Ruby-throated Hummingbird : The Long Walk

This is a Ruby-throated Hummingbird. The little jewel in its gorget gives the species its name. It’s easy to see it here when it’s perched; it’s stunningly more challenging in flight when they can hit speeds of 60 mph - especially given that hummingbirds can change direction in an instant. They can hover. They can fly purely vertically. Unlike every other bird, they can even fly backwards. But what they can’t do is walk. Their evolutionary history has created one of the world’s most remarkable fliers but at the cost of taking a single step.

Torah relates two long walks. The first begins when HaShem speaks to Avram telling him Lech-Lecha. Walk! So Avram beings a journey of several thousand miles from Mesopotamia to Canaan. And during this walk - depicted without details - we see the birth of the Jewish People. The second long walk is the Exodus, the multigenerational trek from Egypt to Canaan. And during this walk - extensively detailed - we witness the birth of the Jewish Nation. There is in these walks an inherently creative impetus. Halacha, The Walk, constitutes who we are and how we live.

Unseasonable rains lately have left me more hummingbird than patriarch. I’ve been prevented from my accustomed long morning walks. It’s during these walks that I photograph birds. More disruptively, it’s during these long walks that I feel jewel-like flashes of inspiration and awareness. One walks at a “deliberate” pace. Walking provides time and quiet to “deliberate” on important thoughts. And surely there is something freeing, for both body and mind, as we “(de)-liberate.” Morning walks are a microcosm of both Avram’s and Moses’s creative journeys. Take a walk. Do The Walk. And as we walk, let your spirit and your thoughts fly like the Hummingbird.