Sometimes, at the end of the day, I have a chance to sit in a chair and watch the field. The field is all around but cut by a road that brings customers to the stand. The road -- state highway -- stretches east and west and reaches out into the world and transports motorcycles and electric cars and pickup trucks with large flags posted to their beds flapping importance in their exhaust as if a staff car of a general in a North African Campaign against Rommel, or maybe with Rommel. I must admit, though, over the last year the number of Virginia Battle Flags has diminished. The road is imaginary in what passes by; each traveling head filled with its own personal history and mythological bookings and fears and hopes and prejudices. They come and go speaking not at all of Michelangelo. A show all its own. Strictly human.

But, if you give yourself the pleasure and look away from the roadway and its tumult and exhaust and speed to somewhere away from where they came, give yourself the pleasure and you look at the field, the green, cut field with long hedgerows and a ridgeline of green to blue, you might notice some equally captivating scenes of force and struggle and survival. Grasshoppers are particularly plentiful this week.

Hayfields produce many things including bugs and the birds to eat them. When the timing is just right the young birds are in the air by the day the mower comes through baling the nests and egg shells. Red wing blackbirds hatch in nests of grass woven by the parents around the stem of tall clumps of grass. The nests are about two feet off the ground. You can see where they are in the field if you study the parents. The young hatch and are fed bugs and they are soon fledglings and, in the air, the family joins other families also hatched in the field and the families become flocks. Sitting in my late day chair, I watch the flocks now swooping across the field in their own harvesting pattern, the back of the flock flying low over the grounded birds to get to the front of the flock where they eat, hunting a new quadrant of bugs from the mown grass. Then that group is in the middle of the flock and then in the rear again when they fly low again to the front, harvesting, gorging for the long migration to come.

Suddenly a different motion occurs, a murmuration, and the entire flock takes off en mass and swoops up to the tree tops of the hedgerows, where they settle in, briefly, as if just practicing, and then they swoop in mass again down to a different angle of the field to eat and hop flying low one by one to the front, all organized in a time-tested routine, a rhythm to give each bird the opportunity of a fresh feeding ground, of being the first in line.

I see the flock there now streaming across the field like a harvesting machine, a combine, stripping the field of insects. I like to think this is my flock, the flock that grew up in my field, that these are Phelps birds. Little doubt some of them are, and some of them will return to the exact clump of grass they were hatched to build their own nest next spring -- Mother Nature willing. A flock can contain starlings and redwings and cowbirds and most of us just think of them as blackbirds and that’s fine.

Currently, it is fashionable to argue the cosmos does not really exist without man thinking about it. That the stars and Moon and life and nature exist only if we perceive it to exist. Consciousness, human consciousness is a cosmological requirement. I know I am oversimplifying, but to me this point of view is antithetical to Being and Existence itself. I had a professor once who vehemently argued if a branch fell in the forest and no one was there to hear it that there was no sound. I am reminded of a Monti Python skit with John Cleese in which the wizard disappears by making Cleese look in the other direction, becoming “invisible” and then “visible” again just by turning his head into the line of sight. Funny. Simple. Too simple? Maybe. Maybe not. I know these birds don’t care if I am here witnessing them, watching them.

Is an empty chair still a chair? Is a pickup truck without a flag exhibiting consciousness? Somehow I believe the Universe is indifferent to OUR existence and I’m just fine with that.