Partway through our morning “nature walk,” my daughter stops just behind me. The dog is in a leash that wraps around my waist - I imagine that for some people this enables running or something like that, but for me it is the only way to prevent her from bounding away into excitement and oncoming traffic. I throw my whole body weight against her and my daughter usually skips ahead, crouching down for roly poly searches, barking back at the dogs who howl at us from behind their gates, pointing out the surprising and the wondrous in all the familiar places.
But on this particular morning walk she stops so suddenly I don’t notice until I am past her. At first I freeze in the panic that comes from suddenly not knowing where the fixed stars have gone. And then, when I turn around and run back to her - her gaze is skyward. “Look, Mom!”
The sky is full of diamonds. The sun is casting some impossible refraction on the backs of dozens and dozens of white birds. They form wobbling shapes as they each point their bodies to some destination they know but we do not, and as they go, the light keeps winking at us. I tell my daughter, “Wow! The birds look like diamonds!” I am almost in tears at this sight of something that I cannot understand entirely, the physics so much sleight of hand, and I imagine God, giddy with the fact of creation - “again! again!”
My daughter looks at me, her hazel brown eyes wide, and solemnly declares: “Those are diamond birds.”
There is so much power, Anthony Doerr told us at the Festival of Faith and Writing a couple of weeks ago, in simile. The power of taking unlike things, linking them, building a bridge of “as a” and “like a” so that we reveal the web of connection that threads through us. And of course the cousin - the brother? the father? the unusual relation - of simile is metaphor. This is that. I am heavy on my metaphors, have you noticed? I lean on them hard, they are the walking staffs of my journeys (see, another, and another…).
I think this might be because in metaphor, we permit ourselves to forget our regular categories and build new ones, naming creation again for the first time. They are diamond birds. The birds are diamonds, they are living bits of refracted light, they are ancient compressed carbon buried in the Earth and bursting forth again and rebuilding their nests, again and again.
My daughter declares to me what I most hope and know and trust is true: that we are part of a living thing, this creation, and our world’s beauty is barely known to us in our traditional categories - birds and rocks and trees and children and dogs, these things are like and not like each other, they are and are not each other, they are woven together in all the ways we don’t remind one another.
But the other day the sky was full of diamond birds, and this evening in the cool breezes my horse and I were one, only for a few moments, only in the fleeting bits of connection where I remember - so easily forgotten - that it is not by bracing or grasping, not by anticipating but by doing, that we become one thing riding against the blue sky. When I try to force it to happen - when I try to force my writing to do something spectacular - I hold on to hard and the horse and I fall apart, two disjointed things connected by a tangle of leather.
But when I relinquish my grip, even the smallest bit, he lowers his head, and then - again, for those few seconds, just the same amount of time I stood on the sidewalk with my daughter - we are a paradoxical unity and the birds are diamonds.
May we loosen our grip on our categories, on what does and doesn’t belong, on what is and isn’t miraculous (no matter how common or how rare, how regular or how fleeting). May we fling ourselves into metaphors, for things are not what they seem. I and my horse can be one unity, the sidewalk can be the site of the miraculous vision of diamonds in the sky, my daughter can be the truth teller who brought us there.