Feeding the Soul

Sometimes we can nourish ourselves by feeding others

In the center of my New England town there is a duck pond. When my children were little, I would often take them there on warm afternoons. We would throw balled-up bread and the ducks would come rushing, flapping their enormous wings. And, the sea-gulls would swoop down trying to peck the bread mid-air.

Now the kids are older, not even kids really. Even the 15-year-old is more a young man than a boy. So, I go alone.

There is a yellow sign that says “SLOW” It shows a mama duck trailed by three baby ducks. When the ducks decide to cross the street, the cars stop; for the ducks have right of way. Once, we waited willingly and patiently while twenty ducks crossed the street at their stately pace.

On a warm spring evening I bought an extra loaf of bread at the grocery store. Loathe to head straight home, I drove instead to the duck pond. As I fed the ducks, I felt a bit sad thinking of the times gone by. I missed the fullness of my days as an engaged mother. I missed the innocence of youth — mine and my kids’.

A minivan pulled up and three kids tumbled out, followed by their mom. They did not have any food for the ducks.

I offered them mine. The kids came forward hesitantly. I gave them slices of bread, showed them how to ball it up to keep it from getting soggy and disintegrating when they hit the water. They started tossing the balls, and before I knew it the little hands were stretched in front of me for more… I smiled at them, happier to be giving them the bread to toss to the ducks than to be tossing it all alone.

The mother looked Middle Eastern. She wore a head scarf. “Where are you from? India or Pakistan?” she asked me with a smile. “India,” I said. I don’t usually ask this question first… seems a little presumptuous somehow. After all, there are head-scarf-wearing and foreign-seeming people who have lived here for decades. But, since she asked me, I thought she might like being asked as well. So I asked her and it turned out she was from Syria.

The youngest boy spoke no English. I probably seemed like a novelty to him. He kept staring at me. Maybe he did not meet too many non-Arabic people in his everyday life. I was happy to be the novelty.

The mother kept urging him, in Arabic, to feed the ducks… the word she used sounded like “batakh”. I knew that word… have known it since before I knew the word “duck”. For, in Marathi (my mother tongue) the word for duck is “bud-uk.”

Or, I thought, maybe the similar sounding words mark the margin of the Hindu-Mughal encounter which dates back centuries. Even as I made a note to research the roots of batakh-buduk-duck, I could not help thinking of the intersecting streams of history, language and culture.

I basked in the children’s joy in feeding the ducks just as I had when it had been my own children tossing bread to the ducks just a few short years before. I liked the idea of us mothers giving and receiving goodwill over shared bread.

We are more alike than we are different, I thought to myself. And, we are connected in ways we don’t expect…. that is, if we allow ourselves to see the similarities and the connections.

And so, on a single warm afternoon, in less than thirty minutes, the Universe gave me a gift. It fed my soul by giving me a way to once again be in the company of children and to share with them the joy of providing sustenance to creatures of Nature.

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