A few days ago I was out walking just before sunset when my attention was captured by the sweet, clarion songs of a solitary bird. This bird had a repertoire of mellifluous trills, chirrups and tweets that came forth in an aria of birdsong. I looked toward the horizon and saw that the purple mountains in the west were tipped with molten gold. Scanning for the lone bird, I located one small, ordinary grey mockingbird sitting at the top of a tall juniper tree, facing the setting sun and singing its heart out for the end of the day.

Mockingbirds are some of the great singers of the bird world. They are so named because they are fabulous mimics who “mock” the songs of many other birds, but they put them all together in a glorious creative burst of song. And as Ernest Hemingway (a favorite writer and inspiration) once said, “You’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”

During my summers in France, I was often carried away at dawn and dusk to hear the wild birds sing. In particular, I thrilled to the songs of a famous plain brown bird, the nightingale, who can produce up to one thousand different sounds! Do nightingales sing at night? It turns out that the males sing at night to draw the attention of females who might be flying overhead. Vive la différence! And get this—the males sing a specific song to assure the female that he would be a good father to her offspring! Once they are mated, the male stops singing at night and sings during the day—very wise. With a vast migratory pattern, nightingales arrive in Europe from Africa, where they have wintered over. They can be heard in France in the spring and early summer, before they fly further north when it begins to get hot.

Here in the high desert, there are many birds that sing beautiful songs, but often it’s the mockingbird that intoxicates me. Like European nightingales, mockingbirds have many songs, but the mockingbird is much more humble. He or she can sing up to two hundred different songs, all lifted from other avian species.

On this particular evening I was contemplating the current pandemic, which may be our most recent sign of “the end of the world as we know it” along with global warming, pollution, over population, satellite debris orbiting Earth, endangered species, war, famine... (Nearly three billion birds have disappeared across North America since 1970, a decline of twenty-nine percent. Today, two-thirds of the continent's bird species are at risk of extinction due to climate change. And here’s an interesting note: Traffic noise is known to disrupt bird songs.)

Mythologizing demands lucent, lambent symbols, and my mockingbird singing at dusk is a good one—the “death” of the light of day into the oncoming night. In the last years of their lives, my teacher Lee and Arnaud Desjardins, a spiritual friend to me, often spoke about coming times involving extreme hardship on planet Earth. They shared a vision that “things will get worse before they get better.” For many of us, it seems that we are here, poised at the brink of a long dark night.

Why do mockingbirds sing at the moment when the light fades into darkness? Why do those awesome divas, blackbirds, sing in the dead of night? (Thank you, John and Paul.) I find these to be metaphors worth pondering. And my ponder goes like this: the wild bird sings at the end of the day or in the black of night because it cannot help itself. It naturally, spontaneously, expresses its innate nature, which is to sing for the sun that inspires its song. Does a bird’s instinct “know” that the sun never goes away but disappears for a duration of time, only to return?

When I listened to the mockingbird sing on that evening, my heart was uplifted. Praise was the rasa, the juice, the nectar of that voice. That cry to heaven invoked praise in me, as the horizon turned golden and the twilight sky was streaked with pink puffs and fountains and mansions of cirrus and cumulus clouds. In that moment I recognized the mockingbird’s songs as nature’s innate praise of deity, of the immanent Divine as Creator of all this. All this includes the endings of what we have known and the beginning of what is unknown, for when day fades into night, the greater cosmos comes into view. First with Venus and other planetary displays, and then the Milky Way, our galaxy, and even more distant blazing suns appear in the vast dark of space. Finally, night gives way to dawn. The sun rises, as it “always” does (though, of course, we know that our sun will eventually explode in a final last gasp of glory)… and another day begins. This is why the wild bird sings.