Visions

I opened my front door early this morning to put my cats out and watched and listened to the starlings as they started their day by leaving my hedge. They left in swarms, I suppose the ones closest to the top of the hedge might have flown first. I felt as though I were peering into their bedrooms, watching them get dressed for the day. There is more than a hundred of them that have taken to sleeping in the hedge lately. I don't know how long they will do this. At dusk I walked up the driveway to the mailbox. I didn't realize they were just settling in and I frightened them and the ones that were settling in darted out and flew back up to the telphone lines, or whatever those lines are that are strung up on telephone poles. (I'm almost sure they're not telephone poles. Ah, they'll be electrical lines, utility lines).

I felt bad that I'd frightened them off so when I left the mailbox I walked back across the road and walked down our other driveway. I stopped halfway and when I stood just in the right spot I could see through the branches of the laurel tree (not to be mixed up with the laurel hedge) and I could see them returning and disappearing into the hedge.

They in such numbers and the sounds of so many wings against so many leaves have the cats frightened and I think, good for them, good for those birds. And I think how in numbers even little birds can make big sounds and create a force that scares cats.

So, I think further and think about the speech that Bono made tonight at the NAACP awards. He said we can be the generation that ends poverty. He spoke from the deepest place of his heart and it makes me wonder what I am doing to help. Thousands of children dying everyday in Africa from starvation and even more from malaria; "a bite," he said, "from a mosquito". Oh, the greed and meaness that have let this happen is terrible to think about. How could this be happening. If we held one of those dying children in our arms we wouldn't; we couldn't, not do anything.
It makes the things that I worry about sometime petty and meaningless. Bono grew up in war torn Ireland and he heard the words of Martin Luther King and he was moved by them and has never forgotten them. Bono was created from the ashes of bombs you could say; he rose up to stand up against all the meaningless preventable deaths. He's a hero. And he's one man and look at what he has done.

He's collecting more people to stand up with him and he's being like the starlings...making all this noise with wings and he's scaring the fat mean cats away and he won't back away. There's not a lot of things that I can say I know for sure but I can say this about him, he'll never back away.

This is the day I saw the starlings get up and go to bed and heard Bono speak words with wings!