Splashing in Puddles

I am a visual kind of person. I make connections between things that are seemingly unconnected. A tree flattened by a hurricane wind, the three crows working out how to dismantle my bird feeder or a snail on the path. It says in Romans that nature itself speaks a clear message of who God is and what He does.

I’d walked along to the shop to buy newspapers and lunchtime pies to warm up in the oven. It was damp, but not raining. My mother’s wisdom said that if the paving stones in her back garden were not dry there was no use in hanging out washing. The paths were not dry so I figured it wasn’t a day for hanging out washing.

On the journey back, which was a little wetter, I noticed a deep puddle next to part of the pavement. It’s the same stretch of pavement that seems to be a gathering place for snails on wet days, but not this day. There were birds, small brown birds, maybe three or four. It had all the elements of a swimming pool with youngsters splashing around. They were dipping and slapping water everywhere as they washed themselves. It did not seem to be a solitary bath. It was too small a puddle and there were too many birds to fit comfortably. They heard the sound of my approach and lifted off in a small wet cloud.

My Thursday afternoons are spent with a small group of Roman Catholic ladies. I am not a Roman Catholic myself but I had been invited along. In those early days, they were not shy about bringing out their rosary beads. I was given a set to hold. Sadly, I know people that would be very uncomfortable dealing with rosary beads. I just held them. Nowadays, they don’t do that, not because they think I might be offended but, they just don’t do it. It is a gentle hour and a half of touching base with the quiet space inside.

I thought about the birds in the puddle and the splashing about. The word ‘refreshing’ came to mind. It had been morning. The birds had done their singing much earlier on. It was time for a wash and breakfast and meeting the challenges of the day – refreshed.

I thought about the meeting that afternoon and how much we played with prayer and singing and shared life with one another. The word ‘refreshing’ came to mind.

I introduced them to twenty-second hugs, somewhere I had read somewhere. The quick embraces do nothing to ground a person. Twenty seconds allows for something deep inside a person to be touched. There is probably a name to a specific hormone that is released. People melt somehow. Bodies that have held it together for so long, relax.

There is a special something that occurs in a communal event that doesn’t happen when a person is alone. It all depends on the kind of community whether it’s a good thing or not. The birds could have cleaned themselves up just as well on their own – the dust and dullness washing away in a pool of water, but doing it together with other birds added something. The dust and the dullness of something more than feather happened.

Something deeper.

Something like the bird equivalent to a twenty second hug.