Bird Droppings September 22, 2025

Listening to a five-note flute and thinking about friends and the word normal

I find it hard to believe it is fall, although you can feel it in the air. The chill perhaps got me thinking back about eight years ago, I was fishing with my grandson at the Atlanta Children’s Museum, when my wife, who I could see with our granddaughter a hundred feet away playing in the moon sand, called me. I looked over as I reached for my phone, and she was upset, I could see. She informed me that my middle son in North Carolina had called, and a dear friend of the family had passed away. In my own strange way, I was close to this young man whom we had known for twenty-five years. He came to me almost eighteen years ago, asking if I would perform his wedding service. He and his wife had talked, and my name popped up. I had never officiated at a wedding and at that time was not ordained. So, checking into things, I followed up and got ordained; those years of seminary and church work paid off.

Jamie, Katie, and I sat down to plan a service. First thing was not to be religious, which was easy for me; this was about their love for each other, which was infectious, to say the least. Second, the wedding was going to be in the old Trolley Barn, a venue in Atlanta. The story went on, and a wedding service, and almost nine years of watching love grow and flourish on social media and our occasional meetings.  They restored a home in Atlanta, and eventually, a career move took them to Tampa. Katie kept a running account of their projects and life in a blog. Then a phone call on that Saturday while at the museum.

My wife and I both felt as if this were a dream. We had been through second grade through graduation with Jamie and his parents. Both our boys were band kids, and they gathered after school for projects and craziness, including several movie projects they all worked on. Many of that crew went to Georgia Tech, and Jamie had a loft at Georgia State just a few blocks away. The friendship continued to flourish. I used this passage in Jamie’s wedding service.

“You have noticed that everything an Indian does in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. Everything that the power of the world does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.” Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, 1863-1950

We each continue our journeys in life. Each morning when I was teaching at the local high school I would stop by our local Quick Trip and stock up. Water bottles, protein in the moon sandbar, a banana, and whatever else I need to make it through the day. No longer teaching, I just go by my corner store and grab supplies for my sunrise chasing and deer watching. Today was no different till a young man approached me and stuck out his hand, “Mr. Bird, great to see you”, and I rushed through my memory banks looking for a name. He began asking about animals in my room, former classmates, and whether I was still teaching. He had seen a photo I posted on Facebook of my room at school and was thinking about me. Funny thing, it just hit me, his name was Stephen, we talked for several minutes, and I bought his coffee, and we parted ways, both of us heading out to chase a sunrise and him to work.

As I drove out, another student popped into my mind. I left teaching in 1977, and this student at that time was fifteen. He had several issues all rolled into a neat label of learning disabilities. I knew after two years of working with him, more was at stake, and administrators did not want to push my more loaded probing. After I left teaching, I kept in touch with the school and students. He came up in the summer of 1979 to work on our family farm for me. We had a day camp, and he helped cut grass and worked around the camp area. One evening, he and his buddy, another one of my former students, asked if we could go to the new movie opening, Dawn of the Living Dead. We did go, and about thirty minutes after dropping them off at the camp lodge, there was a knock on our door. Could they sleep in our house that night? Two teenagers couldn’t take being in the middle of four hundred acres of farmland alone after that movie.

Sadly, my predictions came through several years later, and he is serving three life sentences. I looked him up one day on the Georgia Correctional web page. I recall his sisters’ desperate call after he was arrested, telling me what happened. The family pleaded for life sentences due to psychiatric issues and signed off on no parole. He is now a ward of the state.  Could it have been different, a gesture here and there, a word?

I listen quite a bit to flute music played and recorded by Carlos Nakai, a renowned musician and Grammy nominee for Native American music. He plays a handmade wooden five-note flute, often unaccompanied except by echoes from his own flute. I will explain my morning meditation is green tea, Carlos Nakai, and chasing sunrises.

As I looked through the news on my phone earlier this morning, I read an interesting article. The Dakota Sioux are playing Scrabble to preserve their language. In the Sioux nation, fewer than 205 members of the tribe are fluent in the old language. A good friend who happens to be Creek told me of going to boarding school in this day and age; he is my age, and he was punished for speaking his native tongue, old-style Creek. He grew up speaking only Creek from living with his grandfather, who was the medicine man to the Creek nation, and would only speak Old Creek. While knowing the language, he refused to speak English, having given up on the white man many years previously.

“The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers; he belongs just as the buffalo belonged…. Out of the Indian approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.” Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux, 1868-1937

I was amazed at the offerings that we used to have at our high school. In the previous catalog were courses in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and Latin, and yet in our lifetimes, or at least in mine, we refused an indigenous people the right to their own language. I recall a scene from “Into the West,” a several-year-old mini-series that recently replayed, it is a rerun on Home Box Office movie with a different slant. Children were brought to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania from reservations in the Dakotas and elsewhere, and we tried to make them “normal”. I am not just about Native Americans today, but our feeble attempts at normalcy. Our guidelines and rules were not that long ago. Handed children were forced to write right-handed. In numerous research papers, the concept of mixed dominance came up and showed significant damage being done to left-handed children neurologically. Even today, many traditional teachers will try to get kids to write with their right hand. Seems it is easier on the teacher. Here I am thinking several years back to my granddaughter, who at that time favored her left hand. We tend to forget you are right or left-sided as well, eyed, and footed, literally your entire body.

Normal is such a simple word, pretty much everything that is not abnormal, borrowed from philosopher Foucault. But in schools, it is the norm that drives everything. We look for patterns in testing, for averages, for norms, all those things we can put numbers on and measure. I recall years back, I had a student who would go to the door before a period and ask to be let go early because there were no norms about it. He did not want to be recognized as a SPED, a Special Education student. I would have snuck him out the back door, but we didn’t have one. What was funny was that it became a joke eventually, as I would go to the door and determine who was a norm or not and clear the way when the bell rang.

I think back to my own high school days before IDEA became law in 1974. This was before most disabled children were allowed in schools. I worked in a private center with severely and profoundly disabled children and adults. Our kids were normal, and we viewed the rest of the world as disabled, and we talked this way. They were disabled because they were unable to experience what we did every day. To have an appreciation for little things, reading your first word, taking a step without a wheelchair, not having a seizure for a day or two.

I read blogs and bulletins about clothes and music and think back. I see jeans purchased with holes in them. We earned ours, and yes, I had numerous pairs of jeans with holes and patches; my sons have claimed them all now. But we earned the holes and patches with wear and tear on and in our jeans. Back in the day, we did not have fifty brand-name labels to argue over; it was simply Levi’s or Wranglers, period, and they all had brass rivets on the back pockets. It was funny, as a matter of fact, in high school, we could not wear jeans because of the rivets scratching the seats at school. This is what we were told, and girls could not wear pants, although I am not sure, other than the puritanical demeanor of the dress code in those days. That was over forty-five years ago.

Thinking back to what was normal and what a word that is. I recall special education back then and how one student who was in special education all her life graduated from college and retired recently as a teacher. Nowadays, she would have been labeled a? Where will these kids be?

It was once estimated that by 2025, the Dakota Sioux language would be extinct, and many said so what. It is sort of like so what if we lose a piece of wilderness for more oil, as some politicians are calling for again, with the drill baby drill chant at such endeavors as Tea Party rallies. So what if the Grizzly bear is extinct, or the eastern red wolf, or some nondescript freshwater mussel no one ever sees, or a rain forest tribe that is better off in a house and raising crops than hunting in the forest?

Something we tend to forget is that all is interrelated, Mitakuye Oyasin (We are all related in Lakota), each piece connects to the other, and by losing a piece, the puzzle will never be complete. Some selfish people really do not care about 2025 and whether the Dakota Sioux language disappears or the wilderness is gone, as long as they make their billions now. I wonder what you can do with billions of dollars when you are gone. Maybe that is the part I have a hard time with, and on a smaller scale, looking at lists that drive popularity on social networks. Things like do you have a cell phone, iPod, car, Jet Ski, etc. I will admit I do have a few collections, still, I keep books, and I store literally hundreds of thousands of photos, all bits and pieces of my life and understanding.

So where do we go and what do we do? We look for each connection to the next. We look for the coincidences and chance happenings, we look for synchronicity in life. I have found that after a day or two of looking, you will find amazing things. It is if the pieces fall into place and life takes a whole new look, and what was important may not be as crucial anymore. Try reading Thoreau; there are several good sites on the internet. He walked about for several years just to learn. Enough of my wandering for today, peace be with you all, and please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart, and to always give thanks and always give thanks, namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

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