For the last few weeks, I’ve had the thought I’d like to get a piece of art with a heron on it for our guest bedroom. I can’t say for sure why. Maybe a heron’s grace as it takes flight brings me a sense of both peace and awe. Maybe I’ve always been attracted to a heron’s patience as it watches the water, still as a statue, until it sees its next morsel swim by. Maybe it’s just because a heron would look good on the gray wall.

Whatever the reason, it’s been like a craving, a strange drive to find a specific piece of art.

Serendipitously, on Sunday, as I sat in bed sipping coffee, reading emails and articles on my phone, I opened one of my favorite newsletters, The Marginalian by Maria Popova. And wouldn’t you know, the Sunday’s edition was titled “The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning.”

Ms. Popova’s newsletters are always full of intriguing, though-provoking wisdom. It’s a remarkable rabbit-hole of philosophy and facts. On Sunday, two parts of the article drew my attention.

I’ve read and re-read the following excerpt Ms. Popova posted by Jarod K. Anderson in his book, Something in the Woods Loves You:

There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.

Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.

I’ve especially pondered the first and last lines. When I think about the two paths to magic, imagination (play, what-if, fantasies) and paying attention (a job, chores, responsibilities), I think I’ve been pretty good at paying attention. Even in my childhood, when imagination might have reigned, paying attention was the more necessary path, the insisted path. Throughout my life, writing has given me just enough of a taste of imagination to whet my appetite, but even today, “paying attention” often tries to barge its way onto imagination’s path.

But since retiring, I’m finding great pleasure in walking imagination’s path. Whether my memoir is ever published or not, as I write it, I feel the “nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.”

The next part of the article to capture my attention was an art print of a heron with a collaged poem by Maria Popova:

I’m not sure which stanza I like more, but I think I’ve found a print for the guest room! The second stanza reminds me of yesterday’s post on transcendence in the phrase, “a single sunbeam of wonder, a golden reflection of a larger life in the pure stream of the possible.”

As I mentioned, before Sunday, a heron represented peace and patience. After reading The Marginalian, it also represents magic, imagination, risk, and possibility.

Serendipitous! And that in itself, is a single sunbeam of wonder. 🙂

Other Heron Writings:

Heron Haiku

Heron’s Delight