Birdsong

29 Ramadhan, 1444

One of the benefits of doing the Dawn Prayer early, as is my wont in Ramadhan, is that it's invariably accompanied by our feathered friends tuning up at first light. A couple of days back, when we suffered the power outage, I prayed with all the windows open to ease the humidity that had built up through the long, still night, and got to hear even more detail than usual. Normally there's one very obvious repeated melody that dominates - and gets a bit monotonous if truth be told. But on that morning I became conscious of deeper textures - a whole net of sound. Entangled in blessings.

Have you not seen that God it is to whom everything in the heavens and on the earth gives praise and the birds on the wing. He knows the prayer of each, the praise of each.