Blue-Footed Musings

My husband told me he’d seen a bird that looked “like a svelte robin with an orange belly.” I told him it was probably an oriole, based purely on the “orange” part of his description. I have seen orioles here before, but not so often that I could remember exactly what they looked like. After looking at pictures of them on the Internet, he agreed that the bird he saw was an oriole, and I agreed that some orioles do indeed look svelte robins with orange bellies.

I’ve been thinking a lot of deep thoughts lately. Democracy and fascism. White privilege and Black Lives Matter. Pandemics and the state of the American educational system. Among other things.

Those are all important, but they are things over which I do not have immediate control. Don’t get me wrong. I see how I am a thread in the tapestry of everything that’s happening in the country. I see how I connect. I see how it matters what I think and what I say and what I do. And I will think and say and act better as a result.

But I am just one little thread in a large tapestry. No matter what I do, I cannot make or break that tapestry. That tapestry existed before me. It will go on existing without me. I am but one little thread in a large tapestry on an even bigger loom.

Yet on the small scale, the individual scale, my thread has a beginning and an end. Along the way it can change and it can grow. It can shine, or bring a wild streak of color, harmonize or clash with the threads around it, be so ugly that people wish it wasn’t there, or be so dull that no ever notices it.

On this smaller scale is where I live and breathe and be. On this scale, as I grow older, I wonder what was the point? What did I add to the tapestry? What does it matter? Was I obligated to make my thread beautiful, or to create threads that would continue beyond me? Or was it enough to simply exist, in whatever way I turned out, another thread in a work so large that no one can ever view it in its entirety?