Freebird

The Goldfinch is available at Valley Artisans Market in Cambridge NY. 

One of the most beautiful sounds in nature is the sound of a songbird singing its special tune, flying from tree to tree, free to fly wherever it wants to go.  There is nothing lovelier then watching a crow strut, a couple of love birds cooing, or cute little sandpipers at the beach.

For most of my life I wasn’t able to enjoy the beauty of a bird.  I had a severe bird phobia, not just your run of the mill bird phobia, but a full blown, anxiety ridden, couldn’t breathe kind of phobia.  When I was a young girl I came home to find my two pet canaries dead on my kitchen floor, an event so traumatic I almost couldn’t write this sentence.  Dead birds where a constant theme in my childhood and even today if I am very anxious I can picture them in my mind.

Art gave the beauty back to me.  Art healed my bird phobia when last year I hand embroidered a series of several different birds.  I made a bluebird, a goldfinch, a sparrow, a whack a doodle bird and a series of hand embroidered ornaments with several different types of birds in them.  Expressing those birds through art set me free from my bird phobia.  I still will walk a block out of my way to avoid a dead one but­­ I can look at the living ones and enjoy their songs, their colors, and freedom.

 

Art has a way of fixing all that ails you if you let it.  Finding a way that is just right for you can be somewhat of a challenge, but if you give yourself and your problems to art it can make you heal.  I have discovered that if you are an artist and you are not expressing your life, your life expresses you.  Some say art is not a job it is just a hobby, but sometimes art and music and literature can mend your heart.  Whether it is the end of your bird phobia or a song that makes you dance as if you were young again, art is important.

Everyone chooses their own path in life, or again someone else chooses it for them.  But art is something personal, a way of expressing ourselves in our own unique way just like the songbird.  You can see the uniqueness if you look at photography as a medium, two people can look at the same bird and capture it differently.   It works that way in all of the arts sharing unique expressions of the same theme.

That leads me to the song of the day Freebird was a song made popular by Lynard Skynard.  My favorite line of the song is I’m as free as a bird now and this bird you cannot change.  That is a cry for the unique if I ever heard one.  Find your uniqueness and share it.