Looking out my kitchen window, I see her … resting on a telephone wire. It’s been a long time watching her, for a bird, and she’s still there … probably absorbing and observing all that moves and lives and moves around her but below her.

Like me, she may be retired and doesn’t need to do the flighty things that working birds do. Probably has a solid 401K and good health insurance.

Steady and quiet. Just like me sitting at my kitchen table until my getting up grab my laptop to write this. It’s a quiet neighborhood at this time of dusk, but I suspect she sees things that many of those busy birds do not see. How many minutes have passed as I look upward, and she remains perching up and away there?

There’s a stupid song by Bette Midler, “From A Distance,” the theme being that everything looks good from a distance. Obviously! My kitchen-window-bird may not be … projecting an illusion of beauty but the more spiritual gifts of seeing people and our world complete with its strivings and sufferings, setbacks, along with hopefully many successes. (pause)

She just now flew away. (pause) Flying off now to a new telephone wire to perceive and view life from a different angle?

She’s just one bird, as I’m just one person, but that distant distance is full of beauty along with everything empty of it. In a TV interview with Stephen Colbert, Prince Harry wisely said to us all, especially those of us whose restful lives are limiting, “Digital diet, not only what goes in my mouth but what goes into my eyes.” What a quote for the times we live in.

I have only my, one, only singular view outside my kitchen window. My unnamed aerial observer takes in a fuller vision of life living below the telephone pole.

I wonder what her name is? Could her name be, “Just Me,” or is it “Community?” I think I just named my bird friend on that early Monday evening’s dusk.

Now, if only I had a very, very tall ladder. Or, if I only practiced a taller, fuller, enveloping Godly faith.