Gratitude in Spring

    Every morning I awake with the song of birds. Sometimes I awake in the pearl of dawn to hear the first lilting tunes rousing the sun from slumber, as though that music is as essential to make the sun rise as Orpheus’s guitar. A second bird joins the first, and then a third, and suddenly what started as an aria and grew into a round has become an orchestra of fugues at fortissimo. At the first full light of day I go outside to drench myself in the glorious chorus. Like an audial equivalent of the tropical quetzal – a bird called, for its brilliant color, the resplendent quetzal – the songbirds of Southern Oregon bring rainbows of music to my home. As they warble with flourishes and glissandos, as they sing and twitter and whistle their call and response, I want to fall to my knees in an ecstasy of gratitude. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” I whisper, overcome with my gratefulness for this gift of music, all the more precious for its precarious existence, given the diminishing habitat of songbirds. “Thank you for forgiving us our trespasses against you. Thank you for returning. Thank you for singing.”
    Likewise, holding the stalk of a red peony, turning the head of the flower towards me, I erupt with psalmic paroxysms, hymns of gratitude, paeans of praise. Like David, I want to come before this presence with singing – “Thank you, thank you, thank you”: for this incomparable carmine color against the bottle-green leaves, for these deeply sinuous lines around the ellipsoidal center of almost hidden yellow, for this silhouette of van-Dyked edges. Thank you, oh peony, for being such a beautiful thing. 
    The next thing I know a breeze with a scent of wisteria has brought my chin up and widened my nostrils. The air is supercharged with perfume. Aromatherapy works its magic on my body – I stand taller to smell better, I breathe more deeply of life-giving air, my heart expands with the intense delight of inhaling the purple incense. My psalm of thanksgiving returns: “Thank you, thank you, wisteria, for this gift of your being.”
    To my surprise, this feeling of gratitude smacks of religiosity, even though I am not thanking God for the birds and the flowers. It’s not God or any god-substitute, like the Great Spirit, unto whom I give thanks but the thing itself. Those who would say I’m worshiping God in this way are welcome to that interpretation, but it’s not mine. I’m grateful to these living beings themselves for existing in my life, grateful to each individual bird who swells his tiny throat and twirls his little tongue to sing – though he isn’t singing for me. He doesn’t know I’m listening, just as the peony doesn’t care whether I look at it or not and the wisteria smells good because that is who it is. The birds sing because they want to sing; the flowers have color and perfume to attract the bees. I bask in these beauties by accident. If I interpret that song, that color, or that perfume as an ode to joy, I’m welcome to that interpretation. The bird sings. I listen, and my heart is filled with gratitude. Thank you, birds, for your song; peonies, for your blossoms; wisteria, for your perfume – not for existing for me, but for being creatures who exist, who pour their beauty into the woods, over the treetops, around the house, and into my soul.