Debating at Jagtap Nursery if I should spend 900 Rs on a stone bird bath (could I afford $21.00?), I had a man put the three heavy pieces in my driver’s car. The bath was positioned where I could see it, in front of my kitchen window, beside a newly-planted neem tree that was only my height and too undeveloped for birds to perch. By a year, the neem had ballooned into a leafy, bird haven, concealing any sight of the birds but not their calls, even before they dropped down to the bath.
Then, after two years, the crows came, at first only drinking then bringing pieces of chapati, an Indian flatbread, and dropping them in to eat, softened, on the rim. Resigned, I added a slotted spoon to my cleaning tools. The bath had become known to sparrows, who came in a small family, red-vented bulbuls by pairs, a single or pair of coucals, noisy flocks of babblers, mynas and black drongos leaving the phone wires, and a playful group of small birds I couldn’t find in my Field Guide to the Birds of India, so I called them “the sweet singers.”
In time the crows grew bolder. I would find bird parts in the morning, using the spoon to carry the loss across the dirt road to the field edge where I put my compost for wandering goat herds. I felt discouraged and now researched crow behavior. It offered no help in its description of crows having a communication system that brought more of them to wherever water or food had been discovered. So I took apart the bath and stacked the two support pieces beside the bowl. One day a friend asked if he could borrow it, and I told him that he could take it, glad for him but sad for me.
Before the bath could be moved, a little green bee-eater, a bird that lives on flying insects, began leaving its customary place on my compound’s iron grill gate to perch on the support pieces, swiftly swinging its head, darting for its catch, then repeating the moves. Delighted, I’d stop washing dishes to fully watch. Resolving my new dilemma of having offered the bird bath—a commitment I intended to keep—I realized that a replacement might be the large, angular stone placed in the southwest corner of my brick compound wall after the construction of my home. With the bird bath space now empty, I had the stone carried out, and on the first day, the little green bee-eater claimed its new perch.
As I moved through the changes in my emotions concerning the bird bath, I became aware that while the words “sad” and “glad” may be opposite in meaning, they sound similar—and I found this intriguing and curiously helpful. When I first had the inspiration to move the rock, I felt my sadness lifting, but looking back I realized that I felt the shift in my sadness moments before I consciously recognized the thought that I felt glad and intentionally said aloud in surprise, “I feel glad.” Each time I make a language discovery such as this, I find that it takes less effort in the future for me to shift from my need not being met to the moment in which my need is met. One day recently I heard myself ask, “What would make me feel glad?” then smiled, realizing ….
My realization is, “The unique relationship of certain words can alter our emotions when we don’t know what to do beyond feel them.”