My friend and I always used to joke that Muffin didn’t know she was a bird.  At dinner time, my friend and I would sit at our spots at the table, and Muffin would sit at hers – well, ON the table, with her own plate of food.  She was so acclimated to our world that she had become a little feathered human.

When I bought Charlie, I thought of him in the same way.  He was too messy for meals at the table because had a tendency to roam around and sample everyone’s plate.  But he wasn’t really a bird, either.  For a long time he didn’t sleep in his cage at night, but on a perch that I put on the wall at the end of my bed.  Eventually I got sick of him asking to be picked up the moment I stirred.  I swear he knew I was awake before I did.

It didn’t seem to trouble me at the time that birds were meant to be in the wild.  They were made to fly, and to mate and to gather in colorful, raucous flocks.  Of course, I knew all of that was true, but Charlie was a pet.  I loved him and took care of him as best as I knew how.  I was never deeply impacted by how extremely unnatural a captive life is for any kind of bird.

I approached my purchase of Philip with the same kind of attitude.  I knew that I would take good care of him.  I had a special connection with parrots and I would do my best to give him a happy life.  But this was the first time I had been exposed to a baby.  Muffin and Charlie were several years old when I was introduced to them.  I saw Philip when he was frightened out of his wits from being brought to a totally strange place.  I saw how he responded to different people and how he tried to learn how to perch, and play, and eat.  And those were all things he would learn anyway, and maybe it doesn’t much matter if he learned how to perch on a tree branch or a dowel.  But being involved in the learning process magnified the differences between his current environment and the one he would have had in the wild.

And then there was another piece I had not factored into the picture.

The last ten years.

I had no real concept of original design in my earlier days.  Sure, I knew that people were good at one thing or another, but that was about it.  Design doesn’t have to be noticed to exist, but our understanding sure affects how we treat it.  And since my emotional outlook on life was “do what people like and need”, I didn’t have much of a theology of honoring design.

All of that changed with my introduction to Sapphire teachings.  I learned the importance of recognizing God’s design everywhere.  I learned to look for it and celebrate it.  I also discovered that land and nature are a core part of my design – hence the love of birds – and the mounting emotional crisis.

What on earth was I doing?

It sunk in over a period of a few weeks, as I was making my daily Philip visits.  Here I was, doing all of these terribly unnatural things to this baby bird, who was never made by God to live in captivity.  I would eventually put him in a cage, surrounded by a vast array of things that could hurt or kill him, feed him all kinds of things that aren’t on the menu in the Congo, and deprive him of his wings and a mate.  I felt awful.

It was a challenging couple of weeks, as I wrestled with my perspective.   I had to embrace the reality that at the end of the day, he was a parrot born in captivity.  Thousands of birds are born into captivity every year and there wasn’t much I could do to stop it.  Philip was going to have a pretty good deal with me.  Some would even say I was prepared to starve myself so he could have a new toy every week.  So, I was giving him a good shot at a life he was destined to live anyway.  I couldn’t take him back to the Congo, so I determined that I would do my best to honor what I could about how God made him.

Two important things happened in me, however.  One is that I lost a lot of the human selfishness that causes us to think we can do whatever we want with nature.  If we want to have a pet mountain lion, we have a pet mountain lion.  That, I think is just plain stupid.  At least Philip won’t eat me in the night.  But we seem to think we should possess, just because we can.  I don’t think it has to be proud or malicious; it is just a part of our fallen human condition to turn our call to stewardship into something that satisfies our desire for companionship or entertainment.

The other is that a longing for the real deal was awakened in me.  I think that we were made to have a special relationship with animals.  There are many stories of people who have a wild animal that returns to them regularly.  One intrepid man had a way-to-close-for-comfort relationship with a crocodile.  Many of the mystics of the olden days were known for taming bears and wolves.  That, to me, seems like the way it should be.  They live where they were made to live, we live where we are made to live, and all is well.  No chewed blinds or blueberries splattered all over the wall.

But I had run out of time to philosophize.  Philip was nearly weaned and it was time to bring him home.

I was going to be a new Mom.