I was going to complain about pillows this week. I intended to write a cranky post about the trendy throw pillows cluttering up every single bed in my house.
But as I arrived at my desk, a bird flitted past the small, square window just the other side of my computer monitor, and I felt a spark of gratitude — for the bird, yes, but mostly for the window.
That window is always there, in my line of sight as I work. Most days, I don’t pay much attention to it, nor to the view it frames of my neighbors’ weathered fence and the dainty, restless leaves of their pittosporum hedge.
But yesterday, as I sat down to file my complaints about throw pillows (not to worry, I’ll get back to the pillows, next week maybe) — just as I sat down at my desk to work, a bird flited past my window.
It was a small bird — a towhee? But it was quick, visible just long enough for me to get a glimpse of it before it reversed direction and snapped out of sight — a hummingbird?
A Bird, A Squirrel and . . . .
The view through my window is a static one — the fence, the hedge — until something enters it and catches my eye: a bird, or a squirrel dashing up the fence rail and down again.
Then I look up from my work and am reminded that there is a greater world out there, something bigger than my small struggles at the keyboard. Kindness settles around me.
But yesterday it wasn’t birds or squirrels or the rustling of the neighbors’ hedge that caught my eye. It was the window itself, a window less than four feet square.
It opens onto a simple view: glistening redwood panels, mossy latticework, the morning sun on the bark of a tree. A bird. A squirrel. Not much. But in fact everything.
If that square of light were all that I’d ever been given, if indeed I had not been given decade upon decade of places to be in (a cottage without plumbing on a lake in Michigan, a wood-paneled office off Columbus Circle in Manhattan, an apartment high on Nob Hill battered by fog and wind off the Pacific) if these places, these windows, had never been, if my entire consciousness had been but a single window overlooking a neighbor’s side yard — that one square of light would have been enough.
I’m Thankful for a Window. It’s Small, but It Opens Onto Everything
And so, I am thinking small this Thanksgiving. I could name for you all the things and people and places I could be grateful for, and it would be a mighty list.
But I’m sticking to what a flitting bird showed me yesterday morning: My window is small. It is square. It has boundaries. But it is enough. If it had been all I had ever been given, it would have been enough.
Just outside that window is a lovely space that I like to visit from time to time. See “Widowed: I’m Planting a Secret Garden Outside My Office.” More thoughts on the nature of the universe at “Is That a Fibonacci Blooming in Our Front Yard?”