The Hucklebird.

This story is about a hucklebird. It’s about other things too, but it’s also about a young hucklebird, who happened to give an inconceivable gift to a man it had never met, without ever realizing it. It isn't his fault, of course; there’s no way it could possibly understand. And I realized, as I was writing this, that most of our prayers get answered this way – by total accident. We never really know the entirety of the steps leading up to anything in this world, because it’s all a mish-moshed series of random interacting coincidences, stuck together to make up the present reality. Why would the universe even want to give us a gift, or answer our prayers? It doesn’t care about us. I'll tell you why. Because it must. It's the very nature of infinity.

It is sometimes true that our greatest fears, regardless of our vain attempts to prevent them, will reveal themselves in spite of our noblest efforts. It is also true that even the most fantastical dreams occasionally do come true, despite their near-impossible likelihood. That's not just fairy tales, that's mathematics. If there’s a chance of something happening in this world, it will - to someone. That is life’s greatest irony - because of this infinite universe, due to the exact nature of infinity - every possibility of everything is occurring at exactly the same time everywhere. No matter how impossible something is, it is happening right now. But infinity is, of course, endlessly more expansive than this. Infinity is limitless in every direction, not just up and down and left to right, but deep, like a fractal which exposes itself endlessly the more powerful the magnification. And the deeper one looks, the more it begins to repeat the shape of the original. Like planetary orbits and atomic orbitals, we’re all made of spiral repeating infinities, endless loops, an irony wrapping itself around an irony. And that real irony is: they are the same thing. The fear is the joy. It’s all one. It’s all the same. I know you are not understanding this. As humans, we can’t possibly understand. We are tied to our own subjectivity, our own perspective in thinking. Despite the perceived advancement of our technology and our practical minds, we are still as lost as a deaf, blind child in a dark room.

Anyway, this story is about a hucklebird. Hucklebirds are a lesser-known variety of birds that live, thinly dispersed, in forests all around the world. Despite their nocturnal behavior and terrible sense of direction, their coloring is starkly beautiful. The hucklebird’s extended tail feathers exhibit the most uncommon trait, which is to direct the moon’s light into a little glowing beam behind them, which can be pointed this way and that. Even outside the nest, as they take to flight, their shine in the moonlight is impossible to hide. Birdwatchers can easily recognize hucklebirds in the forest because of their nocturnal behavior and unique tail. They can sometimes appear ghostly, especially after darkness falls, as though their tail feathers stretch out infinitely into the night.

* * *

In the middle of a deep forest, standing on one branch of a fir tree, was a little hucklebird who had taken a rest. It had just finished nibbling a few berries, and had brushed the remaining seeds from its beak. Now it had settled his two wings comfortably by his sides and was looking down to the soft forest floor which was thickly lined with pine needles and sifted soil.

Although it was still early in the morning and most of the forest creatures were stepping brightly into their day, the bird was tired. It was young, and not used to flying for such distances. Home was still far away, and the bird had no choice but to continue. But first, it needed to find a better place to rest. This particular perch had been chosen late at night. In the dark it had hobbled upward, exhausted, half jump and half wing-flutter, to the lowest branch, and then the next lowest branch, and so on, until it settled down on this one which was about fourth from the bottom, and then in one deep breath it leaned himself against the giant tree and fell asleep.

The next day, the bird felt better and set off to find something suitable that was in the general direction he needed to be. It was all a very unfamiliar part of the forest to him, and he only wanted to return to what he knew, his own tree and his own nest. He tried to fly carefully out of the forest to look down from above. He flew up past the trees and up even higher than the tallest nearby buildings. But when he didn’t see what he had hoped, he banked and glided down and across, stretching his broad shouldered wings over the mint-green and copper fields opposite the town. He still could not see his nest, so he flew even higher and then tried to smell the air and feel the wind patterns and imagine himself on a day when he was back home. But nothing worked. Slowly, it became late and darkness fell. The pale moon crept up the edge of the sky. As it rose, the hucklebird saw the beam of light against his tail feathers, and watched as it cast itself in the shape of an arrow on the ground. Then the hucklebird remembered what his parents had told him. If he needed to go home, he should follow the beam of moonlight shining from his tail feathers. Now he knew which way to go.

Before he left, he paused by a row of houses with a moment’s uncertainty, each with identical front doors, porches and enclosed, fenced-in backyards. He came in carefully, fluttered to a stop, and landed in one of the backyards on a little fig tree, and immediately noticed a hanging ball of seeds which had been placed outside by the owner. After sampling the seeds he decided to stay for a few days, since it seemed safe enough, was sheltered from the breeze, and had enough food to last a substantial amount of time.

* * *

Sometimes there’s a little ripple. It’s nearly undetectable, like the ripple of the air when an empty pillowcase falls. It can barely be noticed. Try to hear it, try to hold your breath and listen. Any sound, any movement, any distraction will just pull us away and we’ll miss it. It was the ripple of the air when a feather falls in another room. It was a single soft whisker of breeze tickling your neck so lightly it’s almost not even there, it’s almost nothing even at all.

It was this kind of little tickle of a ripple that happened in the air when the hucklebird fluttered to a stop and landed in the fig tree. It caused these invisible little raindrops to splatter out into the air causing more invisible little ripples everywhere to reflect and to bounce and to stretch out like rain dancing on a pond. And in response these little raindrops caused more ripples which caused other things. And suddenly it affected the air, and the leaves, the little twigs the leaves were attached to, which shook the tree as well. In such small quivers, mind you, that they were nearly positively undetectable. But they were there, in the trunk, the ground and the grasses, rippling through the air, that one event changing the nature of the day in limitless and unending ways.

The hucklebird closed its eyes. When it did, the world disappeared and was replaced into a palette of brown and black. And then when he opened his eyes again he was home, he was in the nest and his mother and his father were there. He was small again, like he used to be with such a big beak; it covered half of his head. Everything was clumsy and bright, but he took the food that he was given and swallowed it with a big gulp. It was nutty and sweet and a little oily and nothing ever felt so good. The hucklebird was sentient in his own world and he tasted and he felt and he shivered from his memories.

Then the hucklebird opened its eyes again and he was in the fig tree once more with the blues and grays of the evening sky, the wind here and there across its feathers and eyes. It was aware and it was watching the world.

Then the bird closed its eyes again. This time it was flying.

* * *

So now it really begins. This is the beginning of the story. Everything I have said was only meant to mislead you. Or perhaps not. It begins in a suburb of some city in the middle of some country. It doesn’t matter which one, it’s irrelevant. Because this story exists everywhere, in every town, in every house.

So you’re in this suburb, the row of houses that the hucklebird sees from outside. It is one of those towns that lie adjacent to big cities, and there’s no tall buildings like downtown but you have these townhomes that are really independent homes attached on both sides with a shared front lawn or something. Everyone has shared street parking or a big community parking lot or whatever. It could be in Columbus Ohio, it could be in Mill Valley California or it could be in Kiev or Lyon or Shanghai or Buenos Aires. It’s all the same.

Anyway, in one of these row-houses, one in the middle with a brass teapot sitting on the doorstep, the one in whose backyard the hucklebird has just landed, sat a man. He brushed the thought of the hucklebird out of his head, where it had suddenly landed because he had noticed it sitting in the fig tree. But the hucklebird wasn’t finished with the man yet because the thought was a seed. It spread like a fracture in concrete, it soaked in his mind, joined with other ideas and started to extend itself. He was thinking about birds. He was thinking about airplanes and flying. It wasn’t a strong or sturdy enough idea and it wasn’t swelling and spinning and pulling other thoughts and chemicals into it like a storm. It was just there, latent, fracturing itself paced and successively, slow and steady carving itself out of nothingness. Where it was, there was nothing. A creature, a dynamic event coming into existence that was just a thought, the tiniest little sensory input from our eyes and our own personal interpretation of that. That’s all it was.

Until it wasn’t, until it was not recognizable as a fracture or a break but something new and separate and self-aware, self-conscious and unsure of itself. It was still an idea, an event created by the mind - the vision of the hucklebird, the fig tree, the window and the frame of the window where an empty vase sat. It was all an idea, a created image transposed and interpreted by our mind and then leaving it there like a seed to sprout and turn into branches and leaves and fruits containing seeds growing other things. It was a thought looking for a home. It was a hucklebird lost in the woods, sitting in a fig tree outside the window.

The hucklebird was not aware of any of this because it could only be aware of itself. Everything it knew about itself and the world was held inside it like a treasure. It could not understand that it was just a thought; a piece of something else; an interpretation in someone else’s mind. Especially a mind that was so different, that was held inside a body so alien to its own. How could it accept that it was no more than an interpretation of a dream, an image folded from the blackness of its own closed eyes, a memory that fits into itself like two masks baked from the same mold?

But the man knew the bird not as the bird but as the thought, or perhaps the invisible seed of the thought. He didn’t see the bird the way it saw itself, nor could he see it as it really was. He could only see the bird through his own observations. And the man’s subjective interpretation of the bird was infinitely distant from the bird’s reality. It was irreversibly bound to himself; a fingerprint of his impression and understanding.

To the man, everything was an interpretation of sensory input and everything was a thought. Every moment and every experience was created by his mind and then experienced by his mind and then cherished and held onto as its own precious memory. For the mind makes its own fantasy and then lives within it. And the man lives within that, and the hucklebird lives as a concept within the man. Only the tickle of an idea in his head. .

* * *

The man went to sleep that night with the seed that the hucklebird had given him. When he slept he was able to experience all the things that would normally be impossible. When he was asleep his thoughts could zoom around the universe, from one planet to the next, and with his own silver wings he became the hucklebird, and the trees, and the stars and the moon.

So it was one of those nights when he was asleep that the hucklebird came to him. It came in a dream, but not a dream which was created for him and where he was playing out a part. No, this dream was like an empty field in a thickly wooded valley, and the bird came down to him from the cloudless sky, suddenly appearing and then landing calmly on his shoulder.

When the hucklebird sat on his shoulder, the man knew that something was going to happen. At first, he didn’t turn his head to talk directly to it, but instead continued to wander forward through the grasses of the field. He tried to behave as if the bird was not there. It remained on his shoulder, and the man took this as a sign, and continued to walk with it and be cautious and aware of his surroundings.

Walking the trail, the man observed lots of little things. When he looked down, he noticed small wildflowers in tightly knit patches across the meadow that brought splotches of color to the grasses around him. They were countless, clumped in random spots along the ground. Some blue and pink, others purple and red. When he looked closer, he could see that the clumps opened up and inside there were dozens of tiny little flowers, each with their tiny petals; and deeper even was a feather dusting of pollen which fell between the thin petals, and each shake from a breath of the wind blew little bits of glitter up in the air. And when he looked even deeper than that, he could see the tiniest rivers of marching little bugs crawling across each of the little puff balls. And then even deeper, until they grew in size and zoomed around his head like mayflies shedding waterfalls of colorful sand. The deeper he looked, the more intricate and complex it became.

When he entered the forest the grasses became the trees, growing into the sky with tall smooth broad green and white trunks. Some were green, some were gray and some were white. It was not cold, and the air felt rich and full. He gradually began to perceive something. At first it was nothing, ephemeral as a thought or perhaps even like a hucklebird. But then, out of nowhere, a small, round flower garden unfolded. A mist began to form at its partitioned edges, and then it began to effloresce and swell as if it might burst. After a moment, like a photo coming into focus, it was complete. A quiet space, a secret place in the trees as delicate and beautiful as he had ever seen.

He walked closer, toward the garden. The paths have all merged together, and the trees have muddled everything so he is standing in the middle of all of this. He is looking straight ahead in the center of everything. He turns his head to look around but as he does, the garden begins to change shape again. This time he sees his own face, then his own body; his hands. The garden is a lake and he is looking down onto his own reflection in the trees. And then he knows that this reflection is neither male nor female, but simply the part of the drop of water that will return to the clouds, the one whose form will be lost and then it will be dissolved into the air and then it will return to the clouds to fall again. Of course the man can die, but inside him is something that can never die. It is that part which is the universe, and everything external to the man and also internal to the man, is contained within it.

The man looked around from where he was standing. From his vantage point in a little dip in the green valleys, he saw dangling ripe and smelly fruits from the tree branches, and they rocked and shimmied when the wind blew. Through everything - though all the little cracks between twigs, grasses, pinecones, tufts of mosses - emptied translucent ribbons of light that overflowed and spilled out through the leaves. When they touched the fruit, they also turned color, which danced between the faces of the garden like confetti. Everything he saw was reflecting upon everything else in the forest, which gave itself back a slight variation of color depending on where he stood. When the man began to wonder why the bird had brought him here, it began to speak.

The bird recounted a magic book that told a different story to everyone who opened it. On the outside, it looked like every other book. But when it was opened, it became vast and immense, rewriting itself over and over again. Whenever someone looked, it became new again. Everyone who read the book understood a slightly different tale, for they could only see the one that would speak closest to their heart. And then the man thought to himself: was it the story that was changing for everyone, or was it the interpretation of it? Was it always the same book? How could such finite space hold such infinite possibility?

When the man looked up suddenly, he saw that the hucklebird was gone. He did not notice it leaving. This was how he understood that he and the hucklebird were the same thing, and that the entire universe is contained at every level within itself. The miracle that had brought him here, in the middle of a dream and laced by the shadows of the fields and the forest, could only be the entirety of the universe itself, working its wonders.

For many days, the man slept and dreamed of this. Every night the hucklebird arrived and led the man by his shoulder through the grassy path and over the forest’s edge, to his garden. The man spent all night there, and left only when it was time to rise. It was an indescribable happiness. He would awaken every night, moving from his life into his dreams, through which he fed himself his own memories like food. It was like a feeding tube looped back into himself. And through it flew all the songs and sweat and bicycles and butterflies and summer nights that they both had experienced out there in the past. But the tube was as long as forever, and it was stuffed full of his whole life.