All the Clichés Are True
Every morning, I eat breakfast at a little wooden stool by the big window in the living room. There are no tables and chairs in this space, just one small stool that is the only thing left from an LLBean playset my kids had when they were little — some 20 years ago. It’s a sturdy little stool perfect for a stepstool, and I sit on the floor and use it as my table. This practice is a kind of meditation for me. It forces me not to read the newspaper, not to read the Twitter headlines, not to flip through the catalogs that came in the mail, not to look at my calendar to see what will be required of me today. What I do is look at the mountains and the clouds, the trees and the birds. Lately, I have been waiting for the hummingbirds to return.
Last spring and summer — our first in this new house — the hummingbirds were everywhere. We have lavender and Indian paintbrush and monkey paw plants they like, and a certain tree they always pause in. They zip around the houses like bomber jets, and when we’re outside, I swear they buzz us just for fun. They fly so close as they zip past that you can feel wind.
When the mild coastal California winter came, the hummingbirds left. I haven’t researched it, but I imagine they fly south, or maybe they hibernate, or maybe they die to make room for a whole new generation of hummingbirds. In any case, with recent world events being so dark and unstable, I have been waiting for the hummingbirds to return.
It felt like the return of the hummingbirds would be some sort of sign that all is well and we haven’t actually fallen into some Silent Spring end of days.
And yesterday, they were there!
While I ate my oatmeal, one tiny ruby-throated bird perched on a leafing branch and buzzed around and came back. Later in the day, I saw another, and heard the familiar zzzzzpppt as they buzzed around.
For one brief moment, all felt right with the world.
The end? Not yet…
I hope you were reading this little story and thinking, “OMG THE SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME, BUT IT WAS WITH A BUTTERFLY.” Or a deer. Or a crocus. Or the flowers of a cherry tree. Or the next-door neighbor kids on bicycles. Because the whole time I was writing this, I was hyper-aware that what I was writing was one giant cliché — a thing everyone has experienced and everyone recognizes. A thing that is not terribly surprising or earth-shattering or unusual. But a thing that nonetheless is true and meaningful for me.
I almost didn’t write it because it was such a cliché –unoriginal, overused, obvious.
And then I reminded myself that the reason something is a cliché is because it is, indeed, true for so many people.
And right now, so many people are experiencing a wholly original thing — a modern pandemic — yet we are all experiencing it in such very similar ways.
So it seemed like a cliché was just right.
