Mozart's Starling Quotes

“And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill, stitch a quilt,; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the elder friend's fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a blanket she knit with deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths, nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“I care with the brightened curiosity of one who loves a subject for no rational reason, but who loves it nonetheless and prodigally. This is the ardor of the academic Austenologist who believes that if she looks beneath the floorboards of the right dusty attic, she will find the diary entry explaining why Jane Austen rejected her one marriage proposal the day after she'd accepted it; of the birder in Costa Rica tiptoeing through tails of biting ants and fer-de-lance serpents in hopes of glimpsing a rare hummingbird that no one has seen for fifteen years. I could list such loves forever, the sort that visit our imaginations on the cusp of the impossible but that we cannot erase from our minds. We follow the trail with whatever breadcrumbs we can gather, with hope, with love, with an almost magical combination of urgency and patience...”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an opening for a tale; not "long ago, when animals could speak," but "Long ago, when people could listen.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“But the earth and its beings are extravagantly wild, full of unexpected wonders. It is time to turn from our textbooks and listen to the birds themselves.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own mumuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined. .”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“While I wandered the dreamy quiet of St. Marx Friedhof, it was the Requiem that swirled through my head. But when I set my chestnut on the gray concrete that had to stand in for Star's tiny, forgotten grave, it was the wild, swirling cadenzas from A Musical Joke that filled my mind and heart. Even more than his poem, this flight of musical fancy was Mozart's truest elegy for his small friend, the commonest of birds who could never have known that he was joining with a musical genius in the highest purpose of creative life: to disturb us out of complacency; to show us the wild, imperfect, murmuring harmony of the world we inhabit; to draw our own lives into the song.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“But in the bare practical outlines, we are two writers, sitting at our desks, with starlings on our shoulders”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“And do most of us really need a scientific document to inform us that the animals we live with are conscious beings?

I believe that the human sense of connection with the more-than-human world is innate and joyous. It is our truest way of being, of dwelling, of relating. It is not new; it is very old. It surfaces in the art and culture of every civilization across place and time - in stories of human-animal relationships that are based on respect, awareness, knowledge, and love.

I have no desire to confer on any animal a capacity that it doesn't have. There is no need. Animals have capacities enough - those we do understand, those we do not yet know, those we can never know because they reside in the unique minds of other-than-human beings.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“reading books over my shoulder and turning pages that I did not want turned, and having finished all of her e-mail correspondence, Carmen settles onto my shoulder, into the crook of my arm, or on my lap against my belly; she rounds her soft breast over her feet, fluffs and then unfluffs her feathers, and becomes perfectly still. Sometimes she will close her eyes; other times she will simply rest, entirely at peace. She might make a contented little sound, one I never hear from her aviary. It is a sigh-chirp, reserved for these moments of quiet snuggling. If I am still, I can feel her swift heartbeat. I will never tire of such moments. Comfort, rest, and unexpected consolation, shared so easily between two beings who grew from such seemingly different limbs of the taxonomic tree.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“There is another world,” Paul Éluard wrote, “but it is in this one.”* One world is marked by a bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon—a kind of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something wondrous. But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” We decide, moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. Certainly”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air the beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“You can’t think up an idea. Instead, an idea flies into your brain—unbidden, careening, and wild, like a bird out of the ether. And though there is a measure of chance, luck, and grace involved, for the most part ideas don’t rise from actual ether; instead, they spring from the metaphoric opposite—from the rich soil that has been prepared, with and without our knowledge, by the whole of our lives: what we do, what we know, what we see, what we dream, what we fear, what we love.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“One world is marked by a bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon—a kind of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something wondrous. But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” We decide, moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. Certainly we get no encouragement from what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the “overculture.” It cannot be assessed by the standardized cultural criteria of worth—measures that can be labeled with a sum or a statistic or even, perhaps, a word. Receptivity to wonder is not economically productive, marketable, quantifiable. The rewards, also, stand beyond such calculation. But it is in such receptivity that we discover what draws us, and along with it our originality, our creativity, our soulfulness, our gladness, our art. Mozart found inspiration in the presence of a common bird. For us, too, the song of the world so often rises in places we had not thought to look.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“In the first century, the Roman author, military commander, and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder raised starlings for study and recorded that Julius Caesar, among other early statesmen, also kept them and taught them to “parle Greek and Latin.” Disastrously for the starlings, it was believed in sixteenth-century Britain that if one used a silver sixpence to slit a starling’s tongue, the bird could be taught to speak more impressively.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“There is another world,” Paul Éluard wrote, “but it is in this one.”* One world is marked by a bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon—a kind of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something wondrous.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“all”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“By the time Star died, the Mozarts had been forced by financial constraints to leave their beloved Domgasse rooms and move to smaller apartments outside the town center. Their new lodging was on Landstrasse, not far from St. Marx Cemetery, where Mozart would be buried. While planning my journey to Vienna I dreamed of a little pilgrimage I would make, walking somber and peaceful and wistful, from the graveyard to the site of these lodgings. Here I would sneak about the grounds, or if the current owner was home and seemed kind, I would ask whether I might walk in the garden. I was sure that after all my thinking and imagining about Star’s funeral, I would somehow intuit which tiny patch of garden was the likely gravesite of Mozart’s starling.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“Carmen [pet starling] brings joy and depth and insight to our family. I believe she has a good life, and I am glad she did not die with her nest mates. But not one single day passes that I do not wish I could see her fly free.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“I waited so eagerly for Carmen to mimic back the concerto's motif. Now I see that she has been calling out something much bigger, much more vital; she has been singing back the song of life, all of life, all the time.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“I have always thought of all creatures-all organisms, really-as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness-ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“I am not suggesting that a bird, say, with her fleet heart, experiences more in a short life of three years than we do in that same period but that her actual perceived life may be longer than three years. The measure is mysterious; the time of the bird's life expands beyond our typical calculation in ways that we cannot understand, at least not yet. is it possible that some people, too, experience this time/space portal, allowing more experience to billow within and around them?”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“My grail chalice has been filled with an elixir that is perhaps headier than the wine of fact-it is filled with swirling, essential uncertainty and the difficult, mature task of dwelling in such a state.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“I am armed with a tenacious conviction that somehow the presence of the people who live in a home reside in the atmosphere of the walls forever.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“It was the official policy of the [raptor] rehab facility to euthanize any starlings that came through the door rather than lavish scarce resources on them and then release them into the wild to wreak their ecological havoc.

Most often the starlings that came to us were babies, orphaned or cat-caught; the people who brought them had no idea about the ecological conflict and usually didn't even know what kind of bird they had. They were just filled with compassion for another creature that needed care.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own murmuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined..”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling