Birds writing their poetry

“Words are a heavy thing…they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn’t fly.”

My friend Jim Everitt, who is one of the best reasons I know to be on Facebook, posted this quote from Northern Exposure Sunday morning. It sparked one of those exchanges we all hope for, where people who may not even know each other come together and have fresh insights they would never have had without each other.  Following the quote above, the three-way conversation went something like this*:

Wait a minute, Jim. Cool quote. But I write poetry and I like to think words help me fly.

Pay attention, Peg. It doesn’t say “if birds wrote…” It says “if birds talked…”

Oh, yeah.

And when people talk, they aren’t writing. And if they aren’t writing, there’s no poetry. And when there’s no poetry, nobody’s flying.

Very cool.

Birds don’t talk. They don’t overthink it (as I’m doing now) or pontificate. I’m betting they don’t even take credit for the mystery of their flight. They simply spread their wings to embrace something inside them that words could never express. And fly. Their flight is poetry. It is prayer. It is how they express the God within.

Whatever our personal poetry is — whether it comes through music or language or acrylics or teaching or inspiring or bringing laughter into being – maybe we don’t get there by being grounded. We don’t get there by controlling it with our words or our thoughts. We can either talk about our poetry, or we can let it fly. We can assume we’re in control, or we can accept it as grace.

*Conversation edited for the sake of keeping it simple

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