Perspective ~ 4

John Hendry Park, Vancouver, BC

Perspective ~ 4

The old gate creaked above the distant thrum of traffic. Even early nesting crows calling to each other didn’t erase the sound. Barely coming from a deep sleep, the melodic squeak seemed almost like a meditation. Awakening into consciousness, I realized it had gone on too long to be a gate. No brush or rustle of wind, no slap of a gate closing as an insistent wind would have pushed it back an forth. Only stillness. Stillness like a breath being held. Listening. Then I remembered something an old farmer told me when I was a child. ‘You hear that noise that sounds like my front gate creakin’ every time I open it? I call it my weather bird - he’s tellin’ us that there’s rain on the way. Can’t say how far away or how much but that there bird is a rain bird tellin’ us to get our boots and umbrellas ready.' I had been in the city so long that until this quiet morning time, the memory had been buried. Later, taking my early morning walk, the sounds of nature as the city awakened, took on a refreshed meaning for me. 

“Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is 

a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.”

~ Douglas Coupland