The Curious Point in Time in which we are all living

I was sitting at my kitchen table eating breakfast and looking outside at the trees. I find a beauty in their nakedness with all their leaves stripped off. It may be from the time of year I was born, the fall, and those were some of my first images my retina was processing. What I like about the trees now is that you can see their basis structure. There are these straight, curvy, bent, contorted vertical wood shapes, each different from the other. I like looking at them.

While I was mulling over the view and enjoying my egg, this strange crashing sound was happenning at the same time. Several cardinals fly around the bushes outside and perch in my azaleas. I can't tell if it's the same one but a very bright red one, must be the male, keeps on crashing into a mirror I have hanging outside on my laundry wall. ( I have an outdoor laundry area that has a few walls around it.) It is the funniest thing. He darts by and then all of a sudden goes in front of the mirror fluttering like crazy and then slams himself into it. I have tried to photograph him from inside the house and also standing very quietly outside the house but he is way too quick to let me capture him. I would probably have to post a tripod with a video to record the smashing of the red bird. What astonishes me is the repetition. I assume its the same bird and he does this over and over again. He never gets that the image he is seeing is himself, so attracted is he to the likeness of himself. Obviously the pain of hitting the hardness of the mirror hasn't daunted him. He comes back for more pleasure and pain repeatedly.

The lessons of the red bird are not lost on me. So much of our life is repeated activities. Some of it works. Some of it doesn't. It's all life but I can't help thinking that, like the red bird, humanity needs to move on and quit hurting itself with repeated activites that only cause pain and never lead to real answers.