Light Up Your Tiny Part Of The World
(Even When Cats Are About)
On a hot and humid June day, I grab a pair of clippers and prune the five bushy bottlebrush trees behind our garage, circling each from bottom to top, snipping away the dead wood.
When I finish, I take a second look, sticking my head into the heart of each plant, moving branches around, and cutting all the lifeless bits I’d somehow missed the first time through.
Then I do a third pass, marveling at the work that still needs doing.
Why did the job take three passes? I ask, even though I’ve just spent two months reading printouts of the same manuscript over and over and over—often for twelve hours a day—finding all sorts of typos, mistakes, and previously hidden ways to elevate the text.
When pruning bottlebrushes or novels, you’ve got to hunt down and eliminate the dead to spark growth. Hunting takes time, patience, and dedication.
The gods of the hunt favor those who offer the proper sacrifices, which in my experience always include time and ego. So I put both on their altar.
‘Kill your darlings,’ the wise writing teachers say. Be willing to offer up to the gods what your ego values most. Both on the page and in the heart. Let the gods prune, removing all you didn’t originally know was dead.
Serve the story.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Many rounds of edits are often necessary just to pry ego’s hands from the project. That’s not always a fun or pretty experience. It requires humility. Getting smaller first to grow tall later.
When we do this successfully, the gods often bless us with the gift of seeing what we were previously unable to imagine.
An honest day of yard work leaves me smelly and sweaty and itchy. Crescent moons of dirt will have blackened the tips of my fingernails. The South Carolina heat will have sapped me dizzy and dehydrated. My back will be screaming out in pain. Some part of me will be bleeding. But I will also feel the quiet pride of knowing I used the sweat of my brow to nudge something in the right direction. And that knowledge will feed the soul whenever I let it.
A honest day of writing is much the same.
With my head deep in a bottlebrush, I’m thinking about all of the above, when I suddenly see something miraculous. It’s a mere five inches from my nose.
Their bulbous purple eyes are not yet able to open. Their beaks look like wax. Their heads and necks are decorated with little patches of smoke-colored fuzz. Their tiny, underdeveloped wings are like armless hands. And I can practically see their internal organs quivering just below thin pink flesh.
As I’m standing there, the momma bird lands on the edge of the nest. She assesses me. She’s a cardinal. Not wanting to disturb her, I slowly back away and quit pruning for the day.
Inside, I tell Alicia about my face-to-face encounter.
And my wife says, “Until the baby birds can fly, we have to be very mean to any cats that come around!”
Many felines prowl our little neighborhood. They’re always in our yard. Alicia loves cats, so I’m surprised by her instructions.
“Cats will kill those baby birds just for fun,” Alicia says. “We have to protect them! I’m serious!”
Suddenly, I feel personally responsible for the safety of the two baby cardinals in our bottlebrush tree.
I keep wanting to check on these birds, but the Internet says it’s best to leave chicks undisturbed. One shouldn’t draw attention to the nest. Predators are always watching. So I resist peeking in again. And when we go out later, I won’t let Alicia open the passenger door of my Jeep, because it’s parked close to the nest. Instead, I back my ride out slowly and pick her up on the gravel road behind our house.
Severe thunderstorms wake me up throughout the night. The internet says hail is possible. I just barely fight off the urge to go outside and hold an umbrella over the nest. I toss and turn.
In the morning, as I make my way through the screened-in porch and into the backyard, Alicia says, “I don’t want to know if you see an empty nest out there.”
I take a peek at the bottlebrush from a good distance away. I see momma cardinal sitting proud in the nest. I see papa cardinal—in all his bright glory—mimicking one of the bottlebrush’s red flowers.
“They’re alive,” I tell Alicia.
And then we continue to fret for our adopted bird children.
Here at the computer today, I wonder why the momma cardinal chose to build her nest right next to my Jeep, in an area heavily populated with cats. It doesn’t seem like the best decision. But whatever makes a momma cardinal a momma cardinal picked our bottlebrush. Because of that, I came face-to-face with two freshly hatched birds and wrote this post.
Momma cardinal lays eggs and then attends to her nest the best she can, knowing full well that danger lurks and success is far from assured. Papa cardinal stands guard nearby, doing his part. In this way, their souls sing a duet.
Here at fifty, I’m deeply moved by their song. This surprises me.
Back in my office, I have a phone conversation with my literary agent, Doug, who has read my new novel over the weekend. He likes it. And wants to pass it along to my editor, whom we both think will like it as well.
This is good news.
But my manuscript is still young. It’s barely had its eyes open for a few weeks. It’s just grown out all of its feathers. I’ve seen it fly here in my home, but I worry about it landing in the great big world. There are cats out there. And snakes. And people pruning bottlebrushes. Maybe some of them will wonder why I wove my novel the way I did. Maybe some of them will criticize me. Maybe they will not be so nice to my recently hatched chick. Maybe they will want to kill it just for fun.
Then I remember that I’m the type of creature who cracks open his chest so that novels can flap their way into the mercurial collective. My soul sings in this way. And when I don’t allow my soul to sing, I get very sick.
With fingers on my keyboard, I’m thinking again about the moment I first saw the chicks five inches from my nose—how the sight quickened my pulse and made me smile. Enough of these tiny helpless creatures survive to keep the species going. Cats are eluded. Wings are grown. Flight does occur. And I think some instinctive part of me grasped the glory of that promise well before my brain began to compose all of what you are reading here.
Suddenly, I hear Alicia yelling at a cat outside. Kingsly and I rush through the backdoor to help chase the predator away. With gritted teeth, I glance over at the nest. The birds are still there and unharmed. I feel a staggering amount of relief.
Sometimes, I like to think about an artistic God watching us and using our attention as a sort of rating system.
“Gray cold winter just exploded with the warm pastels of spring. And you’re inside watching Netflix?” God says in my fantasy. “There are plants breathing in carbon dioxide and creating the air you are right now sucking into your lungs. And you say no one does anything for you? I make different pictures with the clouds on an hourly basis. And you won’t even lift your face toward heaven? Not even when a billion stars sing you a lullaby? I give you the ocean and you fill it with plastic? Really? Really?”
When I grin at a nest of cardinal chicks, does God see it as a glowing five-star review?
Does God consider our shooing away the cat to be a one-star review?
Or is God simply pleased that the age-old drama still captivates us?
It’s silly fun to imagine God as a needy artist.
But I’m beginning to think maybe God just creates because God is the thing that creates. Just like momma cardinal lays her eggs. Papa cardinal guards the nest. And I write these words.
How do you allow your soul to sing? What compels you to risk being discovered and seen? What wants to come through you? What will you risk? How will you light up your tiny part of the world?
PS - Did you read the July 17th post? Have Your Eyes Submitted To Any Novels Recently? (Kale Or Ice Cream?) And the July 31st post? Our Souls Are Not Pez Dispensers (Psychic Delivery Dates)
