On Saturday morning, as my breakfast was cooking on the stove, I went out onto my front porch to fill the birdfeeder that hangs there. I keep the bird seed on the porch in a big Rubbermaid tub that sits inside a large wicker chest. I call it “the seed vault”. As I stepped outside and turned toward the feeder, I noticed that something was lying on top of the vault, near the front right hand corner. As drew closer, I realized what it was: a dead sparrow.
The poor birdie corpse looked intact, except for its skull, most of which was missing. The sparrow’s feathers were matted and rumpled. Some creature had obviously held and carried the bird in its damp mouth. But what creature? If my cats were outdoor cats, which they’re not, I would have interpreted this as a classic offering of prey. Perhaps this is what it was. But would a random neighborhood cat really present me with its catch, in a display of gratitude for filling the feeder that made the capture possible? Mystified, I picked the dead sparrow up with a paper towel and laid it down gently amongst a pile of dried leaves beneath a big bush at the corner of my porch. I wanted it to have some cover, but I wasn’t up to digging a grave.
Throughout the day, I pondered this dead sparrow’s appearance in my life. That’s because I’m a big fan of looking at the metaphorical meaning of occurrences – as well as of illness, as I’ve written in earlier posts. For whatever reason, I am not the kind of person who sees a dead sparrow on her seed vault, puts it under a bush, and goes on with her life. Instead, I immediately wonder whether there’s a message in it for me. “Is it simply a gift from a cat?” I asked myself now. “Or is the Universe conspiring with my inner self to try to tell me something?”
What came to mind first as I mulled this over, was that my inner self was pointing out my blatant hypocrisy: I profess to adore the birds, and yet, I still eat meat. Was I being directed to go back to being a vegetarian?? This is, in fact, something that I have been considering lately. Even so, this explanation didn’t feel like an “Aha!” moment for me. I carried on with my day, my question still hovering beneath the surface of my awareness…
Then came Sunday morning. Easter morning.
I stepped out onto my porch. There I found the dead sparrow, back in the same corner of the vault. At first I thought it might be a second one, but I looked under the bush and found the tiny, leafy grave empty. When I looked at the little fellow closely, I concluded that it was most likely the same sparrow as the day before: Although this body’s feathers were more mangled and matted, its injuries were the same. “Why is it here again?” I wondered, incredulous. “What cat would do that??” I put it back under the bush, under more leaves, feeling both a bit sad and a bit creeped out.
Later in the afternoon, I had the thought to just go out and take a peek at the vault…
A wing. In the same spot. Splayed out, as if it had been plucked neatly from the body. The rest of the sparrow was now lying under the railing at the corner of the porch, below the spot where the birdfeeder hung from the top of the porch. And yet, other sparrows and finches and blackbirds were happily plucking seeds from the feeder. “How can they,” I wondered, “with their fallen brother lying right down there?” This was just so weird… Without dealing with the disembodied wing in any way – which felt callous to me even as I turned my back on it – I went back into the house. By evening, both the wing and the rest of the corpse had vanished.
Monday morning. By now I was almost apprehensive about going out to the porch. But the birds were already hopping around on the branches of the graveyard bush, waiting for their breakfast, so out I went.
A sparrow tail. In the usual place. No sign of the rest of the body. I moved it off the porch, onto some leaves. Actually, I have to be honest about this: I didn’t gently place it on the leaves, as I’d done with the whole sparrow. I tossed it away, carelessly and hardheartedly.
Back indoors, I ate my breakfast and watched the surviving birds jostle each other for a turn at the feeder. There had to be a message for me here. The way the sparrow kept appearing – whether whole, or in its constituent parts– convinced me of this. But what message? I’d been pondering this for forty-eight hours now. That morning, during my meditation, I’d even sought guidance from my inner self. “What is this all about?” I queried. “Is it really about vegetarianism? Or is there some other meaning?” As had been the case all weekend, no satisfying answer had come to me during meditation. But now, as I was finishing up my breakfast, another possible interpretation suddenly occurred to me: This sparrow was giving me a teaching about the identity of the “self”.
There’s a tale I recall from my Buddhist studies: A monk named Nagasena uses the example of a chariot to explain to a king that nothing exists independently; nothing possesses its own, fixed “self”. “Is the pole on the chariot the chariot?” Nagasena asks the king. “No,” the king replies. “What about the axle?” Nagasena asks. “No,” the king tells him. “What about the wheel?” Nagasena continues. “No.” It goes on like this, until the king grasps this idea: The parts of the chariot on their own do not constitute “chariot”. At the same time, what we call a “chariot” doesn’t exist separately from those parts. Nagasena then tells the king that it’s the same with the human “self”.
The sparrow, I realized, is my chariot. Is the missing skull the sparrow? No. How about its brains? No. The wing? No. The tail? No. How about the little foot that stuck out so stiffly from beneath the body? Or the spare feather that remained wedged between two woven reeds of the wicker chest’s lid? No.
When I thought of the sparrow this way, I suddenly felt that this little creature had appeared – however that happened – to remind me that, like the chariot, what I call a “sparrow” exists only thanks to the constituent parts that make it up. I can say that although I identified the bird as “sparrow” when I first saw it on the wicker chest, once I saw that most of its skull was gone, “sparrow without a skull” felt more accurate than “sparrow”. But when I saw only the wing, and then, the tail, I could no longer call them “sparrow”. My mind could see them only as “sparrow parts”, not as “sparrow”. It occurs to me now that this also explains my decision (but without justifying it!) to either ignore or callously toss aside the wing and tail, those body parts that I could no longer consider “sparrow”.
Interpreting the dear, dead sparrow as a reminder of the story of the chariot resonated with me deeply, given my current focus on the meaning of “self”. In fact, I had done this type of meditation just a few days earlier, in regard to my own “self”. I asked, “Am I my hand? My leg? My blood?” “No.” Finally, I asked, “Am I my mind?” The answer was the same: “No”. But this was a tougher “No” to utter, since it entailed a willingness to let go of the idea that the mind represents who I am. And, in fact, letting go of my attachment to my mind as my “self” is a large part of what I’m working on now. So, it seems fitting that the first thing I noticed about the dead sparrow when I looked at it closely, was that its skull had been crushed, its brain removed. No more thinking. No more sparrow mind. The sparrow is not its mind.
I feel so thankful for this experience, disquieting as it was. I am sad for the death of one of the little creatures I love, but grateful for its very concrete and yet self-less gift. Thank you, dear sparrow-teacher.
Sue Downing 