The Wisdom of Robins

Doing that post about my mother must have taken the stuffing out of me, because it's been over a month since I've blogged. Truthfully, though, there hasn't been a lot going on except some tension at work (we're restructuring) and who wants to blog about that? Then there's my new Facebook addiction....

But signs of spring are beginning to appear. Last Friday (the 13th, no less) while walking to the subway I saw my first robin, high up in a tree, surveying the neighbourhood. This made me think, happily, of one of my favorite people, Priscilla Soloman, an Anishnabeque (Ojibwe woman) and a Sister of St. Joseph.

That's Priscilla on the left. Just look at her eyes. That's where you really see her, that and in the way she reaches out to take your hand when she sees you after an absence, and says your name, softly and deliberately.

Priscilla served as one of the theological reflectors at a conference we held about eight years ago. Her job was to listen to a room of 200 people from across Canada, the US, Latin America, the South Pacific, Africa, Asia, and Europe for five days and then somehow bring coherence to what we had said ... and what she had heard.

How, she asked, could she even begin to discern what she had heard? One day she sat outside our meeting space at the University of Toronto. It was a hot day in late May -- the next day we would have a massive thunderstorm to break the heat, but this day the University had its air conditioners on overdrive. The air hummed. The subway rumbled deep underground; traffic surrounded her in all directions -- bus brakes hissing, horns blowing, tires squealing.

And there, on Priscilla's little patch of green*, a robin hopped by in search of food.

Priscilla sat still and watched it turn its head to one side:

And then the other:

Before drawing back and plunging its beak into the soil, extracting a juicy worm.

The robin, putting his ear close to the ground, focussing on what was before him, was able to hear a worm moving through the earth in the middle of a large city. Surely if Priscilla practiced that same close listening, that same complete awareness of her own surroundings, then finding the juicy bits in our verbal torrent --the essential meaning of our time together-- wouldn't be as difficult as she feared.

I've carried that teaching (which is what stories such as this are called in some Indigenous traditions) with me ever since. I try to practice it. I don't always succeed, because sometimes this is a very noisy world and we are in too much of a hurry to listen.

When I arrived at the subway, I didn't do as I usually do -- clamp the sound-cancelling headphones on, dial up Becky Tracy's Evergreen on the ipod, and pull out the Globe and Mail. I simply sat and read the paper, listening to it so to speak, amid the morning sounds of the TTC: steel wheels grinding over the rails, hissing hydraulics, chimes at every opening and closing of the doors, hiphop leaking out of earbuds, cranky children, laughing children, morning conversations, and shouted phonecalls ("I'm running late!") in that brief period on the viaduct when there's cellphone reception.

And then it was on to work, where later in the day came a call from Fahira at our reception desk: "Sister Priscilla is here and would like to see you." And there she was, completely unexpectedly, with her warm and knowing eyes, her strong hands, and her soft and deliberate "Hello, Sara."

*This little robin was spotted hopping around on our neighbour's little patch of green last May.