The tapping begins just after daybreak and continues intermittently until dusk. It is the sound of Splash, the flat-headed cardinal, attacking his reflection in the window.
Splash descends from a long line of head-bangers, though I suspect there is no survival value for male cardinals who dull their beaks against glass. His great-grandfather was the same. Splash, however, is more relentless than any of his forebears, who eventually learned to live with their evil twins and went on about the business of being cardinals. Splash is a slow learner.
We never actually see Splash eat. He shuns the feeder frequented by all the other birds. I don’t know how he keeps his strength up for the constant attacks, and he’s looking a little thin going into the cold winter.
We’ve tried everything we can think of to deter him: bright lights in the windows, cut-out crows leftover from Halloween decorations, even moving objects hanging from the curtain rod. A small “disco ball” screwed into a lamp socket thwarted him for a few days, but then the attacks resumed. Not even the sight of Samantha the Cat perched on the back of my chair by the window can discourage Splash from his dogged pursuit of “iustitia cardinalis.”
Splash was head-banging this morning as I read in the book of Acts, “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth…” That reminded me of Genesis, where it says that God created man in His own image. I know why Splash attacks his own image, but humanity is still struggling to understand why we attack ours.
That thought landed just as Splash’s percussive pummeling coincided with the first headline that appeared on my news feed at the top of a list filled with slamming, savaging, hitting back, and dropping bombshells. Feathers are always flying in the virtual world of poisonous pixels.
Splash attacks his reflection, which appears as a reverse image of himself, yet that difference is an illusion. We attack our fellow man, our friends, even our families in much the same way. Splash sees his illusion in a pane of glass. We carry our windows with us everywhere we go, and those windows are actively managed to keep us pecking at one another. So complete is the deception that we keep pecking long after the screens go dark. (And how was your Thanksgiving this year?)
Splash’s health is suffering from his obsession. He’s investing his vital energy in something that returns only malnutrition and injury. In the same way, we pour our life force into cycles that pay us back with stress hormones, debilitating anger, fear, worry, and sleeplessness.
Unless he changes his behavior, the tapping will eventually stop—not because Splash has seen the truth, but because he will have beaten himself to death against a lie he mistook for an enemy. May we, while we still have strength in our wings, choose a different fate.
Outside The Box 