Like a Hummingbird: Some Musings on Life and Tenkara

Lately I’ve been sitting on the back deck in the coolness of the morning before the heat and humidity envelope the day like a damp, hot blanket of misery. Each morning I’m visited by at least two hummingbirds. Though it’s hard to say for sure. All I can really say is that I’ve only ever seen two at a time. They come to our hummingbird feeder as well as the flowering plants. I watch them come and go. They’re so busy. I can’t help but to be amazed by these tiny creatures. Little feathered dinosaurs – I tend to think that we’ve never exited from the Age of The Dinosaurs.

To watch a hummingbird hover in place is to watch a miracle. But at what cost? Flapping those tiny wings at between 3,000 and 4,800 times per minute (50 to 80 beats per second). It seems impossible. All that effort to simply stand still. Interestingly, while investigating hummingbirds for this article I learned that on an average day, a hummingbird will consume double its body weight and that relative to size, they have the largest heart of any animal.

One morning as I watched these little dynamos I got to thinking. I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve got ADD. It’s been something that I’ve had to deal with my entire life. I never had a name for it till I was an adult. The mental effort that it can take to complete everyday tasks can seem insurmountable at times. Exercising proper executive function and focusing, especially in a busy or noisy environment, takes an awful lot of energy. Organization of things and management of time… can be difficult. I’m not complaining. It is what it is.

I feel like I can relate to those little birds. So much effort just to keep my mind still enough to move in a productive way and not just stutter, shimmy and grind.

“My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it’s operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. 
-Dave Eggers, You Shall Know our Velocity!

The minimal amount of gear needed for a tenkara outing is of course fantastic. But it’s not just the gear on the stream, it’s the preparation ahead of time and the organization, or lack of both, that is also a huge benefit to someone like myself. It’s so easy to keep a few tenkara rods rigged up and ready to roll. And yes I am one of those heathens that keeps the line attached and wound around the handle of the rod. And the freedom that I’ve learned to exercise regarding fly selection is another gift. I’m never going to say that fly selection doesn’t matter at all – but I’m no longer a slave to the tying vise before each outing tying multiple versions of each insect in various stages of development in several sizes… not that there’s anything wrong with that if you enjoy it – but it’s nice to be able to be free of it when I want to be.

All the moving parts of the universe are complex and simply standing still among the chaos can use up a lot of my mental energy. Sometimes there isn’t a lot of focus left to expend on extra things. Like that hummingbird I need to make the most of every wingbeat. The stick and the string of tenkara is a thing so simple and elegant and so obvious, but somehow so improbably useful. Useful as an actual tool and maybe equally useful as a metaphorical lever to get one’s self unstuck.

“The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Not related to the post really but here’s a song called Hummingbird by Wilco that I really dig…

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