Warm wind bruises my cheeks. The small pond in the field behind my house is dull and gray this cloudy winter’s dawn. A flash of white and black in the air to my left draws my attention from the gnarled oak tree that is my walking-goal this morning.
Wings hard-hinged, body heavy and sleek.
My mind seeks to identify the bird. Memory accumulates like water on the tip of a rainforest leaf.
Cur-wee. Cur-wee. The call of the plover.
Plover. The name, heavy with forgotten memory, completely formed, drops onto my tongue.
This process of retrieving knowledge we don’t know we have works even when results are less joyful than those called-up by the call of the wild plover.
Our minds collect pain too, like drops of rain on a greasy window. This acid gains weight, stretches the molecules of our understanding. Until finally, poison, corrosive, and unstoppable, this wisdom too splatters into our soul.
It’s a natural process, this collecting of knowledge, the stretching of the cohesive images we carry with us until the very weight of these truths break the bonds of our understanding and, like that raindrop hanging on the pointed end of a leaf, eventually fall into the larger stream that is our consciousness. We regroup then, re-think, continue the cycle of understanding that makes us grow as humans.
