Sylvia's Journal

I wrote on my Skype profile: free as a bird at Lobster Cove. But this week I have been all but free as a bird – and only took my meals overlooking Lobster Cove. For the rest I was chugging away at tasks that other organizations have specialists for: drawing up contracts, writing proposals, getting a business certificate, opening a bank account, managing my retirement funds, organizing receipts and invoicing, checking the new business cards, populating my website, learning new software, organizing my calendar for next week, cleaning my inbox, and organizing my thoughts about work done in Chapel Hill last week. This is the new reality of Sylvia Inc.

Someone said, maybe you should go back to work – but I couldn’t, even if I was offered a position. I am now in a universe that is so much bigger and grander than the universe of my last 32 years. If I was a medium sized fish in a small pond, I am now swimming in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans – a little minnow, seeing all the stuff that is going on, the work that is needed… the possibilities are endless.

Now, taking my lunch at my favorite spot overlooking the water, three little barn swallows are showing me what it really means to be free as a bird. It is as if they have come to remind me, or maybe teach me something about freedom. 

I watch them as they perform their acrobatics – high up, swooping down, circling back, but always doing this right in front of me. Of all the space they could use they remain right in front of me. They are joyful little creatures. If they do this because their dinner is also doing acrobatics, these insects must be tiny as there are none to be seen from my vantage point, and it is hot, the middle of the day, when most of the insects are quiet. So, joyfulness it is.

They remind me of the aerobatics I have seen pilots do in their single propeller planes: going straight up until they stall and then spiraling back down to earth. At one time I had some desire to learn how to do that but the crash put an end to those aspirations.

And then, just as suddenly as they appeared they are gone. It is as if they know the lesson has been received and written down. Free as a bird requires some luck (which I have and have had), some intention, and discipline and an occasional reminder from the gurus, human or animal.

Incidentally, and probably not coincidentally with all these thoughts about flying, today it is exactly 11 yeas ago that we fell out of the sky, and lived to tell the story. Maybe that is what the barn swallows were celebrating – life itself!