I tend to think of myself as a mindful skeptic. The universe is big. There are a lot of things we can’t explain. Human knowledge feels pretty small and finite. It’s why I’m an agnostic and not an atheist. I can’t stomach that type of certainty. As a skeptic, I lean towards science and reason as the flying buttresses propping up the cathedral that is my worldview. As a skeptic, I tend to think coincidence is merely coincidence and any meaning we derive from it comes from our mind searching for order. We do this with numbers quite a bit. People will swear that the number 17 or 26 or 41 has played a significant and recurring role in their lives. When people say these things, I may not outwardly show it, but internally, I’m rolling my eyes the way a skeptic might.
All of this is prologue to a very strange experience I had today. An experience that has me wondering if I should play the lottery or avoid lightening storms.
Wanting to take advantage of the sunshine and sixty-degree weather, I walked to the Bay to read, write, and be present in the world. The Bay is one of my happy places. You see all types of people at the waterfront and almost everyone there is happy. They’re playing with their dogs and their kids. They’re riding bikes or walking or going on a run. Tourists are taking pictures of the bridge. You can hear the water lapping against the beach. The white stones of Alcatraz shine in the sunlight.
When I go there to read and write, I get very little reading and writing done. Today was no different. I read a poem. I watched people and dogs. I wrote about how I’m always coming up with titles for my autobiography, or collection of poems, or series of vignettes and character studies based loosely on my life… The title I was playing with today was “By Which I Mean: A Life of Frequent Revisions and Minor Clarifications.” I read another poem. I watched more people. I took a note or two on my phone.
I had come to the last poem in the book I had brought with me, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God by Tony Hoagland. While not his last book, it was published in 2018, the year he died from cancer (there was one more published posthumously). Because he had been going through cancer treatments, his later poems touch on mortality, being present in the world, and letting go. Knowing this was the last poem in the book, there was a strange sense of finality to it.
Part way through the poem, I stopped. A European Starling had perched itself in the bush next to me (maybe three feet away). I know the type of bird because it started to chat and click and chirp and sing – and I have an app that tells me what type of bird I’m hearing. And this Starling was a starlet. He ruffled his throat feathers as he sang, he turned his head upwards so that everyone could hear him. His blue-black plumage glistened like an oil slick in the sun. I sat there and watched and listened for about ten or fifteen minutes. Most of the people walking by didn’t notice, but one or two stopped to watch this single Starling sing.
When he flew away, I wrote a note in my phone – because it was something that had made me smile. “For about ten or fifteen minutes a European Starling perched on a shrub a few feet from where I sat on a bench. It sang its heart out to the people and dogs that passed by on the promenade. Most people didn’t notice. The few who did…” I wasn’t sure how to finish the thought. I went back to the poem and picked up where I had left off. The very next lines from where I stopped were, “There is a bird that can only be heard by someone / who has come to be alone.”
I suppose there’s a reasonable chance, maybe twenty or thirty percent, that on any give day I’ll read a poem that mentions birdsong. Poets like that type of shit. There’s also a reasonably good chance that I’ll be near nature when I’m reading poetry. I look out my window a lot. I sit on benches. I go to the water. I think what caught me off guard was the precision with which this coincidence happened. I had stopped my reading to listen to a bird and the very next lines were about the solitude and presence required to hear a bird that most people were ignoring. I’m still inclined to call it a happy little coincidence and I’m still a little freaked out (in good/weird way) about it.
