Laura Erickson's For the Birds

When I was a little girl memorizing catechism questions for my first communion, I learned that people have souls. My brain fabricated, literally, an image of a soul as a tiny woven square of fabric, flimsy and threadbare, with loosely frayed edges. I have no idea why that picture was so vivid, or why it’s always been the one concrete way I’ve always visualized the human soul. As I’ve grown older, my image has been refined as I realized that like real fabric, frayed edges of a soul can be protected by stitching them to another soul. The happiest people are those whose souls are bound on at least some sides by other souls, becoming part of a patchwork quilt far lovelier and warmer than its individual components. Entanglements sometimes feel constricting and binding—almost suffocating—but they’re also essential for the soul’s protection and peace.

I’ve been thinking a lot about souls as I’ve watched warblers migrating this season. Young birds, just weeks out of the nest, travel without their parents, and adult birds travel without their mates. They move in flocks, but impersonal ones that change membership from day to day and often moment to moment. Birds find security in numbers, but not the emotional security we find in our entanglements. They simply take advantage of the extra eyes and ears of a flock to help them detect predators more quickly and efficiently than they could on their own.

Mated warbler pairs split up before migrating. Their souls aren’t torn asunder by emotional divorces—they part company without any sense of failure or loss or sadness because they never became entangled in the countless ways humans in love bind our souls to one another. Year after year, warblers and other tiny songbirds each take a mate in the spring, and work as a team to raise babies and defend them against predators and other dangers. Their babies stitch them together genetically but somehow never spiritually. In 1945, one scientist studying Indigo Buntings wanted to see if a female could raise young without a mate, so after observing a pair mating, he shot the male. By the next day she had already found a new mate, so he shot that one. The next day she had yet another new mate, and the next day, and the next. He shot nine males and finally left her in peace with a tenth. This was a case wherein the population suffered far more than the individual female did. Wildlife managers know they must manage whole populations rather than individuals, but in terms of the birds themselves, with their every-man-for-himself philosophy, perhaps the individual is all that really matters, except to birds such as swans, cranes, parrots, and jays, who entangle their lives with others in a very human fashion. Maybe thats why these birds seem so truly soulful to me.

Humans in this late point of the twentieth century often move from relationship to relationship, marriage to marriage, but every time we tear our soul from another’s, we tear at the very fabric of our existence. To keep ourselves whole, we must honor past loves and friendships even as we move on to new ones or we become as unrooted and flighty as warblers. Wild and free and unfettered, but somehow utterly devoid of soul.