This afternoon I watched a bird through the kitchen window, a favorite bird of Iris’s and mine, perched sturdily on the narrow back of a wicker chair on Iris’s patio.  My thoughts should have been far from mortality, but kept drifting to the news I’d heard earlier in the day of the death of Amy Winehouse.

How could this bird, with its spindly legs and tiny feet, defy the elements and remain poised on a thin rail…while sleeping?  I have trouble remaining upright standing in a meadow, fully awake, leaning against a tree, yet this frail specimen possessed an innate power that kept it from wobbling uncontrollably and striking the stones below the chair.

Then it hit me.  Not the bird.  But the realization that the bird had balance.  For all of her immense talent, it was the one thing that Ms. Winehouse lacked.  And, as with most things in her short life, she lacked it on a grandiose scale.

I found myself watching the bird with the same absence of intention that I would watch Ms. Winehouse perform; mesmerized by the simplicity, baffled by the complexity and drawn to the mystery.

As I leaned on the sink to keep from falling through the glass, the little creature took flight, and my spirit lifted with it and soared lowly for just a short time.  Returning from where it had fallen earlier in the day.

There are few things sadder than watching a beautiful bird fall, noiselessly, from the back of her chair.