Alive

Posted by Lori Fagerholm

February 5, 2007

I rescued a wild finch the other day--or, really, it rescued me.

I sat reading at a cafe, sipping an espresso and taking my time waking up. I'd come a long way on the bus, in the cold, to find a certain text I needed for school, and had brought it to this cafe to read. The text was dense, and I was bleary-eyed anyway, so I wasn't comprehending much, and was retaining even less. My thoughts were like molasses.

Nature doesn't care a thing for the pace of human life. It moves as quickly or slowly as it's going to, no matter what we're doing. Into my blurry world hopped a tiny bird, turning its head this way and that, its eyes wide. My eyes widened, too. The outdoors had come in. A finch--judging by the shape of its beak--, a little brown mottled thing, had gotten caught inside when someone opened a door. I was awake, tracing the bird's trail across the floor, hopping, pecking, looking wildly around.

It seemed to find a crumb under a nearby table and looked around for more. No one else seemed to notice it. The baristas chatted behind the counter, customers plodded by without a look. I stood up. Slowly, gently, I moved toward the tiny bird, my book in my hand, and it hid under a chair. I waved the book in its direction. "Come on, little thing, this way," I said, not expecting much. But it did come that way, and, slowly, I herded it toward the door.

Suddenly, it leapt into the air and took off toward the rafters, landing on a water pipe high above my head. It was a bird, after all; in the mind of a bird, upward means freedom and safety. Before ceilings, upward was always skyward, and the bird's instincts hadn't quite caught up to modern times. But if the bird wanted sky, I'd give it sky. Sky was a thing it might understand. Cautiously, I pushed open the double doors, letting in a cold breeze and, I hoped, a slightly clearer glimpse of sky than the finch could get through the panes of glass.

The lives of birds occasionally came to quick ends against the windows of my childhood home, but somehow this finch understood that glass and air, though both clear, weren't the same. It took me up on my offer and swooped down through the doorway and outside. What I felt then was a rare thing, a thing I long for but rarely feel: a sense of purpose, of some kind of work completed. I'm the type who often asks, What's the point of life? Maybe there's a point and maybe there isn't, but that day, I helped an animal. The little hopping thing, so fluttery and fast, was bursting with life, and for a moment, so was I.