They are short, squat birds, the size of a small apple. Their beaks are tiny darts of dark brown, and they have stripes like eyebrows running across just above their eyes. They are a rich brown, lighter on the belly, with the quintessential tail of a wren - perky and insistent, jaunty like a cap tipped intentionally to one side or that one pair of brightly colored sneakers I almost bought three years ago.
The Carolina wrens are quiet, it seems to me, and I wonder where they’ve gone. Theirs is a song I know anywhere. Once I stood staring up into a maple tree for almost fifteen minutes waiting to see the rustle to confirm that she was singing to me, the bird I knew by sound and not by sight, her song as jaunty as her tail. It was her, I learned after so many minutes of waiting. There was a satisfaction in that, in being proven right about the bird and her song.
But my time feels scattered, the world ever so fragilely, gently pressing back to its previous rhythms. Now there are jobs that take me away from home, now there are schools and registrations, therapies sitting next to meetings in the calendar that felt—was it only months ago—almost too empty. I have asked for the world to be righted, I have asked for the rhythm to come back, but the song of the wren has retreated to a thing I remember hearing, rather than hear for myself in the mid afternoon when I sit on the back porch with the dog, kids in the sprinkler and the red bucket they make into a pool.
Once again I am confronted with, I think, some internal failure of balance. Perhaps I fail to push sufficiently up and out to achieve the arabesque - arms stretched up in motherhood, belly pulled in for work, leg steady in prayer or back arched in marriage. Perhaps I fall out of the balancing pose because I lack the internal sense of myself in space or I take up too much or too little, I lean too far forward or flap my arms too much.
I have written before about the way that balance is work hidden in the elegance of the ballerina or the yoga master in tree pose. I have seen the work it takes in the body to stretch outward in many directions. And when I imagine balance in my life that’s the image I have: outward grace held aloft by inner work.
I wonder if this is the lie.
Not that balance is not work, but that the only explanation for falling out of a pose is an explanation from within. A failure in my body or my time management, my motherhood or my dedication. Perhaps the problem is, really, that I am so convinced of the need to look elegant that I do not make space for falling down. Sometimes we fall out of tree pose because the floor is uneven. Sometimes our muscles are tired from hours of practice. Sometimes the mind just cannot stretch that far in space. Sometimes we simply cannot do the thing we imagine we must do.
I miss the wrens. I miss the time where I heard them everywhere, I miss the feeling that there was enough time to do nothing and in the nothing their song came through most clearly. I worry that I have lost too easily a habit of listening for these birds whose jaunty tail and dashing eye markings brought me an outsized joy.
Somewhere I am tired and frazzled. Somewhere I am at peace. Somewhere I fall out of tree pose. Somewhere I hold it fast. And somewhere, still, in the midst of it, the birds are singing.