There is an egret on a floating log in the inlet outside my balcony. It is a good resting place for him, for he is routinely there, coming and going daily, hourly.

I am moved to observe him closely. He stands hunched, like an old man, his face staring down at the water. His wings are folded closely against his body, hugging against the chill. A few stray white feathers on either side ruffle in the slight January breeze like the frayed ends of a shawl.

He lifts his head now and looks around, slowly alert to things and sounds about him. He opens his long yellow beak to make a soft sound that I cannot hear. He lifts a black leg to scratch the side of his neck, then shuffles his feet and changes his position to face in a new direction. It is apparent that he is now becoming uneasy, fidgety. Sure enough, he presently lifts his wings and takes flight, skimming low out over Ladybird Lake and then up, banking gracefully in a turn and flying back towards me and higher, over my roof and out of sight.

I don’t know what was on his mind, but something was. There were thoughts, images sent from retina to tiny brain and decoded. There were feelings, congealed shapes messaged by the cool breeze or the breeze-rippled water, or any of the other sensory events surrounding him. I cannot tell you that these thoughts or feelings are familiar, nor whether they are those I would have, had I been standing out there. We live in separate realities.

But I fantasize an emotional correspondence here, probably because I, too, am old and a bit hunched in the winter chill, and alone in a new year. I am brooding a bit, thinking about egret thoughts as if we shared some modest element of feeling. My therapist daughter would doubtless see a coping strategy here, commiserating with a fellow vagrant, a meager effort to rummage for sympathy as I begin a more solitary life.

In truth, though, as a naturalist by training, I tend to project knowable qualities onto other creatures. The egret has long dwelled in this tiny inlet, leaving only during mating rituals in late winter, returning with his lady in early spring. I come to know this creature by personifying him. I know him only by personifying him. We all do this: It keeps nature a part of us, or us a part of nature.

But it goes beyond this. By extending myself to the egret I can become more dispassionate towards my own circumstances. My torment is too sharp to weigh directly without further injury, and so I confront it from a status more remote. The egret seems a suitable vantage.

He would see me as alien, something to avoid. So do I, but I cannot take flight as he does, and so stand apart as an outsider to better see who I am. I should have done this before, perhaps avoiding the recursive pattern that made me foreign to myself. The soul within is for each of us a stranger. Virginia Woolf felt the angst of living captive within: “We are shackled…as bodies to wild horses.”

And yet, what do I accomplish by dwelling on this? I will likely never know who I am, after all, and should not dissect the body to find the resident or tease open scars to expose the rawness. Mired in egret fantasy, I become sadder. Things will be fine, my daughter tells me. Think past the present. The alcoholic recovers. The solitary spouse survives. Sadness dissipates. I nod and try to think egret thoughts instead. Future eventualities are not my concern, after all; it’s the present where I dwell, and where the wounded stranger is.

I am not in mind to relive the past, either, as I look on distantly, but rather to recapture an earlier part of me I left behind. I stretch to recall it. I want to reattach it, as a surgeon stitches back a severed part, but I find myself unfamiliar with it. I claw within to remember: I struggle to feel I am more than a momentary occupant of some soon-to-be discarded container. It will take a while.

We define each other—my body and my soul—as the egret and I do. I stand hunched, an old man, my face staring down at the water, arms folded closely against my body, hugging against the chill.

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Ron Wetherington is a retired professor of anthropology living in Dallas, Texas. He has published a novel, Kiva (Sunstone Press), and numerous short fiction and creative essays in this second career. Archaeology and human evolution inform much of his writing. Read some of his work at https://www.rwetheri.com/.