"He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around--
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought--
He stirred his Velvet Head" Emily Dickenson

It is strange how strange the bird is--the common bird. God has given them wings to fly. They see--yet they are blind--They fly.
They see--yet they are blind. Their ancestry is the deepest and the darkest--the fearsome dragon, the dinosaur.
They sing--words pure, ennobling to the human soul, or perhaps a fearsome cry--sometimes even the annoying squawk.
They walk; yet they do not; more often they hop.
They have no hair, but feathers; strange that feathers have quills. They are so far from mammalian hair. Yet in the physical care of feathers there is a parallel to human hair; and in beauty and pride the parallel is there.
Their excrement resembles the guano of a bat--that wondrous flying mammal with hair, though the bat lays no egg. And the egg--that wondrous thing we devour--is hilarious, perhaps--or tragic.

There is so much that is fearsome in a bird, yet it is God's own creature.Perhaps we can do better.

'Dread'�
I lived on Dread--
To those who know
The stimulus there is
In Danger--Other impetus
To Nuns--and Vitalless--

As 'twere a Spur--upon the Soul--
A Fear will urge it where
To go without the Spectre's aid
Were challenging Despair. E Dickinson
Dread is a thing like a bird, always there yet always superfluous though necessary to Life itself. And yet, what does all this have to do with love or money or any human affair?
'Failure'�
Finite--to fail, but infinite to Venture--
For the one ship that struts the shore
Many's the gallant--overwhelmed Creature
Nodding to Navies nevermore'� E Dickenson

Perhaps that is why the money failed and the Life disintegrated. Romance became a deep shadowy memory. There was no money--no nest--only the wings that carried him away.
Tomorrow, I am leaving for Europe--London--Paris--Salzburg. Today, I am packing--the dismal new year of the 1990's is here. It is sad--especially when the house in the country is so beautiful--the Manor I call it--yet it is only a farmhouse with a garden.
Still there is hope--I tell myself, things will be better ; life will go on sailing, sinking, flying--like the summer, like the birds.
We did not travel into the city of London for several days. Our reservations were made for a small country inn in a little byway of a town. How strange and foreign it all felt.

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