By now you might have noticed that this week’s blogging is dedicated to the beautiful things in my immediate vicinity – bugs, bees, bird, flowers, you name it. It was an attempt to remind myself that you do not have to travel far to find wonder – I had just declined an invitation to a wedding in an exotic location, my (now thwarted) lust for adventure severely at odds with my desire to reduce my carbon foot print, and to boycott a destination life-style, among other reasons.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with travel – it will always be one of my favorite things. I just want to be more conscious in what kind of travel I choose and for what reason.

Sunday’s chance encounter with the hummingbird (Kolibri) in these first two photographs, and the many more I found in my archives, was the best possible reassurance that I want for nothing in the beauty-and-awe department.

Hummingbirds are important pollinators; the fluttering of their wings moves loose pollen around until it finds its destination. Their bills are often covered with sticky pollen that gets transferred to the next flower when they move on to take another nectar sip somewhere else. And pollen even sticks to their heads when they move deep into a blossom, brushing again the anther. True friends of any garden.

Here is a clip that shows them drinking:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtUQ_pz5wlo

Below is a poem by Pablo Neruda that paints with words the colors and the joy you feel when near these oscillating creatures.

Ode to the Hummingbird

The hummingbird
in flight
is a water-spark,
an incandescent drip
of American
fire,
the jungle’s
flaming resume,
a heavenly,
precise
rainbow:
the hummingbird is
an arc,
a golden
thread,
a green
bonfire!

Oh
tiny
living
lightning,
when
you hover
in the air,
you are
a body of pollen,
a feather
or hot coal,
I ask you:
What is your substance?
Perhaps during the blind age
of the Deluge,
within fertility’s
mud,
when the rose
crystallized
in an anthracite fist,
and metals matriculated
each one in
a secret gallery
perhaps then
from a wounded reptile
some fragment rolled,
a golden atom,
the last cosmic scale,
a drop of terrestrial fire
took flight,
suspending your splendor,
your iridescent,
swift sapphire.

You doze
on a nut,
fit into a diminutive blossom;
you are an arrow,
a pattern,
a coat-of-arms,
honey’s vibrato, pollen’s ray;
you are so stouthearted–
the falcon
with his black plumage
does not daunt you:
you pirouette,
a light within the light,
air within the air.
Wrapped in your wings,
you penetrate the sheath
of a quivering flower,
not fearing
that her nuptial honey
may take off your head!

From scarlet to dusty gold,
to yellow flames,
to the rare
ashen emerald,
to the orange and black velvet
of our girdle gilded by sunflowers,
to the sketch
like
amber thorns,
your Epiphany,
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
shimmering
from torrid California
to Patagonia’s whistling,
bitter wind.
You are a sun-seed,
plumed
fire,
a miniature
flag
in flight,
a petal of silenced nations,
a syllable
of buried blood,
a feather
of an ancient heart,
submerged

Music is a sincere hommage to the poet: