'Away Melancholy'

We heard a thump on the front window and found a female ruby-throated hummingbird on the ground. She appeared to be alive, merely stunned by her collision with the glass.  Her wings and distended tongue twitched. I placed her in the palm of my hand and took her picture.

 

She weighed about four grams, less than one ounce. The iridescence of her feathers was almost gaudy, like a Mardi Gras costume. We are seldom able to observe a hummingbird closely for more than fractions of a second, except in photos. The moment seemed privileged. After half a minute or so she lifted from my hand, wings beating at least fifty times per second, and flew to the shingles on the roof. Momentarily she rested, then disappeared.

 

Flights of Enchantment: That’s how Nigel Andrew subtitles his wonderful recent book The Butterfly and that’s how briefly holding a hummingbird left me feeling – enchanted, while admiring her as an engineering feat. Close contact with a creature so remarkable is already good fortune. My youngest son is with the Peace Corps in Peru. He told his host parents, a middle-aged couple in suburban Lima, about my encounter. They were happy for me. In their country, according to folklore, holding a hummingbird bestows good luck, a belief traced to the Incas. Nige writes:

 

“Perception is a creative act. Being inescapably human, we cannot help but project human meaning and significance onto what we see, to interpret it into something we can assimilate. We are not passive receivers of data but, rather, transformers, actively making sense—or sometimes nonsense—of what we are perceiving. We seek out shape, pattern, meaning, we want to fit whatever is there into our human world; what other world can we truly know? This leaves all nature wide open to our interpretation and our humanizing, assimilating impulse.”

 

My close encounter with the ruby-throat left me feeling lighter, more buoyant for the remainder of the day. Stevie Smith would have understood:

 

“Are not the trees green,

The earth as green?

Does not the wind blow,

Fire leap and the rivers flow? 

Away melancholy.”

 

Smith was born on this date, September 20, in 1902 and died in 1971 at age sixty-eight.