Sanctuary

These last mornings have been able to get out in the Audubon Sanctuary. It just struck me that the root of "sanctuary" is the Latin "sanctus" meaning of course sacred or holy. You get the sense of it when you see the yellowthroat fidgeting about the honeysuckle, the house wren with head back, beak opening and closing, the throat pulsating, the cauldron of notes bubbling out as if they were a liquid spilling over into a silver breath of a steady boil. Then the hermit thrush, the catbird, the cardinal; the hummingbird swinging an invisible U back and forth, over and over. Courtship. The birds could teach us humans again in this spring art. It is an art that in our liberation from innocence and the sacred we seemed to have lost. Maybe we can regain it again. Maybe we can again have our innocence in the sacred of sanctuaries where our innocence will be enough that we find our courtship in something as Edenic in its enchantment as the holding of hands.