Hey tweets, We're living through the great dance of life now, as birds from
the north return home from their breeding grounds, and the birds who bred
here start thinking about packing up and moving on, too. Today at the Fill,
all was busy with birdy to-ing and fro-ing. The REDWING BLACKBIRDS were
again present, a new batch from Canada, I think. Our local blackbirds have
been gone for at least a week. The tree swallows and violet-greens who bred
here have fled, too, and a few CLIFF SWALLOWS hang on but not for long. A
HOUSE WREN was hopping among the branches around the secluded pond near the
dime parking lot. It is only the second house wren I've ever seen at the
Fill. Three trees down the path, two ANNA'S HUMMINGBIRDS disputed a favored
perch, as though there were no other available in the vast acreage of bushes
that the Urban Horticulture folks have been planting in the past year.

In the early morning mist, with the pink sunlight slanting through the
bushes, I heard a chittering noise above my head. I looked up to see one
VAUX'S SWIFT thrashing its wings as fast as it could go, hunting the recent
hatch of insects that rose in columns from the damp grass. I wondered where
his fellow swifts had gone. Was this one a straggler from the summer flock,
or a harbinger of a flock from farther north?

I wandered over to the main pond and found a great bird, a SEMIPALMATED
SANDPIPER, picking food near the lone KILLDEER that has been on guard there
all summer. Semipalmated sandpipers are eastern birds that come very seldom
to the Fill. This one was dressed in spanking white and gray-brown feathers.
It looked the picture of health, with its gleaming black bill bluntly
picking along the surface of the mud. Did it know it was lost, had flown far
off course? What will happen to this sandpiper? Will it keep going south,
overwinter in California and return to its correct breeding ground in the
spring? Or will it get ever more lost until it dwindles to nothing?

As I gazed at this one bird all alone, I found myself asking, "What is the
point?" Sandpipers travel so very far to reach the arctic to breed. Imagine
the effort they spend. They feed and feed at home until their breasts become
loaded with fat, and then they fly. If they are lucky, they find more food
along the way. If not, they feed on their own fat, melting away till none is
left and only muscle remains. In a bad year, they feed on their muscles too.
When they reach their breeding grounds, they have their babies if they are
strong enough, or not if they are weak. The babies may survive, or not. In
August, the parents return south, or maybe they fall along the way. The
babies do the same a few weeks later. In the spring, the birds fly north
again, or not.

They live such short lives. In one year, they risk everything on the way up
and the way back. To what end? What is the point of it all?

A nature-lover might answer, "The point is life. Life alone is its own end."
But that's nearly the same as saying, "There is no point."

I unfolded my camp stool and sat. My shoulders slumped. My smile wavered,
then turned down. My heart sank. Some days, it's hard to stay cheerful. I am
not blessed with a sunny nature. I have to work at it. I have to work at
being kind. The world needs so much kindness, but kindness takes such
strength to give. On some days, I feel like the strength floods out of me
like someone stuck a nail in a water balloon. There's a whooshing noise, and
then the bag deflates until nothing is left but a wrinkled old piece of blue
elastic, good for nothing, useful to no one. In fact, worse than useless.
You can't just leave that punctured balloon lying there shriveled up on the
ground; you would be littering. You've got to pick it up and dispose of it
somewhere.

A GREEN HERON came flying in, spread his wings, raised up his head feathers
and landed on the willow tree. For a moment he stood there, gloriously
stretched out, tall and imposing. Then he shrank down his neck and slumped
into the more familiar shape of hunched-up heron. His slump was not mine,
however. Not for him the fruitless contemplation of the pointlessness of
life. That heron was there to fish.

Slowly the realization dawned on me that to truly understand nature and our
place in it, we shouldn't ask, "What is the point?" It's the wrong question
because the answer is dry and dusty and deprived. A better question would
be, "What is the meaning?"

Meaning is something that we create ourselves. It's original in each of us,
and under our control. We can tell ourselves our own happy little story, or
a sad one, for that matter. We can change the story as we ourselves change,
or as we wish to change.

I can watch the green heron and say, "It means that the Fill is a symbol of
great hope. The Fill was a dump once, but now it is the home of this most
fabulous creature, the green heron. It means that humans can mess up the
world, but humans can also fix up the world. It means that I can choose to
help fix things, as I did when I pulled purple loosestrife from the base of
the very tree that the heron was perched on. It means that people, no matter
how chimpian in our desire for stuff or in our bloodlust to hurt each other,
can be divine and noble too."

It means that life is beautiful.