Cardinal Truth

 (picture source: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology )

As I sat on our little back porch last night conversing with an old friend about love, and loss, and the beautiful and sad world we live in, a brilliant male cardinal swooped underneath the grapevines that have wrapped around the corner there to create a cool, green bower. He landed not more than five feet from away, twitching his brilliant tail, his crest rising and falling as he turned his eye to look at me. What a beauty, with his orange beak and crimson feathers! He took me in; then off he flew.

Not more than a moment later, I saw him with a female in the bushes near to the house. She had the same bright beak, but was a muted, salmon-color, just as lovely but more subtle, and she was shy. The male flew to the porch rail several times, then back to the bushes while the female looked on. Each time he joined her they seemed to confer, though they didn’t make any sound that I could hear, and then suddenly, all at once, they both flew into the vines above me. When I looked up I saw what this was all about: They had built a small nest high up in the grape vines near the roof of the porch. It was right above where I was sitting and I hadn’t seen it! Poor things; there I was, all big and threatening, just where they needed to be. I didn’t go though; I sat still to watch.

Their nest is quite different from the one the robins built at the other end of the porch where earlier in the summer we watched four babies hatch, feed, grow, and fly. This cardinals’ nest is made of stiffer stuff, and it is lacy, so much so that I could see the little bodies of the baby birds (I think there are two) right through the twigs, and even a flash of a pink mouth. For the next 10 minutes I sat there as the parents--red and salmon, bright and subtle--came and went, came and went, tending and feeding their young in a fluster of parental concern, both of them often bending over the nest together.

One of my precious Buddhist teachers, Khenpo Palden Sherab, once said, “The world is always speaking to you in metaphor. But you have to pay attention,” and another great teacher, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, said, “You can even learn the Dharma from nature, from the flight of a bird.”  On a day of contemplating death, discovering this unexpected new life above me, hidden in the sheltering leaves, was a small, sweet blessing and a teaching:  hidden in joy is suffering, and in suffering joy; hidden in life, death, and in death, life; hidden in samsara is nirvana, and in nirvana, samsara. Actually there is no difference between the two. There is only this world, right here, but it can be experienced in two very different ways.