Motmots have a way of flying near and staring that might spook a nervous, superstitious person. Even I sometimes think they look like they're trying to convey something to me.
When I started thinking about what their message might be, my first thought was that I was glad these gorgeous birds were at the hut, and not where a little Maya kid could slingshot them, or one of the local bird catchers snare them to sell as caged birds. The Maya are exceptionally fine people, but the average one has little or no feelings for birds, pigs, dogs or the like.
But, then, when I was a little kid on the backcountry farm in western Kentucky, I was the same. My father one day went to town and bought several leg-traps which he set atop fence posts to catch "chicken hawks." Before long one entire wall of our smokehouse was covered with nailed-on hawk and owl wings. I was envious, eager to do the same, but my dad didn't want me fooling with traps. I remember lots of turtles and birds I killed just for the fun of it, with my BB gun and bow and arrows.
Looking back, I forgive myself because I was just a little kid programmed by my family and community. I can forgive my family and community, too, because back then often it seemed like Nature was the enemy, with Her spring floods, late crop-killing freezes, suffocatingly hot, long summers, droughts, unbelievable numbers of mosquitoes from coalmine-polluted streams...
Replacing mosquito-breeding vegetation with neat grass, gravel or concrete, and replacing the swamps with money-making soybean fields seemed like good ideas. This was the Bible Belt, too, so officially Nature was at the service of humans. Chicken hawks had to go. It's still a bit like that now among backcountry Maya.
However, I, rural western Kentucky society and the Maya have changed, and are changing. In fact, I'd say that the most important feature of being a human is that, unlike motmots, humans and human societies can change -- progress from lower levels to higher ones.
But, isn't it dangerous to talk about others in terms of lower and higher levels of enlightenment? Who is to say what's a lower or a higher level?
It's a sticky matter. On the one hand, there's a long history of invading societies rationalizing their violence with a claim of "helping the locals emerge from barbarity."
On the other hand, if the main impulse of Nature Herself appears to be to evolve from simple, none-thinking, none-feeling states, to ever more diversity, ever greater intelligence among evolving beings, and ever greater feeling among the thinkers, isn't "progression from lower to higher states" something that at the very least we should think and talk about?
I think it is, but only with the greatest care, for, from what I can see, the road to higher enlightenment is not one simple path.
As such, it's questionable that I, rural Kentucky and the Maya have taken the road to enlightenment by changing to how we live today. However, because of how the Universal Creative Impulse has managed the evolutionary history of Nature here on Earth, and because of my own conviction that today I'm at a higher level of enlightenment than I used to be, I feel confident in saying this:
Any person or society is progressing toward a higher level of being if with time, in general, there's more understanding about the surrounding world, and more compassion for more different kinds of being. "Field marks" for enlightenment, then, are exercised curiosity, and compassion.
That's part of what the morning motmots undoubtedly are saying to me.