Guided in the Dark
The bird crossed low over the far goal just as something happened on the field that I would spend the rest of the half trying to piece together. Heavier than a jay, smaller than a hawk, gone before I could ask the parent next to me what it was. It wasn't dusk yet — the daylight was still bright, ordinary, nothing about the light asking me to pay attention. The turf under our feet had that faint plastic smell turf always has, the smell of a field that isn't really a field. By the time my eyes found the game again, the opposing sideline had erupted, and I never learned why. It was not a goal. That I know.
I should confess something here. I have been a field hockey parent for going on three years now, and I could not tell you, under oath, what a foul looks like. I know the players run astonishingly hard, for what looks like an astonishingly long time. I know the ball is smaller and meaner than it looks. And I know the referee's whistle goes off with a frequency that suggests either constant wrongdoing or a whistle that simply enjoys its job. Beyond that, I clap when the sideline claps and hold my opinions to myself. Four-to-eight, two nights running, ferrying children between practices and games this week, I had gotten good at looking like I understood what I was watching. That bird found the one gap in the performance.
I still don't know what it was, the bird or the play I missed. What I do know is what happens after the daylight I saw it in fades. This week, once the sky over Cold Spring Harbor goes properly dark, millions of birds will lift off and move south over this exact stretch of Long Island. Warblers, thrushes, nighthawks among them. Most of them flying between dusk and dawn, most of them never seen by a single person below. They will be guided by the position of stars, read by instinct and not instruction, by the pull of the earth's own magnetism, by a memory none of them acquired through experience. No one will be watching. No one needs to be. They were built already knowing the way, and the not-seeing and not-being-seen is no obstacle to it at all.
Turns out, you don't have to read the constellations to be steered by the stars.
Our pond is doing something more modest but not unrelated. The south end has gone to dry ground this week. The water has pulled back further than we'd like, and we are waiting on an emergency coffer dam, a structure built in the water whose entire purpose will be to hold back what would otherwise keep draining away. We can't watch it work. We can only wait for the water to tell us that it did.
I spent two nights this week convinced that keeping track of everything in front of me , the score, the whistle, our family schedule, who needed to be where by six, was what it meant to be paying attention. Then a bird I couldn't name flew through my field of vision in broad daylight and reminded me that the things actually holding all of this together — a migration happening after I've gone to bed, a family, a coffer dam, a season of parenting you don't fully understand — are doing mostly unseen work. Love rarely announces itself. It just keeps showing up in the dark, trusting there's something on the other end worth reaching.
I missed whatever happened on that field. I'd like to think I didn't miss what mattered
A Prayer
God who encourages us by a lure we do not see, and steadies what drains us by structures hidden from sight: hold what is unseen and working in us right now. In our tired weeks, our half-finished repairs, our games we clap along to without understanding. Teach us to trust the pull we did not choose and cannot always explain, in daylight and in the dark alike. Through Christ, who walked toward Jerusalem by a road he could not see the end of, and trusted it anyway. Amen.
