A little bird inspired this magazine. No, I'm not joking, he really did. I was visiting a friend one chilly spring night, talking until well past midnight, trying to divine just what had happened in my life...where I had taken the wrong turn...why all my striving seemed to come to nothing. I wondered what had happened to my dreams, when I had taken the path I was now on, and why. I trundled my thoroughly dejected self out onto the porch, to sit and brood a while. Brooding always makes me feel as if I am doing something serious and constructive with my thoughts, so I was understandably miffed when my dark mood was interrupted by the unlikely sound of a bird singing.
I was sitting near a busy main road with traffic providing a continuous background noise, perfect for brooding, but the bird's song rose above it all, clear and sharp. Annoyed, I frowned up into the barren tree providing a perch for the pest. As the song shifted and changed I realized that the little singer was a mockingbird. He had taken the songs of a number of his brethren and added them to his own, repeating them over and over. There were no other birds nearby to listen or to answer, but it seemed to make no difference. He warbled out his beautiful melodies anyway. He became song. Nothing else existed for him, or seemed to be needed.
I was impressed by his tenacity, and found myself asking him aloud, "How is it that you can sing with so much joy, alone, in the dark, in the cold, in the midst of this uncaring chaos, with no hope of an answer?" A small voice from deep within me startled me with an answer. Because he is a mockingbird, it said. He is what he is, and singing in the night is what he does.
A place in my mind opened up suddenly, and as I examined the meaning of this new thought I found myself grinning foolishly into the dark.
As with most answers, it was simple and had been before me my entire life, waiting for the right question. I realized that I didn't need to change. I had already tried that, unsuccessfully. What I needed to do was "become" and then to let myself "be". In the days that followed I searched this new open place in my mind, identifying the things I had been forcing myself to do that were against my true nature, and finding once again the dreams, values and joyful work that proclaimed what I really "was".
I came to know that the power of the song was not in the hearing, but in the singing, and that the most wondrous songs are the ones made up of many voices, all singing the truth of their own being. It is these songs which prompt us to ask the proper questions, and with a little luck perhaps bring us to the realization of our own true answers. It is my most profound hope that Seeker will become a mockingbird's song...many voices singing in the dark in the midst of chaos, because they must...opening a mind or touching a heart here and there, as that tiny grey nightsinger did mine.
Denise Ruiz
Editor