A sparrow is about the commonest of birds. A few inches long, and drab brown, they are easy to dismiss as uninteresting. Today I was presented with a different perspective.
Sitting outside for lunch in downtown Silver Spring, I was gazing down the sidewalk when a flash of movement caught my attention. It was a sparrow, perhaps 15 or 20 feet away, and flying straight at me, wings set, arcing through the air like a little fighter jet. As it dropped slightly, a couple of wing beats propelled it into another glide.
Just about the time I would have flinched, not wanting to get a sparrow beak through my forehead, she flared slightly to the side, and lit on the seat of the chair next me, folding her wings before hopping around to see if we had spilled anything good to eat.
Later, I thought about the amplifying effect of focused awareness. While my eyes don’t have a zoom lens, my mind does. In the split second that my mind focused on the oncoming sparrow, I was distinctly aware of its pointed beak, dark eyes, cylindrical body and glide-set wings, continually growing larger as it approached, a single point of attention blocking out all the other activity along the street.
Then she landed, and was just a small brown bird on a chair.
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