Love that the sites back up.

All best.

Stories are like sacred songs, mantras. And so we gather these things in that great space between our ears, as it expands as we age. Amulets placed within the sacred places we call ourselves to serve as protectors from invading thoughts. And thoughts are objects, they have shape and vibration, and they can soothe or cut like a knife. They can be sent unknowingly from an untrained mind like arrows falling from the sky. Which brings me to what I wish to say…

I had been watching a pair of Song Sparrows for while these number of weeks who have taken up residence in my trees. The morning is a quiet time and I listen to their song as it works as an ointment on my musical soul.

Well, this wonderful pair of birds would flit in and out of a hole they caused in the full stacks of flowers that crowd each other out in my flower bed. “Just there in front of me! With tall red fluffs on green stilts and yellow spikes on threaded legs.” With the lilies and that, which lay at Maria’s feet”. Daisies and Nasturnums, Bee Balm and the trumpets, Butterfly bush around a Salvia.

And so this busy pair would in and out all day through that, not so obvious hole. I thought “…insects is what they need.” until I looked and saw they carried insects in with them.

Weeding that area a few days after and without thinking I had pulled the weeds and some of the flowers up to create a better presence, only to find a nest with plump chicks inside, there on the ground. So I quickly cover the area with rhubarb leaf on a bucket as a makeshift roof and entrance to hide what was precious therein.

I would watch the hen and listen to the cock as he sang his life to me in the early mornings, and I discovered he had intent, he would sit near me and sing songs, and I named him Frank, after Sinatra. Frank had twenty or so tunes he could call on and he had an ability to mix and match parts of these in other combinations. His patterns were not so obvious. One had to focus and pay close attention to receive the prize inside. So I took to mimicking his call from a catalogue of calls I found online. Some old Song Sparrow calls from 1952; others from the ’60s and ’70s. Birdcall catalogues are not revised it seems very often.

Days went on with Frank messages and my unqualified calls in return. He would come near listening to my fifties tunes. I was wondering what was being expressed. I searched my head for answers to this question and was wondering at times if I might be a bit offensive, clumsy like an American tourist in a Parisienne cafe trying to order a coffee.

So I thought deeply about this and imagined words to the sounds, quite like colours for emotions — red for anger, blues more passive and persuasive and pinks and yellows as expressions of joy and the wonder. The subtleties took a while…

Frank and I began to have intimate conversations as I am a quick learner — and surprisingly the vocabulary of trills, whistles, chirps and beeps have inflection and conjugation, nuance when gestured without holding or losing a note. Songs arrive from deep within the belly and are presented like a soap bubble out of the mouth.

Frank is a busy fellow and has a complex mind, we spoke of his loved ones and the days he spent in the south — he had noticed changes coming to sutle things like moisture content in the air and the light of the sun; it’s changing, it was dimmer and there was hyper-whiteness starting to take prominence in the full spectrum. A new form of light not seen before was subduing the yellowness of an old sun.

Frank was ageing and coming to the end of his life, he was ten years old and he had some wisdom to pass on before he left. His beliefs about the spirit of flight, his understanding of the minute details of reality were astounding as I listened. He believed in a sparrow God and had a Genesis story of his species beginnings.

The great one fell and took shape from the drops of water that showered from the first cloud. Some drops became flowers, other’s animals, and yet still others the bird and lastly his God who was the last to fall and the first Song Sparrow.

Frank had an intellectual side and believed that a shift was coming for all creatures, he was curious about men and found most times that they hated themselves in spite of their great inventions and blundered through what otherwise seemed simple to him. He was troubled by how we had lost connection with what he described as… “What we were presently doing, just chewing the fat. And the collaborative minds of interspecies relationships.”

We became close friends and our songs one day suddenly became sounds in our minds. Frank was telepathic, and so we would receive and send by thought our innermost secrets. He would allow me to enter his mind and experience his abilities as a flyer. He was a Zen master swooping and flitting and quick movements were a bit nauseating at first for me, as I could not keep up to the speed of his thoughts. The seeing the decisions; the movement, the jumping and flitting and enormous leaps for something so small. Frank was a parkour expert par excellence, his plyometric vaults from high places and standing leaps to far above himself with a flick and flutter sideways to an unbearable impossible edge above it all. His defiance of gravity shocked the very understanding of what I believed was possible in movement in this world. And all this as his mind was an instrument of his sparrow soul.

He told me stories of long ago and sparrow wars and the great drowning of the world, birds and men found friendship and a new beginning then. Which is lost now. He spoke of where he would go when he died, and that he would live again as maybe a man next time. We would laugh at that, and I thought of being a sparrow. He advised me on that if it happened…

I expanded greatly as a student of Frank, and the space within became more profound, my fear of falling from high places in dreams shifted and became a glee, as I experienced the nightly visits in my sleep. My training to overcome the fear of a fall. Frank believed I had been a bird and had a great fall in a distant past. I had dreams speaking in a sparrow voice, echolalia sounding from deep within me. Franks guidance brought forth remembrances of long ago when I flew and jumped in trees.

Frank was a philosopher who might sit amongst the greats — he was a magician passing through this world on his way to another.

The visits stopped, the songs in my head stopped, and I went to the nest and found the fledglings gone, his responsibility was done and he was on to next.

I play a sparrow song out loud on my phone and listen to the quiet and off somewhere in the distance I hear the reply with the added history of the fifties from so long ago. A forgotten song of a Sparrow bird long-dead, now his voice revived and gifted to the world, renewed again.