HUM-BIRD DEPARTS - Ted Lyddon Hatten

(Photo by Ted Lyddon Hatten)

She left before I could give her the address. Or mention the forecast.

I was hoping she’d stick around a little longer like she did last year, maybe wait for the second storm to pass.
The truth is I enjoyed her company and our wordless exchange, she on a branch and I in a chair. Her inaudible question, which I grew to expect, stumped me every time; ¿What’s your heart trying to remember today? And then, with a flash of emerald green light, the question still hovering in thin air, she would vanish.
Gone.

Occasionally, I’d succumb to the urge to capture her likeness with a camera, enjoying the challenge but knowing it to be futile. A sharp image will elude me. My shutter speed, at 1/4000th of a second, is too slow to stop a ruby-throated hummingbird in flight. She’s a blur whose wings you cannot see.

Her brain is slightly larger than a mustard seed, and in late September she is processing information that is invisible to me. Her internal compass points Southeast as the autumnal equinox passes. She can see the Earth’s magnetic field - an ability she will need for navigation but refuses to describe. Her arduous journey will take her from here - the middle of the Midwest, through NC and FL, to the center of Central America.

Her body is no bigger than my thumb, and she weighs less than a piece of paper, yet she’ll fly non-stop over the Gulf of Mexico - a body of water that covers 600,000 square miles. The shadow she casts on the water below will cover three square inches.

Nectar in North Carolina will be scarce, with same fare in Florida - the life-saving flowers are gone - Helene and Milton plucked the whole region. But I do hope she lingers there for a few days - living off stray spiders and sap weeping from wounded trees. With the right house number, she could find shelter on Red Oak Road - I’d tell her to look for the wooden hull of an acoustic guitar, the one floating over the floodwaters and above the riptide of the rising sea of loss. It’ll have graffiti etched under the bridge that reads, Crucible of Catharsis.

She is both Magi and star - the gift she bears cascades down her back; it’s the color green. But her’s is no ordinary green for she is no ordinary magician. She deals with refracted light, not pigment. Thanks to chlorophyll, a magnolia leaf is green even in the dark. A hum-bird is not - in order to make green, she needs to catch light. She then takes that light and promptly breaks it with the structure of her feathers, producing a precious flash - emerald. Fractured light, split particle, splintered wave. Like everything about her, the glittering is fleeting.

And if your spirit is broken, truly shattered, if every hope you keep betrays you and your heart is heavy as stone, her chromatic grace is both arresting and liberating - it can stop you cold, and leave your mouth agape before wonder warms you back to life and breaks your memory wide open, finally free.

Her green is a gift, a visual sacrament shining over some forgotten Bethlehem. For a fleetingly eternal fraction of a second, she lifts the light like a priest lifts the body of Christ, uttering her wordless Words of Consecration, This is light broken for you. See.

And just like that,
gone.

She left before I could give her my gratitude. Or tell her to be careful.

Ted Lyddon Hatten is an artist, theologian, and educator in Des Moines, Iowa, who works in ephemeral installation art, dry painting, and beeswax. www.tedlyddonhatten.com