Birds Do It. Bees Do It.

As my own memory slips out of gear more and more often, making each outing a bit of an adventure, I'm struck by the deep memories that compel the larger world into action.  Just this morning, as Finn and I were walking around Woods Park, I watched an inky undulation of geese, hard wired to a particular group shape that seems to point them to watery climes.  Which of their ancestors was the first to discover the benefits of this aerial drafting?  And do they draw numbers to see who will lead it all?

Birds have always amazed and delighted me, though.  I want to lift their hoods and check out all that wiring--that crazy, crazy wiring that calls them between two lands.  That's probably why I could not put down John Janovy's "Yellow Legs," his account of a single bird--a single bird!--and its circular flight between Canada and South America. 

This morning,  I pondered the brain of a passing goldfinch as it flapped its loping way to a nearby tree,  leaving an undulating vapor trail in the shape of a lazy "w".  Why that particular mid-air arc, I wonder.

I'm glad I don't know the answer.  It would be awful to know it all.  Besides, it would just be more to forget.

There are times, though, that these ancient creature memories nearly cause my brain to explode.  Take those monarchs that got sidetracked to D.C.  Even those seeking office in that strange place more often than not get lost when they finally arrive.  Yet these monarchs, despite having never before visited the Jefferson Memorial or U.S. Capitol, managed not to lose their heads there.  Somehow, something deep inside those tiny heads remembered where they were supposed to be, and got them back on track again.  I imagine those wayward creatures telling their friends scandalous stories amid the leaves of the oyamel fir trees of Michoacan.


Even Mark's garden (it really is his--I am simply the one who observes and nods her approval) is rife with invisible memory.  I try to imagine the complicated cache that is the tiny seed of a bee balm plant, its instructions tucked away between pockets of air and membrane, awaiting water and soil to release the memories--purple or pink, pointed in just such a way.  Or I stand, gape jawed, watching two cabbage moths flying in synch, like the Blue Angels cloaked in silk, and I wonder what kind of synapses are firing between them.

Really, it's just laughable that we humans think we are the top of the heap.  I can no more fathom what it is that leads a bee to a certain flower than I can recall what it is that I needed at the store, once I'm inside it. 

No.  Better that we ponder the cyclical workings, the collective memory of the larger planet and all the tiny things that inhabit it.  It is there, lost in those thoughts, that I am both humbled and amazed, glad to be a part of it all.