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| Chester Cathedral. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia. |
The sidewalks at work are lined with seagull feathers this time of year. The wind grabs them, makes them snake along the ground, animates them into a sort of quasi-life. I watched one on such a journey, twisting and turning just off the ground. Its path took it into a brick wall, and I thought that would be the end of the feather. But it drifted upward, carried on the gentlest of breezes, hugging the wall like it hugged the ground.
The sun caught it there, as it danced across the brickwork,
and the simple beauty of it made me smile. I stopped and watched it, that
beautiful thing flying on the breath of summer. And it made me smile. The way
it caught the sun as if it had a right to, as if it owned the sun in that
moment. The way it defied gravity so effortlessly, so unashamedly.
As I walked away, I wondered if that feather made it. If it
somehow escaped to heaven. Or if it, like its brethren, succumbed to a less
noble fate, became one more piece of piece of trash left by a squawking bird. I
wondered if it was futile to try to fly if you’ll only end up in the gutter like
everything else.
I took my melodramatic thoughts of anthropomorphized
feathers into the building where I work. Built back when photographs came in
black and white, it is a vast industrial building lined with massive steel
columns supporting the ceiling many stories above. As I walked back to my
office, my building within that cavernous building, I imagined the place a
forest. Those steel columns became trees, the lacy trestles became branches,
and the roof became the canopy, that interlocking ceiling of foliage that
encloses all forests.
What did that make me, in this metal forest? A creature of
the forest, a part of the kill and be killed cycle we call life? I didn’t like
the analogy. Not because it ran too close to home, not because it made uneasy
by feeling my lowly place in the ecosystem, but because it did not ring true. I
am neither hunter nor prey at work, though I hear the howling of wolves
sometimes.
The middle third of my building has a ceiling that soars
several stories above the two outer thirds. Sometimes I stand at the south end
and look north at the wall of windows that forms the northern wall. It feels
like a cathedral then. A place of worship. Sunlight slices through those dirty
windows, dances through the dust of industry that floats through the air, and
paints the place holy.
In moments like that, I’m not sure what deity that building
was meant to worship. Industry? Production? Efficiency? Maybe it changes over
the years. Maybe old gods give way to new in this iron cathedral. I’m not sure
it matters.
It is easy to look at the world at face value. To look at
discarded feathers as garbage instead of plucky adventurers. To look at
buildings made of brick and mortar as simply boxes for people rather than steel
forests or iron cathedrals. But I think there is value in looking past the
surface. Let the feather be a hero. Let your office be a jungle. Let the whimsy
of the moment catch you. At the very least, it will teach you something about
yourself.
With whimsy,
Tom
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