I started feeding hummingbirds this year (along with other wildlife; it's amazing the variety of critters one encounters in the city). I have feeders all around the house now, including an interesting domed one I picked up recently (keeps out the bees) hanging just outside my screen door. Big Boy is feeding as I type (sort of the on-site bully, but blood is never drawn and there's plenty for everybody...what can you do? shrug).
In the evening, they all come in for a late dinner. Long, drawn out drinks, and when they fly off for the last time of the day you can actually see them dragging their tight-as-a-grape little bellies behind them, off to the treetops to enter their nightly state of metabolic torpor which helps keep their little candles from burning out before morning's light and another day of feeding. Believe me when I say they are the first ones up in the AM and the last ones to say goodnight in the PM.
There he is again. It's been a little cooler the last couple of days here in the California desert, and they're venturing out of their shady hiding places a bit more. Sparkling little fish splashing in the atmospheric sea, and sometimes they'll almost let me touch them. Sometimes they'll wait outside the door as I refill a feeder, 3 or 4 hovering there outside the screen door. Little ruby throats pulsing with light. And I know all this is just space-time wiggling around, but so am I, and as I soar above the rooftops in search of nectar along with my little friends, I am reminded of the kindness of those who have set nectar out for me along the path of my journey. A bit self-serving of an observation, I'll concede :)
If you believe the logical consequence of antinatalism is hatred and personality worship, you are mistaken; on more than one level, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, if you see things that way it is precisely because you never had a chance of seeing things any other way. Same here, for the freedom of the hummingsbird's flight is only contexual, and in absolute terms there is, indeed, no escaping the cage. You'll either spend your days in rage against the cage, or you'll learn to live with it. Either way, you're never getting out of that cage.
