O:JA&L Flash Nonfiction
Personal Essay/Memoir/Vignette
Gregory Ormson
A MAN BECAME A BIRD
AND ACCUSED HIMSELF OF AN UNFORGIVABLE SIN
I think I am a man, a human being, but sometimes I feel all feathers and claws: a crow, towhee, hummingbird, owl, or roadrunner. There are men-birds you know. I’ve seen them. The first was in one of India’s ancient alleys, a narrow pathway walled in by stone like a Roman aqueduct. The other in the remote area of Dine’ land, the Navajo Nation.
Walking behind him in New Delhi, he turned and laughed at me. His brown buttocks visible through threadbare pants like a patchy thrush in the bush testing the limits of its cover. When he turned into an alley, I was there 15 seconds later. He was not. There were no windows, doors, or exits where he could have gone. Only a blackbird remained in the narrow asphalt through-way. It, or he, made a sound then lifted up like a funeral in feathers, laughed again and away. I didn’t know how and still don’t.
In Dine’ land, the elder chose a roadrunner for his brown metamorphosis. Grandfather had reasons for shifting into a skinny-legged cuckoo to sprint away from his hogan.
“Where did Grandfather go?” His Granddaughter – our guide – asked. Grandmother said, “I don’t know, he was just here.” I glimpsed him duck behind the pinion tree. He was wise to downshift and sprint away as our Ford van kicked up dust and closed in on his hogan. Anglos have been delivering disease and bad spirits to the people (Dine’) for a long time. Grandfather was aware.
On my three-day vision quest in the desert, I realized the desert was no place for self-pity. My twin pillars of identity, marriage and career, had crumbled, and I needed shifting and redemption for my broken spirit.
Silent, baking under the hot Sun and the big sage, crows gathered above me and gave me the stink eye. They berated me and cawed out that I was not much of a man, not a bird, and certainly not one of the brothers gathered in shiny ebony feathers. They pointed out that I didn’t do much, didn’t eat much, and didn’t say much.
The crows continued to index my faults: too slow, has big feet, and can’t fly. They were right about everything. Part of me, sitting in fading light, yearned for darkness and relief from accusation, but another part of me was on that branch with my brothers and sisters in shiny ebony wing. We were accusing the man below, and I enjoyed our confident repartee. Today, I’m not sure where I would go if I had to choose between being hanging with my friends above or with the lonely man below.
The California Towhee’s watched me too. I did nothing bad, but nothing good either. Worst of all, I didn’t sing. Maybe it clipped their confidence when I said, Your song sucks. Language specialist Alejandro Zambra described the towhee’s chirp as, “a loud, pervading beep that sounds like a smoke detector running low on batteries.” The California Towhee stared me down and leveled me with truth. “It’s not how well you sing, it’s that you do.”
On the third night of my vision quest I sat in a stone circle watching and listening. Dark night enveloped me like the smell of warm bread, and I recalled the harsh daytime treatment from crows and Sun. Spirits spoke through the wind, seconding the sentence that was meted out by the crows. “Go back to your people and hold the bowl.” I was not lost, only unhappy that I had to go back to people.
“I don’t mind people, but I kinda feel better when they’re not around.” It’s a line from “The Bar Fly,” or perhaps directly from the pen of Charles Bukowski. The movie was based loosely on his life. But I often feel like that too.
Now my life is past the days when I could endure camping on hard ground in rugged isolation, at least in my body. But I need a retreat, and kinda feel better when a lot of people aren’t around. That’s what writing is to me, a temporary retreat, putting hand on pen forming a word to make a sentence. It’s my shape shifting alphabets and words that stamp out a story. And now it’s time to shift my shape again, to become feather and tail.
Peering over my beak, I see a man over there. He’s sitting alone in the desert trying to remember what it felt like when he took on feathers, wings, legs, and claws. The feathers, he thinks, lifted him up between narrow stone walls a long way from here; another time it was on skinny legs that took him road-running in a high desert as a van approached the hogan.
That man/bird looks like me, but he’s not singing, flying, or running. He’s writing something, shifting alphabets and imprints, scratching dirt or paper to find a memory. Beak and claw, sometime long ago, he thinks, but he can’t quite place it.
I see him sitting now. His feet are big, he certainly can’t fly, and all around him is a mess. I guess that’s what writers do, scratch and sit in the mess. I will sing for this mess when it gets dark. He seems to listen better then. I’ll go to him as an owl and ask, “Are you still wasting water?”
Then I’ll ask again,
“who, who, who, who
are you
to do
that thing.”
About the writer:
Gregory Ormson was Midwest born and raised and now lives in Arizona. He’s traveled far in mind, body, and spirit, and learned from a wide variety of people in places from sketch to Shinola. His life goals have been to jettison all defensiveness, and to sing, teach, breathe, and move with grace. Like everyone else he’s a bit stardust, a touch of shadow and light, and a drop of golden matter and mind wrapped in billion-year-old carbon. Pretty simple.
Image: Totem (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
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