On a recent morning, early before work, I walked down a familiar trail cast in a patchwork of shifting shadows. The sun blinked at me through the trunks as if she, too, was shaking off the drowsiness of sleep.
Then, like a spotlight on a dark stage, my bleary eyes were drawn to pools of brightness shimmering in the dark shadows. At first glance, the morning sunlight seemed to fall on the forest floor in an arbitrary way, lighting the woods without discretion. But on closer inspection, I became captivated by that which was illuminated: A branch rested on a bed of last year’s leaves; juvenile green shoots huddled together in a cluster; the shadowy hands of a maple tree, its leaves perfectly chiseled, was stamped onto the rough bark of an ancient oak tree.
It was at that moment, as the morning air washed over me, that I realized I wasn’t just strolling through the woods. Somewhere along the way, I’d wandered from the familiar path and inadvertently stepped into Mother Nature’s theater. Suddenly, the world around me felt new and exciting. The sound of birdsong reverberated everywhere. Like an acrobat, a squirrel leaped through a back-lit tree.
And then I saw him — the most handsome actor I’d ever seen — brilliant in his movements; perfect in color.
Distracted by the beauty of it all, I’d walked into a particularly dense part of the woods. The forest thickened and the sun appeared like a field of stars, twinkling through the canopy. There, standing in contrast to the deep green tones of vegetation around him, a male bluebird perched on a craggy limb. His blue feathers shimmered magnificently in the morning sun, captured by the spotlight.
Startled by my presence, the bird raced along the branch’s length and threw himself into the cool air, soaring through the dappled sunlight to an adjacent tree. I stopped in my tracks and he stopped, too.
For maybe 15 seconds, this dance continued. Whenever I walked forward, he charted a course ever upward toward the sun, passing through light and shadow. When I stopped, he stopped. Then he disappeared altogether. In a burst of flight, the bluebird took off through the trunks and I lost him amid the trees — gone as quickly as he’d appeared, swallowed up by the vast canopy.
In the stillness following the bluebird’s departure, strangely, I was melancholy. Then I shook myself and continue on. It was, after all, just a bird.
And yet, for that brief moment, I’d been transported from the present moment to another time and place — a simpler one.
I returned home lost in contemplation and wonder, with the lingering image of the bluebird soaring into the sun seared into my mind’s eye. Even now, seated in my writer’s chair, I can’t seem to shake the beauty of that bird, or answer the question that’s been ringing in my head ever since: How can something so small and insignificant, against the backdrop of the expansive natural world, have such a profound impact?
Andy Castillo is features editor at the Greenfield Recorder.