danielle isbell / essay

In the Corners of My Eyes, There Were Always Birds

In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing eleven birds, one fruit bat, eight freshwater mussels, one plant, and two fish from the endangered list, into extinction. 

One of which, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, or the “Lord God Bird,” is the subject of much debate – its unseen flight and soaring shadow much like God, whom the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have not declared extinct. Although God is a bird, God is also much more and much less. This being the case, proposing to declare God extinct falls outside of their jurisdiction. 

God, to be clear, is not extinct – it is just that God has not been seen for millennia, and the sightings were hard to confirm: a column of fire, a pillar of smoke, a wrestling angel, a Palestinian Jew. Who can say? Who can climb the morning song and carry down its flag?

The bird, but no one else. 

I. To begin

I will start when it began. In 2005 I was ferried to a home adjoining a wetland where cedars turned the air soft and the birds curried favor upon all who lived in the uninspired homes. There, I was transformed. Into what, exactly, I do not know. An alchemy occurred amongst God, the body, and the birds; it has left its mark upon me so that I ravenously seek such things. 

I could not tell you the genus, habitat, nor feeding patterns of birds. What I can tell you is how they have surrounded my life. 

II. Boughs of trees, wings of birds

In the corners of my eyes, there were always birds. I became entranced by their flight and hollow bones. I placed a small stone in my shoe and ran below the boughs of trees and wings of birds. I imagined myself the moon, circling the birds circling the trees. I became obsessive in my running, always in pain and never at rest. I circled and circled God until I became sick and faint. I dreamed of carving out my own marrow. Like all fanatics, I mistook the pain for God, the ringing in my ears for birds. 

On one run I became encased in a golden orb. The sun slid through the leaves and lassoed the space around me. My legs stopped and my ears cleared. My body finally hovering, overtaking my slicing and siphoning mind. I tasted honey but returned to vinegar. I beheld joy, but could not take it on.

III. The Junco

Even in the crisp winter months, the birds were about. The dark-eyed Junco, with its underbelly dipped in the dust of snow and its back amorphous as night, would land on the frosted twig in the underbrush. It made a vibrating, clear call – to whom, and why, we did not know. We watched the round body, found the circles in ourselves, and hoarded the softness. We collided with the window, sparing the sparrow. We piled our plates high, letting our want of more overtake and override us. Yes, we too were small with these precious months of winter wrapped around our bodies, the cloak of darkness spiraling our heads, the fixation with birds in the underbrush.

IV. Hummingbird

Winter is upon us and the descent into the dark and wet is well underway. Walking, I saw a hummingbird over the last flush flower of November. I stood before it, unmoved. The tide of despair has riddled its way through me, carving and forming me slowly in time. I ask myself if I will ever find it – whatever it is that I need. Or perhaps it will always flit in and out of view, just beyond sight, just beyond capture, and my whole life, I will be spinning this way and that in near view of the thing I seek. 

If only I could be a hovering thing in the corner of God’s eye. 

V. Crow 1

For days a crow has stood on the top of a spindly, tall tree as I count each hour spent beneath a fir in rain. How close I am to love.

I remember plainly and with great effort a long afternoon walk when we sheltered under wide, emerald branches while the rain began to fall heavy. I excise all other people from the memory and hold in my brow the scent of it – bay, indigo, sap, cedar, decay. It is the dome of the blue mosque, the inner sanctum of the lute, the corner of the room where God moves in shadow. It is the idea that God has gone ahead, where we cannot go, and commands only love. 

When I woke today, I went back to bed and craved nothingness again until I could hold in my mind’s eye what it is to sit in the crook of a tree. There was coffee waiting and the sheets were piled, ready to be washed. 

VI. Crow 2

Today, the crows were swaying in every branch of a tall, bending tree. A man who made a home of the bus stop leaned forward to stop me and say “look at all those crows.” There they were, blotting out the world with their big bodies of ash. “Wow,” I said and kept walking. 

VII. Sparrows

I wake in the memory of early spring. We were walking in an unusual way – not far from home, up a hill we rarely traverse. We were talking of something important or that felt important. I recall a red line of tension between me and the blue world. 

As my mind drifted in and out of our conversation, the thread became a web around my heart space, and the dizzying, drowning effect was the world for me that day. We stopped mid-sentence in front of a tree full of sparrows. When we began our walk again, they rose up in a great flurry and landed on the next tree, following us and then leading us. 

The red line was still there, although our words had gone quiet. We had encountered God and lived. 

VIII. Blackbirds, Robins

My partner tells me a story: one spring, after a frost, a flock of blackbirds descended upon a tree and ate everything from it. The next year, much earlier, a flock of robins descended upon that same tree and ate everything from it. Who knows where the spirit comes from, where it will go. 

In ancient Roman religions, they observed birds to determine the future and to communicate with the divine. In my throat, there is a shadow. In my lover’s hand, a purple stone. We know not the day or time of the spirit’s coming; we cannot read the signs, nor do we pretend we can. 

IX. Eagle

Today, a young eagle – still brown and speckled – appeared all shadow against the careful haze of morning. To his right, a wall of storm moving north. To his left, the snowy mountain peaks arresting through a pink layer of cloud. His unmistakable hooked beak fixed on the estuary. My unmistakable life unfolding before me as if I were not the movement of the tall grass at dawn; as if were not the close and strong branches of a redwood waiting to be climbed; as if I were not a fish under the gaze of an eagle.

X. Birds of the air

They say that the “Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (NRSV Mark 4:30-32)

I am not the seed, I am not the bird, I am not the sapphire of morning. I am below the branches with my faith wavering and my body humming. 

XI. After wings, hands

In the corners of my eyes, there were always birds. Even in the museum – music of footfall, dive of feathers. After wings, I became entranced by the idea of hands, which, in time, became an entrancement with the neck, the throat, the stomach, and all at once the whole body. 

Rodin cast The Hands of God, The Hands of the Devil, The Hands of Lovers, Hands from the Tomb, and The Cathedral.  The Cathedral depicts two right hands lightly touching with a center space between them. The hands extend just beyond the wrist and then come to an abrupt stop. The original name, The Ark of the Covenant, suggests that the space between two softly encircling hands is where the law of God resides. 

As long as there are two hands, God may persist where God prefers to be: the shifting space of glint and glide. A bird’s song enters the space between the hands, careens between moth, tree, and wave. But the body is the source of song. As many birds pass onto night, their song goes with them. The earth’s fabric is stretched tighter and tighter. 

XII. Crow 3

Although I find myself encased by worry and quick to sorrow, at my center there is laughter. The warbler knows this. So do the crows. They come closer and then back away. They look at me and ask who I am today and how it is I come to the edge of the water thinking it means only mystery and not joy. Even joy is too serious a word. 

When I was a child, I ran into the Pacific Ocean without delay. It was a cloudy, Oregon day but I do not even remember the cold.

Still, at times I am a hungry little girl carrying in my hand moss and frog, wanting to cure the world.

XIII. I Pray that the Thing I Love is God

The slender-billed curlew has been declared extinct. Its last confirmed sighting was nearly three decades ago, the year after my birth. And so, we lose another name for God.

The low January sun streams through the resolute green of hemlock. Soaring, it turns the air a soft buttercup yellow. Catching shadow, it aligns itself with the dark.

Still, there are junco, crow, song sparrow, blackbirds, hummingbird, bald eagle, warbler, robin, owl, wren, house finch, and black-capped chickadee. 

I place a purple stone in my pocket. I store up song for the winters ahead.

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Danielle Isbell is a writer, dialogue facilitator, and poetry reader for Vita Poetica. She has a background in theological studies and conflict transformation, and keeps coming back writing that breaks open new possibilities of language and imagination. Her writings center on the spirituality of nature, the sacredness of the unknown, and the window she loved in her childhood home. You can find other writings of hers on danielleisbell.org.