at walking distance whether your mind believes this to be true or not. How do you know? Test it: stand up and announce to everyone, “I will never be able to walk a mile” and then proceed do it, maybe with ease. 

You soon learn you were wrong about what you are capable of. You forget that your mind is part of, and not separate from, your body. No matter how small, these accomplishments matter—not in the context of being competitive or better than someone else, but for yourself and your brain’s well-being. You can indeed change, one small stage at a time; you can replace one habit with another. Pick up enough small pieces and eventually you will have enough for a nest and forget that it was just a moment ago you thought building nests was impossible. And then sitting in your nest is pretty darn great. Then the nest is normal and say to yourself, What’s next? Although I may not be expressing this clearly, there’s a humility in all of this. You also see people around you doing surprising things, maybe things you didn’t expect them to be able to do, and that makes you happy. Maybe they build ten nests while you build one, but you’re still building nests.

I guess the phrase “bird by bird” resonates even more with me now. I know that, recently, we moved from the cultural posture of “no one asks for help” to “the only thing to do is ask for help.” Human beings love dichotomies. We love moving from one condition to its opposite (Ah, Derrida had his simple messages, if we’d only had listened). I sat down to write this not knowing why. I won’t bore you with the backstory of what brought me here, because it’s now moving further and further into the background. I remember now that my mind is a muscle, a lung, a heart, and that it must practice and work and all of that exercise makes a difference.

I used to laugh at Warner Brother’s cartoons where they would show the inside of a character’s head and there would be some Rube Goldberg madness on display. But if I could see inside my head and simply see a female cardinal nesting, I’d feel pretty good about things.