36. Flowering the Nest and Divine Consciousness?

I settled into my easy chair early one morning with my big scrunchy dressing gown and a mug of tea and looked out of the window; what would come into the garden or into thoughts. Then a Goldfinch appeared. Pristine colours and perfectly clean. It is said birds wash themselves at least once per day, I guess it keeps the dust and dirt from impeding their flight, and it keeps them beautiful.

It bent over to some fresh Forget Me Not (Myositis) flowers growing beside a path, and broke off a stem with a beautiful blue flower on its end. Discarding that, it bent over and picked another. Then, dropping that stem and flower, the bird picked them up by the mid-stem again and flew off.

Such a Goldfinch is a thing of beauty, and I love the bright blue Forget Me Nots on the canvas of vivid springtime greens.

I sat and wondered for a while, that beautiful flower going into the nest of a Goldfinch, yes making a nest out of flowers, what a great idea.

Coming out of lockdown my wife was hosting some female friends that lunchtime and I thought I would take the spare Forget Me Not and show it to them and talk about the idea of a nest of flowers.

So I went out, in search of the discarded stem and flower. Sure enough it was easy to see, and I picked it up and put it on the side. Would the bird return for the stem? Would it be put off by my having been there? I looked further saw a flower in the soil and sure enough there was another stem, and then another; four in total.

I laid them along a section of border concrete and left. Sure enough before long they had gone.

Was this a purely functional twig gathering exercise or did the bird have an eye for beauty and was that what prompted this bird to use these flowers and stems? We have decorated our nest with flowers too.  

Wallpapers – A Selection

Magpies gather shiny objects, male peacocks attract mates with beautiful feathers. Is there some survival benefit with beauty? Does my dog Evie have a sense of beauty, maybe in a sniff? Bees are attracted to flowers (and flowers on feeling the wing vibration of a bee approaching enrich their nectar with more sugar).

It is said that divine consciousness permeates everything, animal, vegetable and mineral, the differences being what we can express and what we cannot. It is as though we filter the fullness of consciousness. What is not held back passes through as we are in the world, and the bird as it is, and the Forget Me Not as it is.

The diversity of life comes from a common Divine source. Is that why mystics have experienced the unity in all. Is that why I find a bird decorating its nest with flowers as I have. Is that how with knowing insight we might be able to experience the divine radiance in all?

Or, maybe the bird just saw a stalk and not the flower, and thought that would help to build the nest.