Sightings:Extaordinary Encounters With Ordinary Birds

October 11th, 2011. Published under fave books, good buys. No Comments.

Sightings by Sam Keen is a book I found in our local library’s booksale. It’s published by Chronicle Books (a really cool publisher in my opinion) and filled with illustrations by Mary Woodin. I’ve been reading it for several nights now, the last thing I do before i turn off  my bedside lamp. It features the birds that the author has had the chance to observe in the wild. Keen has been an avid bird watcher since he was a child. In this work, he talks about his observations of different birds and how each one has lead him to a certain realization in his life. What I read in the introduction struck me so profoundly that I scrambled out of bed, rifled through my desk for a piece of paper, and scribbled away furiously. They were words I didn’t wish to forget.  They compelled me to keep on reading.

Here is what got me all excited at half past 12 AM last Wednesday: Our most intimate revelations of the sacred come in odd ways that seem meaningless or trivial to an outsider. In these pivotal moments when we are struck dumb by the simple existence of a flowering tree, we detect faint echoes of an unknowable G____. A brief opening appears in the cloud of  ultimate ignorance under which we dwell. Yet the experience is so private, so idiosyncratic, that we don’t know how to talk about it. We stutter in an effort to put into words something that is ineffable.”

Another favorite line is “….we glimpsed the infinite in some finite disguise”. What he means is that sometimes, out of the blue, we see God, who is boundless and limitless, in the tiniest details of his creation. In a very fleeting moment He reveals something to us, communes with us and moves us in a way that others can’t understand. Now finally I get what William Blake meant in this poem that used to irritate me so much:

“To see a world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.”

I have not finished this, but, for several more nights, it will definitely be on top of  the reading pile on my nightstand. I hope to find more gems in it.