what is the best bird?
I'm wondering
A Note: This letter is part of a series I will be writing each month called I’m wondering. This series will be available to all subscribers, paid and unpaid. To learn a little more about it, please do read all the way to the end.
In 2017, I read an interview that Kaveh Akbar gave to Lithub titled Bewilderment is at the core of every great poem. In the interview, Akbar explained his belief that poets have to be “permeable to wonder.” He spoke about how holding fast to discovering wonder in a world that is truthfully not wonderful is the great and terrible work of writers. This idea, this dedication to radical openness, to wondering, I have never forgotten it. It opened something in my internal eye that remains to this day.
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Every morning for the last five or so years of my teaching practice, I have asked students a question that they answer as part of their attendance roll call. Ideally, the questions are generated by the students but often I pepper in questions of mine. It is a practice that has never ceased to be interesting to me, to see through the portals of these questions into the nooks and crannies of students’ lives. I have heard so many stories that stay with me…. a few most memorably include a pair of magical fish, a grilled roadside snake, and a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing in an attic.
This teaching practice is borne from my belief that questions, especially slant or searching or deep questions, connect us to each other in radiant and unexpected ways. The questions, as much as the answers, reveal us to one another.
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Last year, at the beginning of May, on Instagram, my friend Shira (who writes a deeply beautiful Substack called Freer Form that you can read here) invited followers to join her in a month of questioning. The task was simply to notice the questions we ask and collect them in some way. I kept track of my wondering in a digital note called MAY I?
Some of my questions were mundane—Where did I put my phone? What time is my next scheduled ‘let’s hop on a call?’ How much cheese is too much?—but many of my other questions were surprising in the way that the world is when we stop to really look at it.
I discovered so many small mysteries littered in the track of my every day life:
What exactly is an email? (what is a byte??) Why does my toaster fling the bread a foot into the air after it’s finished? Is that failure or exuberance? Does it have to be one or the other? Why do I add the numbers of license plates together? How do I not know what 9 + 7 is without counting on my fingers? Why is a vase of fresh flowers something I delight in every time I see it? Is delight so SIMPLE?!
And there were so many bigger, deeper questions that began to stack up:
What places does love make for you? What is your strangest encounter? What part of your body does sadness find first? What do you save? How does it feel to be you? Who is the last person you messaged? What is the most used emoji in your phone? What do you think about on an airplane during terrible turbulence? What is the earliest thing you can recall? What always makes you smile? What is your ugliest belief?
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Of course, in the classroom, there’s never any sure way to predict how anything will go, and so I never know which morning attendance questions will generate a lot of conversation.
I, for one, did not think that asking what is the best bird? would create as much debate as it did. There were staunch supporters of penguins, of finches, of blue jays, of toucans. Others stood for birds I didn’t know, birds I had to look up and see for the first time: their dappled gray chests, their hard red eyes.
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By the end of MAY I? I had so many questions written down that I would spend the rest of the year pairing the questions with photographs and sending them out to my corner of Instagram. As people answered, I realized the bounty of their responses—beautiful, heart-opening, often sad, often funny, often both at the same time.
Some answers in particular I wrote down and carried with me from the bed to the shower to the car to the highway and back again, carried them with me and showed them the parts of my life that they spoke to:
Here, here is the road he drove the wrong way down not once, but twice.
Here, here is the river freezing over.
Here, here is the corner store where the owner never makes anything quickly.
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For myself, I believe the best bird is the demoiselle crane, so named by Marie Antoinette who was charmed by the crane’s small stature (the smallest of the crane species) and the graceful black feathers adorning its chest which stand in sharp contrast to the trailing ivory feather plumes that stretch from the eye over the head.
This crane, however, is only delicate in appearance. It is, in fact, the only bird whose long loop migration takes it over the Himalayas in the winter. Indeed demoiselle cranes have been filmed flying far above the 8,848 meter peak of Mount Everest as they move from the steppes of Rajasthan in India to reach the softer grasslands of Mongolia to breed and raise their young.
It is an incredibly long and arduous migration and many cranes die of exhaustion. Yet, every year, those that survive begin to fly beyond the most towering peaks in the world in order to reach an unseen almost impossible land. I would tell you what this bird reveals to you about me but I already have.
As I’m wondering continues, each month I will write about a few questions that wondering has brought up for me. I hope you will comment with your own answers to the questions that this series will explore (or if you want to respond privately: I hope you will write to me directly) and I hope you will ask me your questions so that I can write about them too.
More than anything, I hope that as I continue to wonder it will open all of us up to paths we can’t imagine now but feel called to by a question that won’t let us go.
My favourite bird is the Secretary bird of South Africa https://blog.londolozi.com/2020/08/17/the-south-african-significance-of-the-secretary-bird/#:~:text=The%20Secretary%20bird%20is%20represented,the%20nation%20from%20its%20enemies.
In 2019 I made an elaborate power point around this very question of the best bird, with ranked criteria. My best bird was and still is the crow, my worst bird the peacock. Thanks for this.