It was a brisk and bright autumn day when I left my car along the side of the road and began my hike. The trail meandered next to a nearly empty creek that occasionally burbled and more often than not barely made the ground wet. The leaves were golden on the ground and the trees bare, letting more light into the small space between the hills than had been there earlier in the year. I followed the trail out to where the struggling creek made its way into a small lake and sat on a rock to look out at the distant kayakers and listen to the lapping waves.
At some point I looked up from my barely comfortable seat on the boulder to notice three large birds sitting in a nearby tree. They were larger than the usual birds one sees on a regular basis and being so close, their size was a bit offensive to one's sense of order in the world. Birds and toddlers should not be able to wear the same size shoe. And it did not help that these birds were not only very large, but also somewhat ugly. Not just ugly in a too-large-for-their-kind kind of ugly, like seeing a huge spider, but just plain ugly for any size of bird. They were Short Neck Buzzards. And they were bored.
Now Buzzards of any kind are a somewhat necessary if disturbing part of our world. The simple truth is that things are dying out there in the natural world all the time and buzzards perform the necessary act of cleaning up. I won't go into the details of what would happen should buzzards and the others of their kind suddenly took the vegetarian route, but let's just say it would not be pretty. Or smell pretty either.
Even so, it is a comforting thought to know that there are three buzzards in the world on this beautiful afternoon that have nothing to do. But even as I thought this, one of the buzzards suddenly perked up its head as if realizing something and fell forward onto it's outspread wings and up into the air.
"Where did it go?" I wondered. "What did it smell?". "What sad misfortune has befallen some poor creature?"
Before I had the chance to follow these thoughts to their end, the second short-necked buzzard spread its own wings and fell forward into flight as well. It hadn't just been a false clue then, the first buzzard really had noticed something evil afoot in the forest. My heart quickened its duties, my stomach sank in response to the thought that something very bad had happened nearby. But there was still a chance. One buzzard still sat in that dead tree and as long as that was true, maybe disaster had been avoided after all.
But it wasn't true. The buzzard was no longer there. At some point during my most recent reflections, alas!, he had left on his own grisly task. "Oh, what a shame!" I cried aloud to whomever was left alive to listen. This serene beautiful world around me had just revealed its true nature and I was horrified and frightened and desperately saddened by it. "It's not fair!" I sobbed, "It's just not fair!" And now, as I looked out over the lake, all I could see was that infernal Dead Tree. That Dead Tree that symbolized everything that had just come to pass.
But then Hope flickered. With a significant amount of whooshing, the first buzzard swooped in over my head and placed itself in its original place with an impressive amount of grace. I felt a tingle come over my skin as my clouds of grief began to thin.
And then it happened again. Another buzzard arrived and took its place next to the first. These birds had just brought me through such an emotional torment by this point I knew them each individually and had given them the names that seemed to describe their personalities. The first was Grace, the second was Hip-Hop because even now he was bobbing his head to some internal beat that I suddenly realized I could hear. It was the beat of Goodness. The rhythm of Holiness, the strum of Grace. The buzzards had returned! What had appeared as the true nature of the world suddenly could be seen for what it was: a costume, a disguise, a grimy covering hiding its true beauty.
And then my heart lept with joy to heights I had not dreamed possible before this moment because even now the third buzzard was taking its place next to the other three! My tears continued flowing, but no longer from my well of grief, rather from a fountain of bottomless joy and gratitude! I knew it could not last, this mountainous peak of Peace and Life my immediate surroundings and I found ourselves in, but for now All was Right in the world. All was Good. All was Alive.
And then I realized that the kayakers had made it to the other side of the lake and had found a place to jump off the rocks into the water. I smiled at how fun it looked, leaping safely into the air only to be caught without any other harm than the shock of the cold water. And I noticed that the barely comfortable rock I had been sitting on had at some point changed itself into a not-comfortable-at-all rock without my realizing it. So I stood, took one last look at my friends the buzzards to make sure they were still there and turned back along the leaf strewn path to my car.