Angry Bluebird, Happy Sunday!

“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of life!”

There is a famous photograph of a Eastern Bluebird that has appeared in posters, on mugs, on plates, on wall plaques and coasters...an Eastern Bluebird looking angry. It is even titled “Angry Bluebird.” I am pretty sure it was the original Angry Bird. I suppose it is popular, in part, because of the contrast between the whole “Bluebird of Happiness” thing, and the deep frump apparently portrayed in the photograph...kind of a visual play on words. As you see from my photograph above, it is not difficult to catch a bluebird in a pose that suggests anger, or at least malicious intent. I don’t know exactly why we so easily project emotions on to the poor bluebird, which is, after all, just going about its bluebird business...motivated by needs and wants we can barely understand. This bluebird, for instance, was looking at its bolder mates down on our deck already at the meal worms. I am not sure if it was mustering its courage to join them...against its instinct to flee from my presence in the doorway 10 feet away...but I am pretty sure I am already doing what I wondered about...projecting a whole raft of emotions that I might feel when I really have no idea what the bluebirds were thinking, or even if they could be said to be thinking or feeling (in any way at all like we humans feel) anything at all. 

Of course, when we encounter signs of emotion in our fellow humans, we have a higher chance of reading them correctly, since we can be relatively sure they think and feel pretty much the way we do...pretty sure...and that they emote, or express their emotions, in pretty much the same ways we do. A lot of social interaction is based on that assumption. And yet, I am not really sure we are not as often mistaken...or at least as likely to be mistaken...as we are with the bluebird in the photo. I saw a man in many layers of mismatched clothes against the cold walking down the center of my lane (though there is a sidewalk all along there) on our street the other day, intently studying something in front of his face. I though it was a phone at first, and wondered how an apparently homeless (or at least highly distressed) man got a phone (there is a group shelter down the street), but as I got closer and swerved to get around him, I realized that what I had taken for a phone was, in actuality, a lottery ticket, probably just purchased at the convenience store on the corner...which brought up a whole other set of speculations...but then, I was not fully around him when a rare impulse to generosity hit me and I had to admit that I had no idea how to read the situation correctly...and there was a whole history in that man...that he was really just busy going about his business in ways I could barely understand, and had no right to speculate about. My generous eye was opened for a second, and I I found myself sympathetic with whatever he was feeling...without the need to know exactly what it was. 

It is a grace I readily grant to the Bluebird in the photo...that I enjoy granting. I have to ask myself why it is so hard to grant to my fellow human beings that same grace. It would seem to be the way the generous eye should work all the time...embracing our fellows without judgement...without any reservations based on how their beings might impinge on ours. It is, in the end, not an Angry Bluebird, but just a Bluebird, being itself. And we are, so often, just human beings, begin ourselves. And that should be okay...that should, with a generous eye, be all we need to know.

My all your bluebirds be Bluebirds of Happiness today. Happy Sunday.