On Shipping Flamingoes

I have timidly begun my African romance, exercising both the exuberance of learning all I can about my new lover, as well as averting my eyes from the traits that are less appealing.

This plaintive vignette from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa illustrates one of the paradoxes of human nature (also blatantly manifested in the expressions of civilization one sees on the African continent): we are gifted at recognizing beauty when we strike upon it, but equally as clumsy in knowing how to cherish and tend it so that it can thrive and remain to please us -- and we fail to see our response as part of the connection. It's how we are with the good gifts in our lives -- both in our relationships with humans and the world around us.

Like a selfish child who grasps at what she wants but squeezes too hard and then cries when the toy is broken--so often that is the pattern I follow with the good things in my life. And grabbing at what is to be esteemed with delicacy shows how afraid I am of losing what was given to me freely.

I think this little story from Dinesen's time in Africa illustrates it well:

The Flamingoes are the most delicately coloured of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an Oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherche curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were makinug all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.

I once travelled from Port Said to Marseilles in a French boat that had on board a consignment of a hundred and fifty Flamingoes, which were going to the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Marseilles. They were kept in large dirty cases with canvas sides, ten in each, standing up close to one another. The keeper, who was taking the birds over, told me that he was counting on losing twenty percent of them on a trip. They were not made for that sort of life, in rough weather they lost their balance, their legs broke, and the other birds in the cage trampled on them. At night when the wind was high in the Mediterranean and the ship came down in the waves with a thump, at each wave I heard, in the dark, the Flamingoes shriek. Every morning, I saw the keeper taking out one or two dead birds, and throwing them overboard. The noble wader of the Nile, the sister of the lotus, which floats over the landscape like a stray cloud of sunset, had become a slack cluster of pink and red feathers with a pair of long, thin sticks attached to it. The dead birds floated on the water for a short time, knocking up and down in the wake of the ship before they sank.