This article spoke to me, as it is about hummingbirds. My Great Gramma Ipsen used to tame hummingbirds and loved them, too. (I tame moths or nachtvlinders (night butterflies), as they are called in Dutch). :)
Not long ago, I had a similar story as below, after the death of my cousin, Kevin Jr., but it was with a wasp instead of a hummingbird.
Enjoy.... Hugs and love to you all...
The Joy of Dying
by Maya Christobel
Why is it that when you are faced with death, life suddenly takes on dimension and clarity revealing a kind of preciousness that only moments before did not seem to exist in your awareness? A floodlight shines brightly on life the moment that the finality of death is in ones experience. I am so touched, my heart opened in the presence of death yet, we are a culture so afraid of physically dying and bring mostly grief and sorrow to the experience, especially if someone we love dearly suddenly leaves us.
The ending of a life in natural ways is what we expect. Long years piled upon one another until you loose track of the decades, the accomplishments, the children, the loves won and lost, the fortunes found or never granted until one day you take to your bed and slowly leave your body or keel over in the act of tying your shoe. This seems like the way death is supposed to be. But when the child with wide eyes dies of cancer or the athlete, once so fit, suddenly dies of a heart attack at thirty, then you start to wonder about death. And if you wonder about death you also question what living is. Freak accidents, malicious killings, the human devastation of war, disease that takes those not ready or those having had too little of life, just start to become impossible to fully understand. Life and death seem so…random. A brilliant surgeon dies at the peak of her career when a drug dealer makes millions off of suffering and lives to a ripe old age. These are the true mysteries in my mind.
But, today I am faced with an even greater confusion and sorrow. What about those who die having never fully lived or loved? A human being who becomes stranded inside themselves, loitering around the edges of life, never knowing how to find their way, never being understood or loved enough to bloom, dying alone, in a hospital with strangers or found dead in their unheated apartment or on a park bench, exposed to the elements or overdosed on drugs. It is this enigma I cannot seem to understood.
Who are we on this planet? Why are we even here? Billions of people either lost, afraid, angry, greedy, hostile, numb, hateful, warring, killing, hopeless and alone. Where are the joyful and happy free people on our planet? The innocent young before they are met with the harshness of life? The mentally challenged who seem to see realms that bring joy to them all the time, the enlightened ones who try to teach us, the very few who have found a way to simply do what they love and have the means to support life in that way? I don’t know. But they are not near enough to me, not in my family or in the families of those I know. There just seems to be too much suffering that obscures all the true happiness that is there simultaneously. Or is it a matter of where I focus my attention? Or is it a matter of the Universe stepping in and getting my attention?
In the midst of this confusion a tiny Hummingbird flies into our kitchen window only to land in front of my large dog who picks it up in her mouth. I rescue the baby Hummingbird who looks dead as it lays limp like a lima bean in my hand. Why did it fly into the window, this navigator of the sky, the smallest bird on the planet who beats its wings faster than any bird alive? I held it thinking it was dead and yet its breast was moving. Standing in the sun and cupping it in my hands I sent energy from my heart to a heart no larger than a grain of rice. I began to feel an electricity and vibration coming from the tiny being. An hour past and the Hummingbird sat in the palm of my hand, stunned, but alive. A broken leg and possible damaged wing. I ran to the internet to find out how one rehabilitates a baby Hummingbird. Feed it…every thirty minutes and don’t stop. So, I did and by the time the day ended she was eating like a champ and much stronger, always eager when I came with food or extended my hand to her.
The next day we started a ritual of eating from a dropper and then she would perch on the tip of my index finger on her one useful leg and start to flap her wings, more like a sea gull than a Hummingbird. She would become easily exhausted and then back to a nest I had made until the next feeding. My life suspended itself and I was on Hummingbird time. Each session we had she got stronger, ate more and now I was smashing fruit flies and putting it in her mouth for protein. My joy increased as she got stronger. I was all smiles when I was with her. Our times of exercising her wings grew longer and the wings beat faster and faster. Now I could simply go to the nest and she would gratefully jump on my finger and we would stand again in the sunlight reflecting off the opalescent green feathers and she would begin to buzz. Wings now a blur. Each day longer and stronger until she finally started to jump off my finger and glide to the grass below. I would pick her up and do it again and again. It seems as if she would make it through this trauma and finally be strong enough to fly away.
Everyone around me marveled at her, taking turns feeding and arguing over who would get to exercise her. She brought out such joy and wonder, rekindling a kind of child likeness in us all. The entire time I felt as though she was here for a reason since I do believe that animals can sacrifice themselves and their lives for us in a myriad of ways for what might seem like no apparent reason yet we are touched deeply by their presence. If we are paying attention these creatures can teach us much.
This tiny little life force smashed into my window of vision on a Wednesday. That same day my husband Matthew received a phone call that his younger brother was inexplicably admitted to a Long Island hospital with what seemed like sudden pneumonia. The Sunday before Les had gone to visit his mother in a rest home and brought her a tuna fish sandwich. Then he took a walk with a cherished friend. One day later he was sick and then in critical condition. As each day passed there was a mix of delight that the Hummingbird was here with us and getting stronger, trusting our huge people bodies not to crush or kill it in some way. Each same day there was sorrow that such a young man was so gravely ill. Two days later we got a call that Les was brain dead. How had this happened so fast?
In just three days Les had gone from pneumonia to life support and sudden brain death. In three days a hummingbird went from death to life. The hummingbird weighed as much as a scrap of paper. Les weighed nearly four hundred pounds. I made some loose and mysterious connection between the two stark polarities, recognizing the similarity was a life force of innocence that at the heart of it all was about joy. Each locked in a body that was now protesting and broken.
Saturday morning I was feeding the baby bird and exercising it, when it started to fly better and longer, eating more each time I came to it’s nest. It was now aware of other Hummingbirds buzzing around the feeder near by and its vibration would increase sending electricity into my hand and up my arm. Each time together I would allow that joy to fill my heart and send it back to the bird in some symbiotic dance. We all marveled. We all became amazed for a brief moment in our lives, more loving and open hearted.
It was noon on that same day and I arrived home from the store and before I unpacked the groceries, went out to exercise the bird and feed it yet another bunch of select fruit flies I had grown on a piece of banana. Even my ninety year old mother had brought me a bug on a napkin she had collected for our new guest. The hummingbird was stronger than ever and I thought to myself, “She will fly away soon, even with her broken leg.” We stood in the sun longer than usual. She ate more, everything in sight. I walked back under the porch to place her in my makeshift nest, a purple plastic bathroom caddy filled with nesting material and little twigs for her to learn to perch herself on with one leg. As I gently set the bird on the branch it suddenly dropped dead, falling off the perch. She was gone. I could not move. What had happened? Then at that very instant the sliding door to the porch opened and my husband stepped out. I looked up and his tear filled eyes met mine. “My brother just died”, he said. I had the hummingbird in the palm of my hand and in that moment as I looked at Matthew we were both speechless.
As suddenly and mysteriously as Les had died, so had the hummingbird, within moments of one another. My mother came out on the porch and stared into my hand. How had this happened? Even she saw the synchronisity. We all just sat there like statues. Crying and strangely filled with delight. Something of magic had broken its way into our moment of death. We had experienced such profound joy and wonder with our little creature and such sorrow and remorse about the tragedy of Les dying so young and without explanation. Somehow I knew that these dyings were tied together by tiny unseen threads. One and the same.
There was no difference in their moments of death… the joy and sorrow came from exactly the same place. Our hearts were opened by both. Suddenly, I realized in no uncertain terms that now my heart felt sadness about the hummingbird who had brought more joy with it than I can remember and I felt such profound happiness that Les was finally released from his prison of a body and flying free. I was filled with awe and wonder in the face of such a paradox and bring this experience into why I am here with my mother. I am leaving behind so many “notions” of what death is and what it might be with my mother and have become open to simply not knowing a thing about death, but filled with respect and wonder for our spiritual web.
Dying has become dimensional for me. Not some linear time line but fully dimensional, encompassing everything that birth begins: love, wonder, appreciation, joy and magic. “We are all one” is the mantra for the times we live in and the transformation our species is moving toward. If a one ounce bird and a four hundred pound man are one in the same then if we extend this truth to the plants and animals, to Gaia herself, then our very one dimensional lives, that seem all too linear in our minds, becomes an amazing web of inter-relationships and the polarities reveal themselves to be man made constructions of our minds. For the heart beats with a vibrational frequency and force in everything and everyone around us. If we slow down enough and open our minds and hearts wider than ever, then the matrix of life will reveal itself to simply be one large organism, one immense consciousness. This clarity brings me utter happiness as did the tiny hummingbird and the creative and loving spirit in Les.
On the day Les and the Hummingbird died, on Long Island Camille, Les’s close friend who had just taken her last walk with him that week, found a bird and helped it fly away. At that same moment Matthew’s sister Ellie in up state New York, met a Hummingbird face to face that greeted her with familiarity, and while it hovered near her face for a long while, I was tucking our tiny Hummingbird into a little matchbox. Everyone shared their stories as if they were the only ones to have visitations until it became apparent we were all part of some miraculous web with Les at the center. A few days later the phone rang for Matthew and it was Camille. In sharing their love for Les Camille said, “Les never stopped talking about how much he loved Hummingbirds, ever since he visited you on your farm in Maine. He simply loved them.” None of us even knew that about him.
The animal world has been conduits, messengers pressing their way into our human lives. A red Cardinal flew into the same window the same day as the Hummingbird left. It broke its neck instantly. That same morning we came out on the porch and found a dead skunk right here in the heart of suburbia and by that evening a tiny lost dog came and stood by our sliding glass door and would not take no for an answer. I have no answers for this seeming phenomenon. I don’t need them. The morning after the deaths it was apparent my two cats had worked in the night to reach behind my mother’s china cabinet where a large pad of paper had been slipped to protect drawing and sketches. Matthew had no memory of years before sliding in a huge photograph of his brother in with the drawings. When we got up the day after Les died, we walked past the dining room and there under the table was the huge portrait of Les, face up. How had the cats managed to pull it out and bring it to the middle of the room? The animal presence in the lives of those who circled around Les has been amazing.
The little Hummingbird came and left but changed my perception of death forever. Les dying young could have left me feeling tragic and waving my fist at god. Just days ago I would have wept in burying the animals and I did not, I simply was in awe and stayed present with the moment. Les came and went in this life leaving behind the opportunity for all of us to embrace our own lives more fully and hold the mystery around us with greater awareness and joy. Death has not entered my life like a specter emerging from the shadows but has come into my life bearing gifts. What could be more revolutionary? What could be more miraculous?
http://www.theheartspaceblog.com
Not long ago, I had a similar story as below, after the death of my cousin, Kevin Jr., but it was with a wasp instead of a hummingbird.
Enjoy.... Hugs and love to you all...
The Joy of Dying
by Maya Christobel
Why is it that when you are faced with death, life suddenly takes on dimension and clarity revealing a kind of preciousness that only moments before did not seem to exist in your awareness? A floodlight shines brightly on life the moment that the finality of death is in ones experience. I am so touched, my heart opened in the presence of death yet, we are a culture so afraid of physically dying and bring mostly grief and sorrow to the experience, especially if someone we love dearly suddenly leaves us.
The ending of a life in natural ways is what we expect. Long years piled upon one another until you loose track of the decades, the accomplishments, the children, the loves won and lost, the fortunes found or never granted until one day you take to your bed and slowly leave your body or keel over in the act of tying your shoe. This seems like the way death is supposed to be. But when the child with wide eyes dies of cancer or the athlete, once so fit, suddenly dies of a heart attack at thirty, then you start to wonder about death. And if you wonder about death you also question what living is. Freak accidents, malicious killings, the human devastation of war, disease that takes those not ready or those having had too little of life, just start to become impossible to fully understand. Life and death seem so…random. A brilliant surgeon dies at the peak of her career when a drug dealer makes millions off of suffering and lives to a ripe old age. These are the true mysteries in my mind.
But, today I am faced with an even greater confusion and sorrow. What about those who die having never fully lived or loved? A human being who becomes stranded inside themselves, loitering around the edges of life, never knowing how to find their way, never being understood or loved enough to bloom, dying alone, in a hospital with strangers or found dead in their unheated apartment or on a park bench, exposed to the elements or overdosed on drugs. It is this enigma I cannot seem to understood.
Who are we on this planet? Why are we even here? Billions of people either lost, afraid, angry, greedy, hostile, numb, hateful, warring, killing, hopeless and alone. Where are the joyful and happy free people on our planet? The innocent young before they are met with the harshness of life? The mentally challenged who seem to see realms that bring joy to them all the time, the enlightened ones who try to teach us, the very few who have found a way to simply do what they love and have the means to support life in that way? I don’t know. But they are not near enough to me, not in my family or in the families of those I know. There just seems to be too much suffering that obscures all the true happiness that is there simultaneously. Or is it a matter of where I focus my attention? Or is it a matter of the Universe stepping in and getting my attention?
In the midst of this confusion a tiny Hummingbird flies into our kitchen window only to land in front of my large dog who picks it up in her mouth. I rescue the baby Hummingbird who looks dead as it lays limp like a lima bean in my hand. Why did it fly into the window, this navigator of the sky, the smallest bird on the planet who beats its wings faster than any bird alive? I held it thinking it was dead and yet its breast was moving. Standing in the sun and cupping it in my hands I sent energy from my heart to a heart no larger than a grain of rice. I began to feel an electricity and vibration coming from the tiny being. An hour past and the Hummingbird sat in the palm of my hand, stunned, but alive. A broken leg and possible damaged wing. I ran to the internet to find out how one rehabilitates a baby Hummingbird. Feed it…every thirty minutes and don’t stop. So, I did and by the time the day ended she was eating like a champ and much stronger, always eager when I came with food or extended my hand to her.
The next day we started a ritual of eating from a dropper and then she would perch on the tip of my index finger on her one useful leg and start to flap her wings, more like a sea gull than a Hummingbird. She would become easily exhausted and then back to a nest I had made until the next feeding. My life suspended itself and I was on Hummingbird time. Each session we had she got stronger, ate more and now I was smashing fruit flies and putting it in her mouth for protein. My joy increased as she got stronger. I was all smiles when I was with her. Our times of exercising her wings grew longer and the wings beat faster and faster. Now I could simply go to the nest and she would gratefully jump on my finger and we would stand again in the sunlight reflecting off the opalescent green feathers and she would begin to buzz. Wings now a blur. Each day longer and stronger until she finally started to jump off my finger and glide to the grass below. I would pick her up and do it again and again. It seems as if she would make it through this trauma and finally be strong enough to fly away.
Everyone around me marveled at her, taking turns feeding and arguing over who would get to exercise her. She brought out such joy and wonder, rekindling a kind of child likeness in us all. The entire time I felt as though she was here for a reason since I do believe that animals can sacrifice themselves and their lives for us in a myriad of ways for what might seem like no apparent reason yet we are touched deeply by their presence. If we are paying attention these creatures can teach us much.
This tiny little life force smashed into my window of vision on a Wednesday. That same day my husband Matthew received a phone call that his younger brother was inexplicably admitted to a Long Island hospital with what seemed like sudden pneumonia. The Sunday before Les had gone to visit his mother in a rest home and brought her a tuna fish sandwich. Then he took a walk with a cherished friend. One day later he was sick and then in critical condition. As each day passed there was a mix of delight that the Hummingbird was here with us and getting stronger, trusting our huge people bodies not to crush or kill it in some way. Each same day there was sorrow that such a young man was so gravely ill. Two days later we got a call that Les was brain dead. How had this happened so fast?
In just three days Les had gone from pneumonia to life support and sudden brain death. In three days a hummingbird went from death to life. The hummingbird weighed as much as a scrap of paper. Les weighed nearly four hundred pounds. I made some loose and mysterious connection between the two stark polarities, recognizing the similarity was a life force of innocence that at the heart of it all was about joy. Each locked in a body that was now protesting and broken.
Saturday morning I was feeding the baby bird and exercising it, when it started to fly better and longer, eating more each time I came to it’s nest. It was now aware of other Hummingbirds buzzing around the feeder near by and its vibration would increase sending electricity into my hand and up my arm. Each time together I would allow that joy to fill my heart and send it back to the bird in some symbiotic dance. We all marveled. We all became amazed for a brief moment in our lives, more loving and open hearted.
It was noon on that same day and I arrived home from the store and before I unpacked the groceries, went out to exercise the bird and feed it yet another bunch of select fruit flies I had grown on a piece of banana. Even my ninety year old mother had brought me a bug on a napkin she had collected for our new guest. The hummingbird was stronger than ever and I thought to myself, “She will fly away soon, even with her broken leg.” We stood in the sun longer than usual. She ate more, everything in sight. I walked back under the porch to place her in my makeshift nest, a purple plastic bathroom caddy filled with nesting material and little twigs for her to learn to perch herself on with one leg. As I gently set the bird on the branch it suddenly dropped dead, falling off the perch. She was gone. I could not move. What had happened? Then at that very instant the sliding door to the porch opened and my husband stepped out. I looked up and his tear filled eyes met mine. “My brother just died”, he said. I had the hummingbird in the palm of my hand and in that moment as I looked at Matthew we were both speechless.
As suddenly and mysteriously as Les had died, so had the hummingbird, within moments of one another. My mother came out on the porch and stared into my hand. How had this happened? Even she saw the synchronisity. We all just sat there like statues. Crying and strangely filled with delight. Something of magic had broken its way into our moment of death. We had experienced such profound joy and wonder with our little creature and such sorrow and remorse about the tragedy of Les dying so young and without explanation. Somehow I knew that these dyings were tied together by tiny unseen threads. One and the same.
There was no difference in their moments of death… the joy and sorrow came from exactly the same place. Our hearts were opened by both. Suddenly, I realized in no uncertain terms that now my heart felt sadness about the hummingbird who had brought more joy with it than I can remember and I felt such profound happiness that Les was finally released from his prison of a body and flying free. I was filled with awe and wonder in the face of such a paradox and bring this experience into why I am here with my mother. I am leaving behind so many “notions” of what death is and what it might be with my mother and have become open to simply not knowing a thing about death, but filled with respect and wonder for our spiritual web.
Dying has become dimensional for me. Not some linear time line but fully dimensional, encompassing everything that birth begins: love, wonder, appreciation, joy and magic. “We are all one” is the mantra for the times we live in and the transformation our species is moving toward. If a one ounce bird and a four hundred pound man are one in the same then if we extend this truth to the plants and animals, to Gaia herself, then our very one dimensional lives, that seem all too linear in our minds, becomes an amazing web of inter-relationships and the polarities reveal themselves to be man made constructions of our minds. For the heart beats with a vibrational frequency and force in everything and everyone around us. If we slow down enough and open our minds and hearts wider than ever, then the matrix of life will reveal itself to simply be one large organism, one immense consciousness. This clarity brings me utter happiness as did the tiny hummingbird and the creative and loving spirit in Les.
On the day Les and the Hummingbird died, on Long Island Camille, Les’s close friend who had just taken her last walk with him that week, found a bird and helped it fly away. At that same moment Matthew’s sister Ellie in up state New York, met a Hummingbird face to face that greeted her with familiarity, and while it hovered near her face for a long while, I was tucking our tiny Hummingbird into a little matchbox. Everyone shared their stories as if they were the only ones to have visitations until it became apparent we were all part of some miraculous web with Les at the center. A few days later the phone rang for Matthew and it was Camille. In sharing their love for Les Camille said, “Les never stopped talking about how much he loved Hummingbirds, ever since he visited you on your farm in Maine. He simply loved them.” None of us even knew that about him.
The animal world has been conduits, messengers pressing their way into our human lives. A red Cardinal flew into the same window the same day as the Hummingbird left. It broke its neck instantly. That same morning we came out on the porch and found a dead skunk right here in the heart of suburbia and by that evening a tiny lost dog came and stood by our sliding glass door and would not take no for an answer. I have no answers for this seeming phenomenon. I don’t need them. The morning after the deaths it was apparent my two cats had worked in the night to reach behind my mother’s china cabinet where a large pad of paper had been slipped to protect drawing and sketches. Matthew had no memory of years before sliding in a huge photograph of his brother in with the drawings. When we got up the day after Les died, we walked past the dining room and there under the table was the huge portrait of Les, face up. How had the cats managed to pull it out and bring it to the middle of the room? The animal presence in the lives of those who circled around Les has been amazing.
The little Hummingbird came and left but changed my perception of death forever. Les dying young could have left me feeling tragic and waving my fist at god. Just days ago I would have wept in burying the animals and I did not, I simply was in awe and stayed present with the moment. Les came and went in this life leaving behind the opportunity for all of us to embrace our own lives more fully and hold the mystery around us with greater awareness and joy. Death has not entered my life like a specter emerging from the shadows but has come into my life bearing gifts. What could be more revolutionary? What could be more miraculous?
http://www.theheartspaceblog.com
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Maya Christobel www.theheartspaceblog.com