The chatter started around 5 a.m., long before the time when the sun should come fully up but when there is a soft greyish light hinting at dawn. I rub my eyes as if that will somehow allow my ears to focus. It has been a long, long, long time — more than days or weeks — many months, really, since the chatter seemed so normal. The birds with different songs are welcoming the new day. It was maybe 30 minutes of notes in keys that were harmonious but not really a single harmony — more like flowers in a natural meadow — colors that a painter could only hope to capture, knowing he did not independently choose them. The sky imperceptibly shifts and becomes shades of soft lavender — the blue that is also pink — together for only minutes. The songs diminish in chorus form, limited to carefully overlapping solos, a syncopated simpatico of notes sung with a singular message — morning has broken.
The lavender disappears in some distracted moment, and when my attention returns, the sky has become a warm, soft blue — not the full daytime, if you didn’t know the time, blue — but the same shade that could be twilight if you woke after the longest sleep and had slept somehow round the clock.
The magic of song and the color wheel of dawn doesn’t last long; Less than an hour of the show of light and music. Different seasonal sounds now are folded into the prior choir. The metal inside of the chimney has a strange rat-a-tat machine gun shimmy sound. It is less lyrical than any morning song. It is intentional, jarring, really, directed and purposeful. The woodpeckers have returned to peck at the metal lining of the fireplace. They can arrive at all times of the day, but they have a sixth sense to know if you have tried to sneak in a quick nap on the living room couch.
When the lawn appears between spring snowstorms the bunnies emerge and nibble on the grass and stay for hours exploring the yard, again. I wonder where they slept all winter. Where are they sleeping now?
In other places in the west, spring arrived weeks ago. My friends in California are posting moments of blooming bushes and trees while other traveling friends post shots of balconies with lavender wisteria at wineries in France.
There is a war still growing in the cold, muddy, not-yet-spring fields and cities in Ukraine. A huge Russian tanker was sunk by the spunky tiny Ukrainian army, and that counts as a big-ass win.
But the food fighters of the nonprofit World Central Kitchen were under attack last week as they tried to prepare fresh hot meals for the refugees. At least a dozen workers/volunteers were wounded and hospitalized for being in the wrong place at the wrong time — making soup. A war zone. And we are so very far away from those conflicts we were consumed and all atwitter watching a billionaire — the most billionaire of billionaires — trying to purchase a social media app, which can seem to build little more than discontent.
Yet, we are now a dozen years away from the uprising in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring, when a string of countries pushed for freedoms the Western world took to be basic rights. Those protests, and the quick cruel responses by the oppressors, were recorded by brave, fierce citizens and uploaded unedited in real time. It was my introduction to the power a social platform could have when used for more than updates on faux celebrities. It was the birth of modern citizen journalism. The form of immediate communication invited the entire world to see the cruelty in real-time, the real words being used by the real humans who were being beaten and shot and disappeared. For many of us, we were surprised— maybe even shocked— to see the way this news was being communicated, so quickly with instant global coverage, on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the sun is shining on the decks of a cruise ship in Estonia right now. The cruise line canceled Russian excursions and has placed about 1,500 men and women and war-weary children on a ship where they are safe and warm and dry and being fed three meals a day and sleeping together in small cabins and hooking up to the internet, so they can take online classes. They are displaced and fearful for their families still in Ukraine and grateful for the generosity of the Estonian cruise line while sitting and rearranging deck chairs in the sun.
After World War One, artists tried to make sense of the horrors and absurdities of what they had witnessed and a whole new style of art was born: surrealism. It is an unsettling juxtaposition of dream-like images that are often distorted and grotesque and bizarre. It is what nightly news, which is really a 24-hour global cycle now, can feel like when you see the images of this war in vivid real-time.
And waking up to a sweet dawn that unfolds into a stormy day in a mountain town in a free country with plenty of shortcomings, without bombs falling in the night, but seeing images of mass graves and blown off boots from the feet of tiny children can overwhelm the senses and confound any sense of reality.
Real birds are tweeting real songs outside my window and real tweets on social media platforms are relaying in real-time, the atrocities of an aggressor in a war that started out as an occupation. What Putin did not count on was that Ukrainians loved their country and their freedom and would fight for their way of life. I just feel a growing kind of out-of-body surrealism- the absurdities of a madman dictator, who can kill civilians who simply want to live the free lives they were living a month ago.
I cannot compartmentalize the tranquility of my early morning sweet songs with the real-time sounds of the bombs falling that we see on all the media platforms including the one a billionaire is trying to buy. What would all those millions upon millions upon millions of dollars mean if they were, instead, spent on helping the innocents in Ukraine? Like a Dali painting gone bad, Elon Musk’s face is kinda melting into the landscape of a war-torn country. It isn’t an image I invited but one I cannot escape this Sunday in the Park.