THE ORIOLE
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
This afternoon the rain pummels
the purple Chinese houses, stripping
the petals from their stems. The storm
drives the spring birds back to their nests.
The splendor hurts, thanks to the grayness
of the daily grind, and because my love
is gone and no one else
is here to share it.
It doesn't bother me now
to sit still by the creek,
dying out of myself, just
flowing water and oak woodlands
because we are not bounded
by minutes, and generations
may pass, or only moments.
A creature with merciless jaws
is nearby, but the oriole
has returned in the sunlit rain,
flitting from branch to branch,
singing a little.
Ithuriel's Spears (Walley Baskets)
My alternate reality is filled with flowers. Once, while meditating, I performed a mental purification process during which I imagined cleansing my chakras with a damp white cloth. I started at the root chakra and slowly progressed one chakra at a time up along the spine, and eventually I discovered that my crown chakra was full of trash. After several days of mentally dumping garbage from my head, I felt that something significant was about to happen. Suddenly I envisioned a pure white flower with innumerable petals. I thought at first that it was a rose, but a voice in my head clearly stated, “Lotus.” Not knowing what a lotus looks like, I went online, found pictures of the flower, and discovered that the thousand-petaled lotus corresponds to the crown chakra, the divine core of the self.
I did not feel enlightened, however. Still restless and unhappy, the following day during meditation I asked out loud what else I needed to do. Immediately a voice in my head stated, “Forgive.” So, I continued the purification process, spending many hours forgiving those who had harmed me. Over the course of several years, I let go of anger and hatred and resentment. Finally, I repeatedly imagined draining black energy from my aura into the fires below the earth. Free of negativity, I am now able to fully appreciate the splendor of the flowers along my path.
“The Oriole” was inspired by a storm in Watt’s Valley, a small foothill valley near Fresno. In late April and May, a stunning array of wildflowers dominates the north-facing slopes: tier upon tier of Chinese purple houses, interwoven with pink fairy lanterns and bright yellow tarweed, crowned by umbels of Ithuriel’s Spears. My wife and I always called Ithuriel’s Spears by their less common name, “Walley baskets,” because my wife thought that name was much cuter and more descriptive, and I agreed. That day, I remember, the rain fell so hard that we feared the flowers were going to be pummeled to death. Just before we left, an oriole arrived in sunlit rain, and we were glad that we had come to the creek despite the marauding storm. After my wife left me, I felt bitter and rewrote the lyrics to suggest that only I was there that day. I, of course, have since forgiven her and now feel grateful that she was there with me.
The same array of wildflowers had a special significance for me. A slope next to Watt’s Valley Road one year teemed with these flowers, and I pulled the car over, my soul ravished. We got out and gazed at the flowers for a long time, and I turned to my wife and exclaimed, “There is a God,” which is not something that I would have said lightly at the time since I was a deeply skeptical agnostic who vacillated toward atheism on more than one occasion. My wife told me that God speaks to us through signs, one of them being the beauty in nature. My wife and I affectionately referred to the slope as the “God Hill” from then on.
My wife liked two lines in the song especially, the one about dying out of the self in order to experience a greater awareness of God in nature, and the one about “the creature with merciless jaws” being nearby, which she recognized as a symbol of death. She interpreted the line to mean that the recognition of our own mortality spurs us to become more aware of the spiritual dimension within nature and ourselves. She liked to say that you cannot see birds or flowers unless you have them in your heart, and I realized, based on what she said about experiencing divinity in nature, that she was also implying that if you can feel the ravishing beauty of flowers and birds, then you can also know God in your heart.
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