Scratch that! I just remembered that besides butterflies, I don’t like insects! Bzzz!!!

Dang it! I definitely don’t like lizards too! Guess I can’t quite call myself an animal lover then. Whatev’s!

I often feel a burst of energy each time that I have the privilege of interacting with other creatures/creations. I talk to them. We have great conversations, by the way.

This morning, I got up pretty early to attend to my chores because I had a long list of activities for the day and needed to get my chores over with. Many window panes in my house are meeting grounds for a variety of birds. It was therefore not unusual to have this one captivating bird perch at my kitchen window. Remember that I mentioned it was not unusual for birds to visit. The time of day did not matter–they visited anytime they wanted to.

This bird that perched at my kitchen window is not the most beautiful bird that I have seen, but it was a species that I had never seen in my locality before. At first, it just stood still, staring at me, probably trying to decide if it should stay or fly away. Well, it stayed. In a few minutes, it got chatty. Like really chatty. For a while, I thought it was probably communicating with its buddies who were presumably nearby, but I soon realized ‘he’ was talking to me. I smiled and began talking to it too.

I remembered how the Bible encourages us to be careful about nothing and to learn from the birds, who have no thought of what they would eat or wear. Aren’t we more adorned than they are?!

It was a rather chilly morning, so I asked this bird how it coped with the fluctuations in atmospheric temperature. I told it I found it beautiful and wondered why I hadn’t seen it or its kind before. He seemed to communicate just fine because it would go quiet each time I spoke, and then babble as soon as I paused. This went on for about eight minutes (it seemed longer), which was rare, seeing that most birds would have flown away the moment they sense a human.

It occurred to me to capture this moment, even if it’s a few seconds of our engagement. My phone was close by – I was playing music on YouTube studio. I reached for it, and turned the music off to switch on the camera. As soon as I made a turn to capture it, it flew away.

No warning.

No goodbye.

That hurt a bit. Who am I kidding?! It hurt a lot.

Our conversation felt meaningful while it lasted. I mean, it did not seem like it was in a hurry to leave, so I must have spooked it when I reached for my phone and switched off the music. Was it that? The fact that I switched off the music, I mean. Did it get too silent and unsettling? Or could it be that it got upset at the fact that I left it unattended for a few seconds? That would be awkward, wouldn’t it, seeing that we just ‘met’? Anyway, I resumed playing music and waited a few minutes, hoping that it would return, but it didn’t.

That’s kind of how life is with humans, isn’t it?

One minute you are connected to this person and the next, she’s out of your life. One day, you think you’ve met the one. You are excited as should be. You turn around for what seems like a few seconds to savour what you’ve got, to share your relationship with the world, and then it’s gone. You barely have any tangible keepsake of that memory; of those times. It’s over, almost as soon as it began.

Every experience leaves you with something. What we gather from our experiences wholly depends on us. How we translate our story is our choice. We alone determine the most important aspects of our stories and the depth of any experience. You may want to review your experiences and attribute empowering meanings to them because that right there is what forms our realities.

So once I saw a little chatty bird and away it flew!