Whispers to a Stubborn Heart

(Chapter 1 of The Race Before Me)

 

Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.

- JESUS (Luke 8:18 )

 

Years ago, right after it happened, I tried to sit down and write about it. I thought that capturing my thoughts and feelings immediately after the experience would allow me to be more lucid, to remember more of the details, to paint the feelings with brighter colors. It did not. In fact, it took me three years, or rather the experiences of those three years, to even begin to understand. It will surely take me until the end of my life to continue to understand. (bn, May 2000)

The Beginning

Like many of my life’s tales, this one started on a bike. More specifically, on a Bridgestone mountain bike, on the Military Ridge trail west of Madison , Wisconsin . I was out for a “sanity” workout. Perhaps I should explain what that is. A “sanity” workout preserves or regains sanity during times of duress. It does this simply by flooding the body with endorphins, adrenaline, and all the other natural chemicals to which many of us develop a healthy addiction. My nomenclature is really quite ironic considering a “sanity” workout usually requires the type of physical effort that many would not consider sane.

The antagonist to my sanity in this case was my doctoral dissertation.

As any Ph.D. candidate can attest, trying to capture the trials and tribulations of the preceding four or five years and then to frame them in an arena of “statistical significance” is not a simple task. It’s draining. Imagine taking a tangled knot of twine that it took you five years to unravel and then having to roll it up into a tidy ball much smaller than the original. Or imagine toiling for days to pull apart the plumbing in your kitchen to diagnose a leak, then being told (while your wrench is still warm) that you have just a few hours to put it back together because company is coming. You get the picture. In the instance of this story, I was mired knee deep in the pipes, washers, and valves of my graduate thesis. The morning had slipped quietly into evening, I still wore the same shorts I woke up in, and I hadn’t left the computer monitor save for a couple mugs of coffee. I needed to get out and breathe.

So breathing is what I set out to do, courtesy of some hard cycling and an accelerated heart rate. The Military Ridge trail between Madison and Mt. Horeb is a great venue for such a pedal rage. It is not hard in a technical or geographical way, there are no screaming, root-laden descents or stomping uphill climbs; rather it offers an open, traffic-free trail. This allows you to let loose your reason and turn the darn pedals…turn them hard.

The Path

On this night, life was pulsing in the air. The summer overture was tuning up, played timelessly by an orchestra of bird lungs, frog throats, and insect legs. Gnats swarmed in small clouds, hardly visible but definitely palpable when pedaling fast with an open, panting mouth.

On previous rides on this trail, I took notice of the birds. I guess I had to. You see, there were always sprinkles of little, and I mean tiny, brown birds fluttering around near ground level. I suppose they were scavenging, insects for food or twigs for nests, something like that. Whatever their purpose, I had to notice them simply to avoid running over them. I would like to believe that my concern was purely humane in nature, stemming from a respect for all of God’s creatures, but I don’t think it was. I was probably most concerned with avoiding a feathery mess in my spokes.

Let me clear something up – I am an animal lover. There is something about the innocence and simplicity of a non-human creature that really commands my respect. Animals don’t lie, they don’t cheat, they don’t obsess over money, they don’t envy, they don’t kill for sport, and they don’t hurt each other emotionally. I can’t recall any “Cat World Wars.” I don’t think geese demand pre-nuptial agreements. I have never seen a Bassett hound trying to enslave a beagle. Animals seek only what they need and take just enough to survive.

Being an animal lover does not, however, automatically qualify me as a bird lover. Nothing against our feathered friends, but they just never grew on me. Sure they sing (cool) and fly (very cool), but come on, as a friend for humans? They seem more like novelties, fixtures with rapid heart beats and leaky bowels. So when riding my bike at break-neck speeds on a gravel trail, small brown birds hopping around in my path seemed nothing more than a nuisance.

On this day, my opinion changed.

The Gift

Did you ever take notice of something in your periphery, something small or perhaps random, but something that ended up mattering? Perhaps you saw a flash of two eyes as you made a wrong turn in the night, only to end up finding somebody’s lost cat. Perhaps you sat under a painting at a coffee shop that inspired you to make the perfect gift for someone special. Perhaps during spring cleaning you turned over a line from a church hymn that you had jotted down years earlier, only to have that line ring true in your heart at the exact moment of its re-appearance. These happenings are neither planned nor even imagined. They are gifts. They are lessons. They are reminders. They are scoldings. They are…they are gifts.

Such a gift entered my life in the form of a brown baby bird.

How I noticed this little guy, featherless and flightless, hopping along the trail, is a mystery to me. But as I peddled over the mixed gravel and wavy ruts of the Military Ridge trail, I did notice him. I slowed only to confirm what I thought I saw, a little fluff-ball chick pouncing around the gravel like a wind-up toy from a cereal box. I passed slowly, a bit taken aback. A baby bird alone on a trail, no mother flying nervously around, no siblings chirping from a nearby land-nest? The sheer puzzle of it all drew me in. The questions had entered my mind, and I had to deal with them. I braked, and I turned around.

Believe the rest that follows, because it is true. I am not one to lie, or even exaggerate, and to do so about this story would be an insult to the experience.

I spotted the little guy right away. I saw him not because I remembered landmarks or distances, not because he bore any distinguishing colors, and not because he made any audible noise. I saw this baby bird because he hopped out of the brush and came right to me. Flabbergasted by this, I slowly dismounted my bike and sat on the side of the trail, not wanting to scare him off. Well there was no scaring this kid. He continued to hop towards me, as a child might run to a parent coming home from work with a bag full of chocolate-covered peanuts.

At this point I let myself go with the surrealism. I say surreal because here is an animal that should instinctively flutter away from large moving objects, especially living ones. Wild birds do not socialize with humans, and if they do it is to grab a crumb of bread and high-tail it out of there. But not this one. So I let myself go. I stretched out my hand.

He hopped right into it.

Justification is (Too) Easy to Come By

In my hand I held a baby bird, fuzzy and frail. His weight on my pa lm felt like no more than a tickle. There was no fear in his eyes as they called up to mine. There had been a sense of urgency in his journey to me, but now in my hand he seemed relieved, safe. As he stared at me with such intensity, mouthing a needy squeak every so often, I got the distinct impression that here in my hand was the safest place he had been in a long time, or at least a long time in his reference frame of life. I started calling him “kid” and talking to him. But as I sat there, dripping sweat on the side of a trail with a baby bird staring at me from my hand, the first rational question then pirated into my mind: what is going on here?

I think being rational was my first mistake. You just don’t want to taint the unexplainable by trying to explain it. But I was, and am, a scientist at heart, so go figure. My first rational thought was at least very concerned in nature. I had always been told growing up never to touch a bird’s nest, bird’s eggs, or baby birds. The logic I remembered is that touching them would leave the scent of an intruder, which apparently could be enough to scare off the mother, leaving her young to perish. (Sometimes the simplicity of nature doesn’t seem so innocent after all.) Now fearful of the damage I might be doing, I set the kid back to earth. He tried to hop on my leg. I moved it away. He came again to me. I backed away. It broke my heart to mount my bike. It broke my heart in a half-sad, half-pathetic way to see a baby bird try to chase down a bicycle. It broke my heart completely to see him give up. I had left him.

The knee-jerk human reaction is to justify our own actions. Pedaling away I found plenty of justification. Why did I leave? I shouldn’t meddle with nature, leaving my foreign scent all over a lost chick, perhaps removing him further from his rightful place. Why did the bird come to me? He’s too young to know the difference. What could I do to help? Nothing really, as I had no experience and no knowledge in ornithology. What is best for me? Keep pedaling, finish your workout so you can get back to the task of writing your Ph.D. thesis and graduating. Justification is very selfish in nature, and, unfortunately, justification is quite easy to come by.

Somewhere inside, however, I knew I really did not want to leave. I took a subconscious note of the general area, and I promised myself that on my return route, if I saw that fuzzy kid again, I would do something. Part of me yearned for this chance.

The rest of me cowardly hoped against it.

Hearing the Call

I would be lying if I said I could think of anything else for the next hour. This is just a personal trait of mine, sometimes a blessing but often a curse. If an idea, puzzle, problem, or challenge gets inside my head, I am not good at letting it go. I seek understanding. I drive towards explanation. For a person like me, giving my troubles and worries up to God can seem like scaling Mt. Everest with cement shoes. So I thought about the bird. Rational thoughts of problem-solving flew around in my head, interspersed with the vision of him hopping down the trail towards me, and the feeling of his feet tickling my wrist as he clung to my arm.

Thinking back, I believe I pedaled a little harder that evening. I tucked down further and moved the cranks with more power than even I had planned. The slight but long uphill into Mt. Horeb evaporated behind me. Riding strong made me feel proactive. I wasn’t rejecting the bird, I was riding fast to return to him more quickly. Ironic isn’t it? I could increase my speed to complete my planned ride and return to the bird, but hours earlier I couldn’t simply…turn around.

As dusk started to sneak up on the night, I wondered if I would get a second chance. When I had rode away from the kid earlier that evening, I remember dreading that he might still be there when I got back. Two hours later, my overriding fear was that he would not be there.

Answering the Call

Summer nights in Wisconsin get delightfully cool. This night was no exception. The sun was taking cover in the horizon, but the air remained humid, allowing the layer of sweat that had cooled me for two hours to now feel like a thin blanket in the still air. Shadows disappeared and the sky and land took on a uniform pale darkness. It is this time of night when the daylight seems to fall through your fingers like sand. You can feel it getting smaller and slipping away. And this night, losing the light mattered a great deal, for in darkness we lose even more control, become more helpless. I needed to find my new friend. I needed to take care of him.

Stopping my bike at the landmarks I had noted earlier, I felt anxiety but purpose – a singular, pure, clear purpose. My doctoral thesis had been put on a mental shelf along with all the other worries of the day. My focus was cleansing, a gift of perspective in a time that just a few hours ago seemed so arduous. I began my search at the spot where I held my bird, a spot easily found due to the disrupted dirt and flattened grass at the edge of the trail. He wasn’t there. A small hope rose inside that perhaps he found his way home or his mother found him, paralleled by a fear that he may have been laying cold, hungry, and immobile somewhere near. There was nothing to do but keep looking. Without thinking, I allowed myself to escape rationality again, to again let go to surrealism. I moved to the center of the trail, announced my return, and waited.

Not even a moment later, a small fluff emerged from the brush. It was my bird. He had meandered his way down the trail a bit, but not more than several meters. His hop had lost its spring and veered a bit crooked now. This time I went to him and picked him up. Holding him again was now very sad. He seemed so fragile and vulnerable and truly helpless, probably because some of the mystery was now revealed. He was officially alone, abandoned, without family, and without shelter.

What would I do? To try to map out a comprehensive plan was impossible. In truth I only knew one thing – I wasn’t going to let this kid die out here, scared and all alone. And God willing, if I could get him through the night, a trip to my vet in the morning might give me some direction, along with some crazy glances, I’m sure. But the next morning seemed light years away. The next few minutes needed to be taken moment by moment, challenge by challenge.

The elements at hand were few – a bike, two water bottles, the clothes on my back, and the he lm et on my head. In my hand sat a beating heart in a fragile shell. In between my home and us was still about ten miles of trail in an ever-darkening night. I did not try to process the thoughts that came to me, I just obeyed them. The only vessel to transport my friend was an upside-down he lm et, the strap wrapped judiciously around my handlebar stem to form a makeshift carriage. I took my jersey top off and crumpled it in the base of the he lm et, trying to sort the few dry spots up to the top of the bed. I placed my bird inside, folded a cloth roof over his head, gave a word of encouragement (we’re gonna make it, kid), and started home.

It became immediate that the ride for him might be rough. The he lm et was not in danger of falling off, but it did sway back and forth and vibrate with the ride. It probably felt like an earthquake to his small, undeveloped frame. (Hang in there kid.) My hope was that the jersey was providing enough absorption to take the sting out and provide a shield from the passing air, which began to have a noticeable chill to it. I stopped often and talked constantly. I felt like I was riding in an ambulance with a hurt friend, holding a hand, offering words that cry out for faith and trust. (Come on. No problem. We’re a lm ost there.) Just get him home first, I thought, then take it from there.

Not once did I question what I was doing. Not once did I seek logical perspective to tell me that I was crazy, that it was just a bird, that baby birds die all the time and I don’t lose any sleep over it. The difference, perhaps, was that this bird came into my life. For whatever reason, random or not, he had found his way in and sought me out. He was part of a call to me, a small and maybe insignificant call, but it was a call I heard.

And when you hear a call, you must answer it, or pay the price of regret forever.

To Err is So, So Human

We did make it home. My bird’s motions were becoming listless, and his fuzz had flattened a bit, but he was alive. It started to break my heart to see him now. When I first met him, he bounced to me with a desperate but trusting “You’re here! Save me, thank you!” look of joy in his eye. Now, he was drifting. His eyes looked black and dull. There was no joy.

I went busily to task to avoid the heartache. I tried to apply simple knowledge: 1) keep him out of reach of the cats, 2) try to get him hydrated, 3) keep him warm, and 4) eventually try to get him nourishment. I kept him wrapped up in the he lm et. It just seemed natural that way. This old Vetta he lm et was the only thing he knew since the trail. Some stupid part of me seemed to believe that as long as he was in this plastic carriage, he would make it out okay.

I set about the task of getting him water. The anatomy of how a bird, much less a baby bird, drinks water was a mystery to me. Relying again on the bare basics, I put a droplet of water on the end of the faucet and gently brought his beak to it. The droplet, a single droplet, rushed over his beak, some into his mouth, some over his eyes, the rest matting down parts of his face. If you have ever had to wash a long-haired dog, you might know how different they look when wet – sometimes funny, sometimes pathetic, but usually vulnerable. The expression of their eyes is amplified tenfold. Well, the same went for my bird, and his eyes started to tell me he did not feel so safe anymore.

(I’m trying kid, I’m trying.) One more droplet of water spilled into his mouth and over his face. I couldn’t help but cringe that the water may have stung his young eyes, or even blinded him. I really didn’t know what to do. He must need food, some form of nourishment, right? I need to find something easily digestible. I opened up a can of cat food and put a dab about the size of a BB onto a toothpick, the closest thing I had to a mother’s beak, and put it in his mouth. He mouthed acceptance, I think. Or was he choking? (What do I do? I’m trying…) The look of trust and safety that I had seen hours earlier in the pa lm of my hand was gone. He looked like he was on the verge of giving up. (Don’t give up. Are you hurt? Did I hurt you, drown you? Was the ride too rough? What do I do now?)

I made a dry bed for him in the he lm et. I said a prayer. I put the he lm et up on a high shelf. I sat before my computer monitor and stared.

A few hours later he was dead.

Lessons from a Broken Heart

In my family, we have always buried our pets when they die. We said little on these occasions. We made no ceremonies or speeches, just the final gesture of care to place an animal down in the earth. The baby bird had not been a pet. I don’t know quite what he was, but I do know that I cared for him. I would bury him. I did not own a shovel, so instead I found a spot of weeds up to my waist and laid my friend down, in the he lm et, wrapped in my cycling jersey.

A broken heart can come in many forms, none of which can be described very well with words. But the words regret and helplessness might provide a start. Failing to save the bird, wanting so bad for him to make it through the night, then holding his stiff body and wishing it were alive would classify to me as heartbreak. Not in the romantic sense, mind you, but I’ve felt that too. It feels just the same, only it lasts longer. A heart can, and will, be injured in many ways.

It has taken me my whole life to learn to approach a broken heart. How do we normally handle it? Well, we can opt to simply survive the experience, to get through the pain through simple diffusion of emotions over time. I’m sure I am not the first to discover this, after all, I didn’t invent the phrase “time heals a broken heart.” Or maybe we try all sorts of attacks against the hurt – revenge, denial, replacement, apathy, cynicism. But let’s face it, these tactics work only temporarily if at all, like eating cake and icing when your body is hungry for real substance. Worst of all, perhaps, is trying to reason with a broken heart, to explain it scientifically and logically, trying to quantify and understand it. I say worst because in doing this, you relive the instances, the mistakes, the pain both received and dealt out, and you feel the injuries over and over. And over.

I spent awhile analyzing my baby bird situation. Looking at the surface level, I addressed the details of the attempted rescue. How could I have better transported him? Did the jarring trip injure him and cause his death? How could I have better provided him water? Did the brute force droplet-in-the-beak approach drown him or hurt his eyes or throw off his temperature balance? This technique is simple: analyze our lives through human eyes, human rules, and human knowledge…and stay unsatisfied forever.

Looking deeper than the surface, to the level we sometimes fear and therefore neglect, is something I have been forced to do. Events of my recent past have allowed me, albeit reluctantly, to revisit events of my entire past, including the baby bird experience. On this level, I look at the questions that really matter, and on this level I even find some answers.

The first question: why did I ride away from a life in need? Selfishness of wanting to finish the task I had planned for myself before starting a task that would help another…this selfishness caused me to ride away. Fear of a situation that I had not before experienced, and one that therefore did not guarantee success…this fear caused me to ride away. And listening to the practical world, a world that told me to finish my thesis and go on to professional heroism, a world that told me that baby birds die all the time, a world that told me to look out first and foremost for my own best interests…this voice of the world caused me to ride away.

The next question: when given a second chance, why did I accept it? Something broke through my protective walls of selfishness, fear, and worldly acceptance. Something broke through and drove me with a pure, cleansing purpose. Imagine getting caught in a thunderstorm in your best suit, first fretting of the damage to the expensive fabric, but then eventually breaking through some mental barrier and being able to dance carefree under the rain. And at that moment, you cannot imagine being anywhere else.

As a human, I have spent much of my life encasing myself in walls. They have been defensive walls like selfishness and fear. They have been temporary, comforting walls like money or sex or attention. They have been distracting walls like worry and hustle-bustle. And without knowing it, I hated those walls I spent so much time and effort building. They entombed me.

I don’t think I am alone. People spend their lives building walls upon walls, then trying to use quick fixes and worldly prescriptions to make cheap little windows in them. Goodness knows our country offers up its share of psycho-analysts and self-help cookbooks to use as pick axes, to chisel away from the inside and make us believe we have control. But perhaps these are not broken out of, perhaps they must be broken into. This is God’s job, brother.

We hold pick axes against a twenty foot concrete wall, God picks up the wall like a pebble. A pick ax arms us with control, and we work with unceasing endurance, physical and mental fortitude, unyielding stubbornness, and limitless drive… and we still never see the other side. Trusting in God relinquishes our control and rests our hopes on the faith that God hears our prayers and works from outside, in His own time. Does that sound passive and weak? Hardly, because it requires the obedience of faith and patience. Faith and patience, try them on for size and you’ll see they are so far from passive.

So God knocks on our door, or oftentimes breaks it down for us. We get pissed off at this most of the time. Leave my door alone, man! I spent years of anger and envy building that door! But he breaks it down and makes us look outside, with moments of pure, undeniable purpose. He shines a ray straight through our walls and gives us a glimpse of the joy outside. “Come on out here and help me out,” He whispers through the shattered door. He calls us out. Some calls take a minute, some calls take a lifetime. The challenge is listening for them.

I can see now that meeting my baby bird was a call from God. A small one, yes, but a true one nonetheless, a narrow but bright ray of light that found me despite my attempts to block it out. In the short run I failed in this task. I was left with a dead baby bird despite my best, yet fumbling, efforts. But I realize now that the true task might have been different, more far-reaching. The light that shone in made me look outside. So I looked, and I saw, and I listened, and I heard. Perhaps now, years later, I have finally accepted the gift of that baby bird. Perhaps now I have finally heard the whisper.

And now it is my responsibility, and my privilege, to tell about it.

Another Chance: Oranjello and Mr. Pink

On Easter weekend in 2001, a lm ost four years after I met the baby bird on the Wisconsin trail, I met two more baby birds. They were left on my doorstep in a cardboard box at my house in St. Louis . They were fuzzy baby chicks, and they were dyed in bright colors for Easter. One was big and bright orange. I called him “Oranjello.” The other was scrawny and bright pink. I called him “Mr. Pink.” Here we go again, I thought to God. This time, He sent baby birds in obnoxious bright colors, I think to make the call a little harder to ignore. God does have a sense of humor sometimes.

I pounced on the internet to find some instructions on caring for baby chicks. And then I set about pointing lamps down on them for warmth and closing them up in a safe room. The next day was Monday, and for some reason I took them to work, although I don’t really know why I would do such a thing. They got out of the box in my office and crapped all over the place. They had food, plenty of it, and apparently they ate it in vast quantities, judging by the volume of bird crap on my floor.

In passing by one of my friend’s offices that morning, I joked about how he should take these chicks home for his kids to play with, fully hoping he would get suckered into the idea of kids squealing with delight at the pink and orange fuzzy chicks. Then he would be stuck with them, I imagined, and his kids would love them so much that they would be sure that their daddy would find them a good home when they started to grow feathers.

Well, funny thing. This friend’s mom actually lived on a farm in southern Illinois , a farm with chickens, and a farm he was going to visit that weekend with his family. He took the chicks, brought them home to squealing and delighted children that night, and then to go live on a farm. Oranjello and Mr. Pink grew up to be healthy, happy chickens. They shed their obnoxiously colored fuzz, grew their rightful feathers, and lived on a farm. Rumor even has it that scrawny Mr. Pink grew up to rule the roost.

Redemption: Meech

It was a hot Saturday in July of 2002, and I was rushed big time. By mid-afternoon, I had to be on a plane to Montreal for a professional conference. In two crucial months, I would be competing in the Ironman Wisconsin triathlon, and I wasn’t about to skip a workout. I had set my heart on using the Wisconsin race to qualify for the big daddy of them all, the World Championship Ironman in Hawaii . Little did I know that the winds of a distant Hawaii were about to whisk me to another memory, another story to carry forever.

On that Saturday, I rode my bike southwest from Columbia , Illinois . I hadn’t planned my exact route beforehand, but I had planned two things – to ride blisteringly hard, and to be back in less than four hours. I couldn’t miss that plane. I rode strong through Va lm eyer, past the grain silos near Maeyestown, blinked through Fults, and rolled on towards Prairie du Rocher. Head down, legs rolling out the smooth, strong circles, I was focused.

On the way back through Maeyestown, it happened again. Holy cow it happened again. This time, out of the corner of my salty eye, a gray ball of fur lay curled up in a ditch to the right of the country road. I braked, and I turned around. A small kitten, two inches from death, was balled up and bare breathing. But it was breathing. Off came the he lm et, around the stem of my bike I made a carriage, and in it I placed the gray ball of baby cat. I had absolutely no plan past that, but I started to ride.

The road was rough and the kitten was jarred around inside the he lm et. I had to stop somewhere soon. I flagged down a truck, and I asked for help. “Those cats are a dime a dozen around here,” the driver said before she drove away in a cloud of dust. Luckily, about two miles up, I happened across a man outside his work shed. He had oily hands from working on a tractor or something of the like, and he looked cautiously at the guy in a bright-colored bike racing suit rolling into his gravel driveway. Well, this nice man happened to have a cat that just had kittens herself, and he offered to put the hurt gray kitten into the mix to see what would happen.

I rolled away, and I didn’t care if I was going to miss my flight. I did my small part, but I prayed deeply that this one would not die.

I went months, many months, before I ventured to Maeyestown again. The fear of a dead kitten kept me away. But I had to return, and I did. I was again on my bike, and again I rolled into the gravel driveway. A woman was hanging laundry on the clothesline. I started to say, “You don’t know me, but…” before she interrupted to say, “I bet I know who you are!” At that instant, a gray kitten, now much larger, bound between her legs. Apparently, the kitten had made it through a couple rough foodless and motionless nights that the family thought were leading to sure death. But one morning, they awoke to find a new kitten with a full belly and a twinkle in the eye. This kitten became the life of the litter. The gray kitten was a baby girl, and she was named, “Meech.” I picked Meech up into my arms, gave her a kiss, and put her back down to return to her new family.

About a year later I returned again. The man I met the first time was again at his shed, this time pulling apart a dead turkey he had just shot. He took a piece of the turkey leg, threw it down on a piece of cardboard, and a full grown Meech started chewing on it. Meech was round and firm, now full of a litter of her own. As she went after that turkey leg and gnawed off pieces of gristle, I just remember thinking that it was a strange and ironic and beautiful site.

Thanks for choosing me , I thought.

bn (2000)