How different and how alike are some creatures: While Canadian geese may weigh twenty pounds, hummingbirds may weigh only a few grams, yet both migrate thousands of miles.
One of the surest signs that spring will soon rejuvenate earth is skeins of Canadian geese in V-shaped squadrons, thousands of feet above, honking happily, flying northward, validating Percy Shelley’s poetic line: “If winter come, can spring be far behind?”
With a favorable tailwind, these birds have been known to fly 1,500 miles in a twenty-four hour period. Not to be outdone, hummingbirds migrate to wintering and nesting grounds from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, and some of their migratory routes are as long as 2,000 miles.
For some hummingbird species, part of the annual migration includes a 500-mile flight across the Gulf of Mexico. At their normal twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed, this leg of their journey may take as long as twenty hours. How can such tiny creatures, whose wings beat on average eighty times per second, and whose heart rates can reach 1,260 beats per minute, make such a perilous, non-stop flight without succumbing to exhaustion? Only their Maker knows.
Using navigational skills that rival global positioning technology, both bird species return to the same nesting spots year after year. Monogamous, male and female Canadian geese remain together until one of them dies, and they can live as long as a quarter of a century.
Human beings can learn much about love from birds. They court, mate, care for each other, and raise their young. Their enduring relationships define love in one word: commitment.
In his beautiful little poem, “Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town,” American writer E. E. Cummings defines a similar loving relationship between two human beings — a man named “Anyone” and a woman named “No one.” Since these names are pronouns, they can apply to all human beings: men and women who are totally committed to loving each other.
Anyone and No one court, marry, and have children, referred to as “Everyones” in the poem, and like the birds previously mentioned, commit themselves to caring for each other and raising their young. In time, “Someones” marry their Everyones, and the nest is empty, except for the loving parents.
After years of commitment to one another, Anyone died. Cummings writes, “ … no one stooped to kiss his face,” meaning his grieving wife kissed the love of her life one last time, but those who attended the funeral soon forgot him, demonstrating a human failing so different from commitment: indifference.
The poem portrays the man and his wife as the universal two, so bound together in love that even after “busy folk buried them side by side” death does not part them. They will remain together for eternity with their Maker, as implied in 1 John 4, verse 16: He that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him.
Anyones and No Ones, have a happy Valentine’s Day, and remember: We can all learn from the birds.
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
