Something to Believe In

Lavinia Spalding finds meaning in a cardinal's insistent knocking.

Photo by Andy Morffew. Via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s been months and she still hasn’t quit. She started in June while we were wandering Paris, addicting ourselves to fancy French butter and chouquettes, small sugared pastries we bought by the bagful.

There’s a bird, our Airbnb guests emailed from New Orleans, that keeps flying into the glass of your kitchen window.

I’ve seen birds hit glass. They drop to the ground, dead or stunned. I’ve held them and sung mantras to them. Sometimes they’ve flown away. Often they haven’t. Still, there wasn’t much we could do from Paris, so we ate our butter and pastries and hoped for the best.

In mid-August my husband and son returned home while I flew to California for a conference. When I joined them after a week, they insisted they’d tried everything: paper bird cutouts, tin foil covering the window.

She was a cardinal, buff-brown with a black mask and cartoonish orange bill, and when she wasn’t hogging the birdfeeder or perched in the Japanese Maple, she was a frenzied, territorial mess, attacking her reflection every few seconds. I knew what to do. I cut out my own construction-paper birds, convinced they’d be superior, and taped them up. For a few hours, she stopped.

Some weeks I heard nothing from her. Then she’d reappear, careening into the windowpane every few seconds. I’d rearrange my bird outlines and rap on the glass and tell her to quit. She’d flutter off but return. Eventually we settled into a rhythm. She thwacked the window, I rattled it. She thwacked, I rattled.

She was a cardinal, buff-brown with a black mask and cartoonish orange bill, and when she wasn’t hogging the birdfeeder or perched in the Japanese Maple, she was a frenzied, territorial mess, attacking her reflection every few seconds. I knew what to do. I cut out my own construction-paper birds, convinced they’d be superior, and taped them up. For a few hours, she stopped.

Now, half a year since Paris and with a new president taking office, she’s in a state. We all are. I sit by the window with my laptop, scrolling. I don’t want to see all the ways my country is falling apart, but it’s hard to look away. Meanwhile, she and I take turns thumping the glass like a call and response song, an interspecies morse code.

Quit.

I can’t quit.

Quit.

I can’t.

I should be working on a lesson plan today. I’ve assigned my students themes to write about, and this week’s topic is “spirituality.” But even as I’ve finally found sample essays and pulled together prompts, I question whether I understand the word.

When I was growing up in New Hampshire, any time a friend asked if I believed in God, I’d mechanically answer, Religion is the bane of society and the cause of all wars and suffering, mimicking my atheist parents. Yet each summer, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, I was allowed to attend church with my Southern Baptist aunts who drove up from Texas and stayed across the road. I didn’t ask questions. I liked Sunday school—seeing friends, drinking grape juice, eating a wafer, the reward of candy from the store afterward. I liked the glossy children’s Bible my Aunt Helene had given me. I liked the idea of having something to believe in.

Then, when I was 8, my Uncle Jay—Aunt Helene’s husband—died of prostate cancer. He was a tall, funny, slightly bowlegged cowboy with a Texas-shaped birthmark over his right eye and a bullwhip he used to cut the grass in his yard, and he was my favorite. I was devastated by the empty spaces he left behind. But I’d been learning about Heaven and was comforted by the knowledge that if anyone belonged in that dreamy place, it was Uncle Jay. When I shared this with Aunt Helene, she shook her head mournfully. He’s not in Heaven, honey. Your uncle never accepted the Lord as his savior. I’d been learning about Hell, too. I ran home sobbing, and though I regularly returned to my aunts’ house that summer for cookies and cola and hugs, I never returned to church. I resuscitated my script. Religion is the bane of society and the cause of all wars and suffering.

I took that script with me to college, where I read Sartre and Camus and began calling myself an existentialist. We’re dandelions, I told friends. We live and die, end of story. Still, in moments of desperation, like when I peed on a stick, praying for just one line, I found myself petitioning a deity I didn’t believe in. Please God, no, no, no. Only Planned Parenthood ever came through, only other women.

I turned to literature for answers, connection, a sense of something larger. I read Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, Margaret Atwood, and told my friends, Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Female writers became my congregation: a circle of gentle guides singing a gospel of spaciousness, nudging me to draw my own interpretations about what mattered, what constituted as sacred. Stories mattered, were holy.

Some weeks I heard nothing from her. Then she’d reappear, careening into the windowpane every few seconds. I’d rearrange my bird outlines and rap on the glass and tell her to quit. She’d flutter off but return. Eventually we settled into a rhythm. She thwacked the window, I rattled it. She thwacked, I rattled.

In my 20s I moved to South Korea. I still wanted something to believe in, so I read Pema Chödrön and Thich Nhat Hanh and The Dalai Lama. I changed my script, started telling friends, Attachment is the root of suffering. I met a Polish monk there who taught me to meditate and brought me to a mountaintop monastery where we woke at 4am to sit in silence, then hiked before dawn to see the Buddha carved into a cliff, illuminated by sunrise, golden. Two years later, in Santa Fe, I took Buddhist vows from a Tibetan Rinpoche who taught me about training my mind and gave me a dharma name: Drolkar Llamo, White Tara Goddess. I noticed a softening in places that had been spiky, had scraped from within.

Now, two decades later, instead of reading or meditating or hiking, I’m staring at my laptop, feeling cut from all sides. Instead of training my mind, I’m letting it stray to places that pierce me. My practice is unsteady, my mind a jumble. I try to focus, stop worrying about what I can’t control.

My bird returns to the glass incessantly, as if magnetized, elasticized, hypnotized. She comes in slant, walloping the windowpane, and I shoo her away.

Quit.

I can’t quit.

Quit.

I can’t.

I take a break from the bad news and my lesson plan to look for bird solutions but instead find myself reading about symbolism. Cardinals are messengers from the spirit world, Google says. Angels. Visits from departed loved ones. Signs from God. Vitality and the blood of Christ. Passion, redemption, devotion, positivity, renewal, luck, reminders to listen to your inner voice.

But what if my inner voice has taken to screaming?

Researching cardinal behavior is a diversion from human behavior, from politics, from the revelation that my country has abandoned girls and women, wants to grind us down, make us handmaids. It’s not lost on me that this bird is a female, banging her head against a figment. I daydream of Paris, sticks of butter and chouquettes. I want to fly away. I want to drop to the ground.

I wonder if my cardinal feels fear and projects herself forward anyway. I wonder if she knows how to hit just hard enough, at the exact angle, to avoid breaking her neck. I wonder if the impact hurts, or if she’s become accustomed to it. I wonder if she aches, or is growing numb. I wonder if there’s anything I can do.

It’s helpful to imagine a healing, an eventual coming-back-together. I’m in my mid-50s now, and more than ever, I need reasons for reverence. I’m terrified of losing faith in goodness, kindness, basic humanity. I try to summon reminders of the beauty of being alive: family and friends, students, the Dharma, books, travel, pastries, nature, birds. This bird. I want to trust that together, she and I can figure it out.

In the first Pema Chödrön book I read decades ago, When Things Fall Apart—which I still send to heartsick friends—Chödrön wrote that things falling apart is a kind of testing and a kind of healing. Things don’t really get solved, she wrote. They come together and fall apart, then come together again and fall apart again.

It’s helpful to imagine a healing, an eventual coming-back-together. I’m in my mid-50s now, and more than ever, I need reasons for reverence. I’m terrified of losing faith in goodness, kindness, basic humanity. I try to summon reminders of the beauty of being alive: family and friends, students, the Dharma, books, travel, pastries, nature, birds. This bird. I want to trust that together, she and I can figure it out.

I continue clicking and eventually stumble on a new link with a fresh tip: Hang something on the window’s exterior to break the reflection. I grab a dishtowel, packing tape, a ladder, and head outside. I’m short, so I stretch. Finally, with the towel attached tenuously to her favorite spot of glass, the top right corner, I say some quick mantras and go back inside. I wait. I’m prepared for this to fail. I’m ready to be disappointed. I listen for the sound of impact but hear only silence, stillness.

I know it’s a temporary fix, and I’m ok with that. Perhaps she’s a messenger after all, telling me about spirituality. About rattling windows, searching for answers, harboring doubts, stretching, trying to help. About attachment and suffering. About letting go without giving up. About breaking illusions. About finding some peace, if only for today.

---

Check out Lavinia Spalding’s website.