He Who Talks With Small Birds

Most of my week has been spent at the YMCA, lifting weights, attending my “Healthy Back” class, practicing Tai Chi, walking daily with Skye, and twice-daily, fifteen-plus-minute breathing exercises.

I’m still thinking about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though I’ve hit a slight snag with the author’s introduction to 2006 edition where he argues that “In the intended ending it is not the narrator who triumphs over a villainous Phaedrus. It is an honorable Phaedrus who triumphs over the narrator who has been maligning him all the time.” and, later “In Phaedrus’s view the narrator is a sellout, a coward, who has abandoned truth for popularity and social acceptance.”

Personally, I’d always seen the end as the point in which the narrator becomes “whole,” becomes one with himself. But I’m not ready to entirely dismiss the narrator or embrace Phaedrus, who seems obsessed with ideas, obsessed to the point that he alienates everyone around him.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot more thinking to do about it before I’m ready to write any more about it.

Meanwhile, the constant rain keeps me inside, limiting my birding to the front yard and the resident hummingbirds who seem to be more and more comfortable with my presence.

In fact, after this picture,

Singing Hummingbird

I’m thinking of renaming myself, He Who Talks With Small Birds.

5 thoughts on “He Who Talks With Small Birds”

  1. You were right the first time, am. I changed the title from “to” to “with” about the time you were making your comment.

    Somehow i prefer to think of myself conversing with the birds rather than talking to them, which might make the neighbors more nervous than they already are.

  2. Zen and the Art is a book that has always confounded me. Somehow I think that book can never be completely understood by its author or by us, and that is how it should be.

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