Who Lives Down The Street From Flamingos?
Wally pondering whether he can swim faster than flamingos can fly.
:::
“Nature is the art of God.” (Dante)
:::
It’s amazing what becomes normal, almost nondescript to us, over the passage of time, rooted in a place that becomes home. I rarely take for granted the fact that I live almost 10,000 miles (16,000 km) away from my place of birth in Northern California, where the vast majority of my family still lives. Most of the time, it’s a simple math calculation (“Let’s see, 9 hours difference puts their day when?”) or a quick check online to see the latest ‘local’ news. For my family, Cape Town has become our home over the past three years, and ‘home’ itself has been continually re-defined as we settle into the rhythm of marriage and children, a new family center formed as the cycle of life rolls on.
Normal in Cape Town is a funny thing, as it is anywhere people live. For us, we live at the intersection of two magnificent oceans, the Atlantic and Indian, and can literally see the current lines between the two intersect off Cape Point. Table Mountain is one of the new “natural wonders” of the world. The New York Times named Cape Town as the number 1 travel destination worldwide in 2014. South Africans, especially from Gauteng, flock to our shores each holiday season, which is a funny thing in and of itself, living in a place most consider a holiday destination. Every direction the eye scans beholds yet another breathtaking view or natural beauty that many others would eagerly desire to see.
I say this not to brag, for our family considers our opportunity to live in this gorgeous corner of the world something we are deeply grateful for, and awake to each day. Rather, I list these examples to illustrate this simple point: what human beings consider ‘normal’ is relative to their sense of place, their neighbours and surroundings. To many in our world, we live in the shadow of one of the most iconic mountains in the entire world. We realise that as well, and yet Table Mountain and its surroundings are home for us.
What if we began to consider the flip side of this statement as well – that what is ‘abnormal’ for us is also relative to our sense of place, our neighbours and surroundings? Perhaps people who speak a different native tongue, have a darker (or lighter!) skin colour than ours, and who value traditions distinct from our own are not weird but rather simply unknown. What if we considered those different from us as human beings with incredible dignity and value that we simply have not discovered to this point?
All of these thoughts have been swirling around my brain since I took Wally to the Zandvlei Estuary down the street from our home in Muizenberg a few weeks ago, and stumbled upon a flock of 25 pink-legged flamingos who were calling the waters near our house “home.” As I shook my head in disbelief and wonder, trying to reckon the reality that I lived down the street from flamingos, who were my ‘neighbours,’ I found myself wanting to speak to any other neighbour walking their dogs near me, looking for an explanation for this unexpected delight from the animal kingdom (Who doesn’t love flamingos? Their combination of grace and awkwardness, shaded with the colour palette of a 7-year old girl, is hard to beat!). I kept finding long-time neighbours offering me unsatisfactory answers. “They come and go, but always return here.” “I don’t know what they are attracted to here, but they always seem to return.” It’s as if I was looking for a spectacular explanation to make sense of the wonder before me that my fellow neighbours considered normal.
The more I reflect on my flamingo neighbours, however, the more I am convinced that their relative normalcy to our neighbourhood actually reveals a beautiful truth of the wonder all around us. To quote the first stanza of a haunting hymn written by Maltbie Babcock in 1901,
“This is my Father’s world
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.”
(“This Is My Father’s World”)
:::
Note: I reflect on this idea further in a new “Kitchen Table Story” video teaching of the same name I just completed for EKerk. I hope “Who Lives Down The Street From Flamingos?” encourages you to listen afresh to the Father’s world singing all around you, “the music of the spheres.”