Starlings (again)

I'm sitting at my desk, early morning on a grey and gently breezy day, just enjoying the sounds of starlings somewhere nearby. I rather think they're perching on my roof, in fact, and the variety of sounds they make is quite entertaining. Starlings are great mimics, and incorporate all kinds of stuff into their repertoire . . . and when gathered together in a group they're very vocal, you do really get a sense of there being a conversation going on.

One of things that fascinates me, as I puzzle over what being human is all about, is that we are born, or so it seems, with an innate capacity to be excited, delighted and bemused by the sights and sounds and colours of the world about us. It's this that motivates artists and musicians, travellers, scientists; and for me it lies at the heart of what it means to have a faith to live by. Birdsong is there for its own reasons, and not to entertain us, but we love to hear it, and some hardy people will get up at 3 or 4 am once May and June come by, just to hear the dawn chorus; sometimes Ann and I have joined them.

Flowers are the colours and scents they are to attract pollinators, not us, but we enjoy them too, and we'll be visiting famous gardens in our droves through the summer to see them on display. The point I'm trying to make, I suppose, is that what attracts me into faith is not that the world contains birdsong and flowers, but that I contain the capacity to delight in them. I don't need it (I think); I'm sure I could get by without it - stay safe, feed myself, procreate, pass on my genes. But it's there, it's part of me, it's what makes me what I am - and as I see it, there lodged in my soul is a little sliver of the Creator's capacity to delight in his creation.

Well, while I've been writing, the starlings have headed off to the nearby ash trees where they love to perch, and I can't hear them any more, though there are still some sparrows chattering nearby. I'm glad, though, that they've been part of the beginning of my day.