January 23, 2020 I Stalk a Chickadee and C.S. Lewis

I’m not sure I should tell you this, but…I spent some time this afternoon stalking a wild chickadee. I’ll get back to that.

I’ve been reading a book by C.S. Lewis called Letters to Malcolm – Chiefly on Prayer. Lewis operates on a different intellectual plane than most of us; certainly, he’s miles above me. I read The Abolition of Man once to my two youngest when they were in 8th and 9th grade. I had to stop after every other paragraph so we could try to grasp what he had written, but it was like trying to catch a wild bird – we always ended up with just feathers in our hands. Was this is the same man who wrote my favorite books: The Chronicles of Narnia, which I have read over and over and over?

I was worried that this book would also be so far out of my reach that I’d just catch glimpses now and again of Lewis flitting about on the highest branches. But this morning I read a paragraph in that book that made me laugh with recognition. Maybe he and I are not so far apart, for he says this about prayer:

Well, let’s now at any rate come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us.

Oh yes, Jack and I are in the same room after all – I see him quite clearly, and he definitely sees me.

I was outside for awhile this afternoon, but my walking turned into stalking. I could hear that bird, I could hear quite a few of them way up high. I thought if I stood still silently out in the snow, under the trees and just waited, my waiting would be rewarded. Never mind the cold! Surely, a bird would eventually show itself. I watched and waited. There! Way up high – I see you! I got a photo, a very poor photo, of a little bird body almost indistinguishable from the branches. You shall not see it. After 15 minutes or so, I walked over to the back door, thinking it was time to call it a day. I turned around and there he was. I saw him. He saw me. And then we went our separate ways.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.