Nest Builders
Have you ever heard of a bird refusing to build a nest? There’s no such thing, nor do they whine or seem unhappy. What do they know that we don’t?
Sometime in the 1970s, my mom and I were weaving our way out of our subdivision, turning left on to Sideburn Road. I was in elementary school and I think I was trying to convince my parents to stop working and to get me some stuff I wanted. I hadn’t yet made the connection between working and getting paid. And it really seemed like this work thing was getting in the way at that moment.
“So how many hours does Dad have to go to ‘work’?”
“At least eight per day, except weekends or we won’t have any money. He trades what he does for money.”
“What? Geez. That’s like most of the hours you have! For how long?”
“Forever. Until you are really, really old. And one day you will have to work for someone to get some money to buy food and clothes and pay for a house.”
“What?! You have to pay someone for a house?!”
One day life would change and childhood would end and someone would snatch up all my time. Apparently I would need to have some kind of skill, some suits, then I would need to toil by moving piles of paper around in an office. And I would staple them and stuff and talk on the phone, while looking out my window onto a parking lot. And most of my hours would be gone, dead, stolen. It seemed like torture. I needed a way out of the system.
As soon as I was old enough to take a public bus alone, and scrounge together seventy-five cents, I started skipping school. Take that, Boss Man. I decided to steal back my hours in advance. And boy did I ever. One of my favorite activities was to take the bus to the Smithsonian Museum complex, because I am a nerd, and it is free to the public, and really awesome. For years I went to school just enough to pass and stay under the radar.
But after skipping school for the millionth time, amazingly with little repercussion, it began to dawn on me that there might be a flaw in my plan. I had to accept that eventually I would need to work. I had to face this reality and change my attitude because the world just wasn’t letting me wiggle my way out of it.
I remember the image that made things click for me: I pictured a bird building a nest. Then I pictured a bird refusing to build a nest. Or look for worms. Or I tried to. You can’t really picture this because there aren’t any birds that refuse to do this. And they don’t whine or seem unhappy. They just go about their business and do what they must. Their whole life is working to stay alive and raising birds to replace them. I was going to do what birds do. I would work and be happy about it. And I would even try to be good at it because people seem happier when they are.
I think I know why I remember the whole ‘work epiphany’. I recognized that I was part of a system from which there was no escape. I could get around the truancy officer, nosy neighbors, and my mom, but there was a point at which I could not escape this system of which I was a part. I couldn’t really understand it and I couldn’t beat it. I just had to accept it with a good attitude or life would be torture.
It took me thirty something years to figure out that we are all part of an even larger system. As bizarre as it seems to many, to me still, there is a Creator. And strangely enough this Creator communicated a way to survive in this world to some people in the Middle East a long time ago. And eventually they wrote it all down so we can read it and succeed at our jobs here on earth. And while we can’t really and truly understand it, because it’s all too huge and strange for our tiny little minds, just like the bird can’t understand much either, we are nevertheless part of it.
I see why it is so hard for so many people to believe this. We lived through the 20th century, which was the century in which there was the most rapid global change ever in the history of man. At the start of it we were fighting wars on horseback and couldn’t put someone under before doing surgery on them. By the last half of it, we had landed on the moon. And came back again intact. With pictures and moon rocks. At the start of the 20th century in the United States a female or a black person couldn’t walk through life with even the most basic human rights like personal safety, education, and in many cases even property rights. Now, personal politics aside, we have African Americans and women on our Supreme Court and we might even have a black president. It’s astounding.
We have started this millennium with a map of the DNA chain and portable little pocket computers the size of a wallet – jammed with more information than we can read in a lifetime. That doubles as a phone and a camera. And I am going to sit here and tell you that you should follow some rules that God gave to a Middle Eastern guy with a beard thousands of years ago. Even though humans have had their paws all over it. And that we think we accomplished all of these amazing feats in the past hundred years, but really God did it, not us. He created it all, sustains it, sustains us every second and we can’t see Him, but He’s there and He’s doing it all, but we think we are. We think we can figure it all out and manipulate the system. I mean we can clone stuff now and we can grow food anywhere on earth and send it anywhere on earth. But I’m going to believe that there is a system that you can not buck.
Yup. And it does sound totally nuts to me even though I believe in it and live it and write about it once a week. I have just changed my attitude. I didn’t know the system existed until I was a few decades old, so it wasn’t that I was trying to buck it. I didn’t know there was an ‘it’. But living in it in a conscious way, and suspending my disbelief long enough to give it a shot, has made my life incredibly amazing and magical. It’s not some kind of trick, to live inside the system. It’s a gift.
A bird’s job is to build a nest. And you know, we’re all nest builders too. In Psalm 84, the bird is a metaphor for The Divine Presence and the nest symbolic of the Holy Temple. When we strive for truth, we help rebuild the Holy Temple for the Divine Presence. Now I know why the birds are so motivated!
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