One Thursday this past April Jesse (my seven-year-old) was running a temperature of 101 degrees when he woke up in the morning. I stayed home with him. Around noon I had to take him out to do a couple of errands that couldn't wait. On our way to the car, we found a dead song sparrow lying in the driveway next to the car. I explained to Jesse that sometimes a bird will get fooled by the way sunlight reflects off glass and fly into a window with so much force that they break their necks. I surmised that that is what happened to this poor little bird. Jesse proceeded to inspect all the windows of the car until he found a tiny fluff of feather still clinging to the glass at the point of impact. We decided that we would bury the bird when we returned. When we returned, however, Jesse was spiking another fever and was so tired I took him inside and we forgot about the bird.

The next morning the bird was still there but I had to hurry big brother Dave off to school while my wife Cathy stayed with Jesse. The bird lay there unburied until I got home from work. When I finally got the chance to dig a little grave and go to collect the bird for burial, it was about 6pm on Friday. As I approached it, I couldn't believe what I saw. There was a pile of sunflower seeds next to its beak. Not just a little pile, it was very nearly as big as the bird. At first I thought maybe Jesse had done this but as I looked more carefully, I could see that the seeds had been carried there and the shells had been cracked open and the kernels had been left in the forlorn hope that they might inspire a miracle. The little bird who did this beautiful, heartbreaking thing was undoubtedly the mate of the other.

A song sparrow is a small bird, unable to carry more than one of those seeds at a time. One can only imagine the desperate emotion that drove that bird to and from the bird feeder so many times on this errand of devotion. Of course, that was the height of mating season. Animal behaviorists might tell you that all this is no more than an artifact of the mating behavior that was interrupted by this untimely death. I wouldn't get involved in that discussion myself. There is probably a little truth to that theory but there is a greater truth to be had here. These are times in which loyalty and devotion are easy to mock. In both business and our personal lives we are encouraged to think about the cost/benefit ratio of everything we do. Is the status quo "working" for you right now? Are you getting the maximum return on your time and money? If not, change things! Lay off 10% of the workforce. Leave your relationship. Forget doing what you love and learn to love doing something that pays better. We often take the paradigms of the global marketplace and evolution to indicate that we need to make these decisions with an entirely cold and appraising intellect.

Yes, what happened to this little bird is sad, but if you look deeper, there is hope and comfort that outweighs the sadness. As it is written in Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. The cost of building that pile of seeds was far in excess of any possible benefit for the surviving bird. A more adaptive behavior, one that would have yielded a better return would have been to move on and find another mate. But those adaptive behaviors are in the house of feasting. In the house of mourning you can glimpse the greater power that redeems the sadness, pain and privations from which feasting and wealth can only provide ephemeral insulation. If we only had eyes to see it and a heart to understand it, it is everywhere but we can encounter it most directly when the time of loss comes. It is this spirit (force? being? order?) that transcends the simplistic logic and arithmetic of narrow self-interest. Call it God or Karma or Love or anything else you like - It shines through in that little pile of seeds and it animates billions of such miracles every second.

2006 Jerome N. Gould