Power Outages Are for the Birds—Literally!
As I write this there is a power outage, a fairly significant one that will last for over four hours, according to Rocky Mountain Power:
We humans don’t like an interruption in our routine. When the power goes out we scramble for our candles and our flashlights, worry about the milk spoiling in the refrigerator, and, most importantly of all in the 21st century, wonder how we’ll access the internet when our cell phones no longer have power to be used as hotspots!
Also as I write this, life goes on for the birds at the bird feeder outside our window without interruption. The birds are wonderfully oblivious to our petty human concerns, putting us to shame when it comes to self-sufficiency. In fact, the silence of the power outage make the chattiness of our house finch friends all the more enjoyable.
The silence of a power outage reveals the rhythms of the neighborhood in ways that are normally concealed by the various electronic noises of the apartment, from our house fans to our streaming music. Every Monday, for example, and also as I write this, our apartment’s landscaping company mows the lawn outside our apartment. Why do we humans care so much about mowed grass anyway? The lawnmower pierces the silence, ruins the calmness of the neighborhood, and, more importantly, scares my finch friends away from our bird feeder unnecessarily for a time. I, for one, could do without mowed grass, and I’m sure my finch friends would agree.
How marvelous it would be if we humans were as independent, self-sufficient, and harmonious with nature as our feathered friends, indifferent to mowed lawns and power outages alike. The birds are putting us humans to shame this morning, revealing our petty human cares as just that: petty. Even if all the food spoils and I have to go foraging, itself a rather charming thought, it’s unlikely we would starve. I can fish, hunt, and gather. Heck, I can even beg if I had to swallow my pride and do so to get some food on the table. I’d even eat the bird seed if I had to, and would probably be thankful for the protein-rich meal our feathered guests enjoy so heartily every day.
In truth, we need so much less to make our way in the world that we humans tend to give ourselves credit for. We slave away for corporations and schools and governments, cram our heads with so much minutiae irrelevant to our basic needs, both biological and psychological, and call ourselves “civilized,” all while the chickadees and finches outside our window run circles of self-sufficiency around us as we cower in the darkness waiting for the power to come back on instead of heading out into the sun to make our way in the world as naturally as all the other creatures of the Earth.
From this point of view we have arguably devolved as much as we have evolved, losing our oneness with the natural world around us for the sake of modern conveniences that consume our freedom as much as liberate us as they were intended, a point which Henry David Thoreau also made in his book Walden; Or Life in the Woods about a great many human endeavors, from the pyramids of Egypt to the railroads of 19th-century America:
Sitting here on my laptop, watching its battery level sink toward zero as I scramble to write this post before it dies completely, makes me think of all the unnecessary distractions from the important things in life with which we humans preoccupy ourselves.
We build our technological Tower of Babel, our cell towers and high rises, complete with air conditioning and internet access, to escape the brute-force facts of our biological existence, all while forgetting the simple joys those basic facts of our existence can bring us, if we are silent and still enough to be attuned to the immediacy of the world around us without all the distractions of modern life.
But we humans can fend for ourselves just as easily as the birds when we need to, and we can think more clearly using our uniquely human mental faculties in the silence of a power outage without all the electronic noise robbing us of our brain’s metaphorical processing power.
Moments from now I will shut off this laptop to preserve the last remnants of battery power for a few hours, and I will become better acquainted with my finch friends outside, happily munching away on their sunflower seeds while I catch myself from fretting over spoiled milk and focus on being one with the transcendence of the day instead of being consumed by petty human cares over which I have no control.
Power outages are literally for the birds!
For Further Reading:
Walden; Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
