Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

When I was little, I kept a shoebox of precious things beneath my bed. Inside was a broken scallop shell, half a small, blue eggshell (which I now know to be a Starling’s), a Pheasant’s feather, a Crow’s feather, a variety of nondescript leaves and stones, and a postcard of Picasso’s The Swimmer. My mother had sent me the postcard from Paris while she was attempting to see all the art she wanted to see before she died. On the flip side of the postcard, she asked what I thought the image might have been when I first saw it, and shared that it reminded her of Matisse’s blue dancer. I was three, at the time. To this day I am grateful for how much respect was woven into her love for me. It is a thread that I try to continue through my own love, such as in trusting that even the most vulnerable of hatchling Birds possesses an innate wisdom and knowledge of the world; the kind of which I could only dream.

Recently, after sharing with someone that I help care for baby Birds at a wildlife rescue centre, they responded by saying, “Oh, how peaceful!” And, I suppose it is, in the same way that being caught in an avalanche or a hurricane might, in its own way, be peaceful. Troublingly, I find myself in the place that I typically reach at the end of the Summer, when I am running solely on fumes and love. It is a strange state to occupy, to feel so physically depleted, while also overflowing with the particular type of repletion that only baby Birds seem to offer. I keep falling into these little dazes. Part reverie, part torpor. I’ll be stood at the kitchen window, staring at a hunting Kestrel hovering over the fields—head perfectly, immovably still, wings fluttering rhythmically against the pink underbelly of clouds—and then, suddenly, it’s evening. Time remains a beast with a will unto herself and I, no match for her, yield to her capriciousness; just as we each, one day, must. One of the Starlings died this morning. It took him the best part of an hour, and I knew what was happening, and I knew there was nothing I could do other than offer him a dim corner of his little enclosure and send him wishes for peace in his return to the Everything. His sibling moved closer to him, toward the end. I’d not seen that before. He stood on a little perch about an inch above him, sentinel to the whole thing, looking far more noble than any juvenile Starling was ever supposed to look.

Although Death marks the end of life, it might, if we’re willing, first bring us fully to it. How ironic, that the force which seems to threaten to annihilate us, holds a key to our liberation. How curious, that what we most need is so often located on the other side of what we most resist. As children, we are soft, permeable, and open to the world. We sense the precious nature of the ordinary—of feather, stone, self and shell—and we instinctively wish to protect it. We are born little custodians, and something within us intuits that the world does not always know how to care for sacred things. Its busyness, its harshness, and its preference for utility, teach the child to armour themselves, to build a persona capable of surviving the climate into which they were born. And so, our treasures are buried, in the hopes they will be preserved. The pattern seems to operate across scales, with our deepest aliveness often buried beneath the things we most fervently wish to avoid—and yet, it is in the reckoning with them that we transform. After my mother died, it took me decades to wade through the grief—wrestling, along the way, with the leaden knowledge that everything I love will die—only for me to find, on the other side, that I loved it all the more fiercely for the knowing.

I noticed, a little while back, just how often I say, aloud, but softly, “You’re ok, you’re ok”. This, of course, is something I say to baby Birds, and sometimes the Rabbits, and Chickens and the Turkey at the farm, whenever they seem to need a little reassurance. It only recently occurred to me that I am also saying this to myself. I do not, for a moment, offer myself up as a picture of togetherness. I cannot parallel park. I am notoriously terrible at replying to messages. After watching March of the Penguins I spent three days crying in bed. I am, in many ways, markedly ill-equipped for life, but I have managed to create a little pocket of the world inside which matter and meaning and a ferocious love are held. Not unlike my little shoebox.

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Yours in aimless flight…

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Sitting at a red light, the other day, I watched as a white van pulled out, suddenly, from a side road, in front of an oncoming car. The driver of the car slammed on its brakes and hit the horn. The man driving the van stopped, in the middle of the road, blocking the car, and began screaming at the woman driving it. I was on the other side of the road, facing the direction she was coming from, so I could see her face, which wore a mix of confusion, indignation and fear. The latter of which grew considerably when the man opened his door and began marching towards her. I find that in situations which suddenly become serious, a rare quiet descends. It is clinical in tone and, as my vision fixes and narrows, a plan will emerge, lightning fast. If her door isn’t locked and he drags her from the car take the keys from the ignition, get the wrench from the boot, and if necessary, aim for his knees. Thankfully, her door was locked, and she had the wherewithal to manoeuvre around him as he pounded on her window, before she left him, alone and unhinged, raging in the middle of the road. I had beside me on the passenger seat a fledgling Blackbird who had died just minutes before. She’d been attacked by a Magpie, and had a small but deep wound in her neck. So deep, in fact, that the blood coming from it had been the most extraordinary violet colour. Like an Iris, or a Petunia. The light turned green, and I carried on my way, there but for the grace…

During my first year of caring for baby Birds, whenever a juvenile escaped inside the baby Bird unit, I’d find myself beyond stressed. By the end of my second season I’d become a dab hand at catching Birds mid-flight, but that first year plagued me. I had recurring dreams of lunging for a Bird, only for my fingertips to skim their tail feathers. Or I’d catch one, wrapping my hand around its soft, warm body, only to open my fingers and find nothing there. These dreams mirror my relationship with hope, of late. I reach for it, over and over, but holding onto it seems impossible. The multifaceted threats of this time—from environmental collapse to horrific misogyny, and from open corruption to for-profit wars—form a weighty tyranny which is tied to the ankles of anyone paying attention. Faith in my own species set sail some years back, and I watch as it becomes ever smaller on the horizon. When I am far from myself, when I am lost to these horrors, I am fated to pendulate between my ever expanding sense of wonder, and an ever deepening sense of despair—and, at times, the violent oscillations betwixt the two threaten to break my neck. Thank heavens, then, that I am afforded solace in the shape of tiny wings. Thank heavens that when a fledgling Starling is tucked under my chin, or I am carrying a nestling Robin who is 8 grams of feather and insistence, telling him that soon he’ll meet the sky, I am returned to myself. I am recalled to the central axis from which the pendulum swings—wonder, dread, wonder, dread, wonder. From there I do not suffer the swing, I hold it. These are the mechanisms by which I survive loving the world. The Birds see me remembered, and I serve them, in return. It is as sweet a reciprocity as exists between Life and Death—where she brings him everything she has, and in return, he makes her precious. These horrors, this tyranny, refuses to reckon with the cost of a single life. Refuses the genuine weight of it. And so, I join the global resistance which battles the cult of expendability, by turning only ever more intently towards the inherent sacrality of 8 grams of insistence, and violet blood, and the violence I would apparently commit in the name of protecting the vulnerable.

Last week, a nest of five Robins arrived in the ICU. The following morning I went to feed them, but they would not stir. For an hour and a half, in twenty-minute cycles, I did all I could to rouse them. Whistling, giving the softest, smallest head strokes, painting a line of electrolytes along the side of each beak. Each time, nothing changed, save my rising dread, and I closed their incubator door and made my way out of the room—but then, over the hum of all the other incubators, I heard that most distinctive sound of the rattling, imperious trill of baby Robins who have, collectively and without warning, decided that they must immediately be fed. I rushed back, and all five had their necks fully extended, mouths as wide as physics would allow, each one utterly certain, in the way that only the very new can be, that they are the most important thing in existence. For half a second I joined them, tilting my own head back and looking to the sky in thanks and relief. I fed each one, and then they each promptly fell back to sleep. Not all Birds are early Birds, and hope keeps stranger hours still.

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Yours in aimless flight…

Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Years ago, on a gloomy November morning ceilinged by low-hanging cloud, I met Sunshine for the first time. I’d started volunteering at an animal sanctuary, and had been tasked with tending to the Rabbits which lived around the edge of the little park that she occupied and, as I worked, Sunshine watched from her straw throne inside the central coop. I’d never met a Turkey, before. I’d seen plenty but never known one by name, and certainly never loved one. In hindsight I can see how three-dimensional life had been, up until then. I was nervous of her, at first. The Birds I’d known prior could each fit in a single hand, and Sunshine was the size of a stocky toddler, but with wings and a rock solid beak. She made sounds I didn’t understand and she possessed a primordiality so unfamiliar to me that I erroneously filed it as volatile. In the afternoon, a member of staff came into the park and Sunshine made some raucous proclamations, to which the woman responded by going and sitting cross-legged opposite her. My stomach tightened at the proximity of this woman’s eyes to Sunshine’s formidable beak. I assumed she knew what she was doing, but also couldn’t help but wince at the thought of the damage this Bird could potentially do, and so when Sunshine, in response to having her chest stroked and softly being asked how she was, began to purr, I felt more than a little ashamed at having reduced her, in my mind, to pure reaction. I went over to the pair, asking if I could sit, and the woman enthusiastically suggested I bring some dry feed to offer, and I soon found myself kneeling at Sunshine’s feet, offering my cupped hands full of seeds towards her. The speed at which she snapped her head to and from my hands made me jump and pull back. “It’s ok, she’s really precise, she won’t hurt you,” said this most patient woman, “Watch, she’ll pick out all the sunflower seeds first”. And so, extending my hands once again, I watched as Sunshine snatched individual sunflower seeds from a mix which to my own eye was a blur of similarity, with the exactitude of a striking Cobra. Shortly after, she began swiping her head left and right, reorganising the mix to reveal her second favourite, the dried corn. When she’d finished, there was nothing but husked oats left in my hands. “She’s not interested in those,” I was told, “but the chickens will have them”. I felt a sudden deference towards this Bird, a deep admiration for a creature whose sovereignty saw her accept, with great discernment and skill, what she knew was right for her, and simply leave the rest. Over the course of that long Winter, I watched and participated in the forensic care offered to Sunshine. Like any being who has seen their fair share of Winters, she finds the colder months difficult and her arthritis sees her slow down, significantly. How sweet, then, the dance that sees her slowing answered with rising attunement and greater ministry. There were times in those months when Sunshine insisted on being outdoors, and so three or four of us would kneel in near freezing mud, two of us lifting her either side, as at least one other positioned blankets beneath and around her. All of us apologising for the inconvenience, each thanking her for her patience. Would that the well-earned senescence of every being be treated with such tenderness. Would that the road toward Death only ever be paved in kindness.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Joyously, the Cherry Blossom is here, seeming to offer up well wishes for the newly nesting Birds. An occasional gust of wind makes confetti of her blooms. The celebratory nature of the season—heralding new life, the creative act infused through the day—makes only more stark the insanity of the needless destruction that plays out against it. I wonder when, or if, we as a species might finally rejoin nature in her regenerative ways; when, or if, we might remember how to listen to the world.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

It may come as a surprise to exactly no one, that I love baby Magpies. It goes without saying, of course, that I love all Birds, of all ages, the world over—but the soft descending trill of a baby Magpie sends a weakening through my body. They chirrup, and something in my cells recognises them, as though kin. We become tuning forks resonating across the unbridgeable distance between species. Perhaps this is a kind of love. I once helped care for a baby Magpie, who was about six days old when we met. I named him Jasper, in honour of the green jasper feathers he would one day grow, and he was the laziest Magpie I’d ever known. Typically, at his age, the mere hint of the day’s first feed would prompt an enthusiastic, elongated neck and cavernous gaping beak, but this fellow needed to be coaxed with forehead strokes and gentle words of encouragement. He worried me, at first, until it became clear that he was simply not a morning Bird and that, as far as he was concerned, showing any enthusiasm before 8am was embarrassing.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds. And it is dedicated to the poet , who left this earthly life and became starbound on January 31st.

When I was about ten, a local falconer brought his Harris Hawk to my primary school. She was an exceptional Bird, regal, curious, and confident in a way that entranced my younger self. She had never been wild, though the wild still clearly lived within her as she and the falconer spent much time hunting together. The pair shared a language spoken in glances, head tilts and the occasional whisper. At that time in my life, I felt distinctly out of place. I found a diary entry from then, where I’d spoken to feeling like a package which had been delivered to the wrong address and was waiting to be returned, but in seeing this Bird, and in sensing the complexity and intelligence which existed within the interplay between she and her falconer, I caught a spark of something strangely familiar. Following a talk about falconry and Birds of prey, my small class was given the opportunity to have our photographs taken with this majestic Bird. Some kids declined completely, others agreed but only if the falconer was holding her, and a few decided they would brave holding her themselves. I—terrified, but besotted—was one of the latter, and so joined the end of the queue in the hopes of calming myself before reaching her. Ahead of me, child after child had the heavy duty leather glove upon which she sat placed on their hand while they grimaced and held their arm outstretched as far from themselves as they could. “Right,” I said to myself, “you get one go at this. Now walk up there and meet that beautiful being face-to-face. And if she attacks you, so be it.” My turn came, and with chin lifted and jaw firmly clenched I offered out my arm so that the glove, and the majestic Harris Hawk, could be placed upon it. For a few seconds, I froze, shocked by the weight of her, by the power in the grip of her talons and by the fierceness of her hooked beak. But then I recalled the way that she and her falconer spoke; subtle, wordless, body-to-body. And so, terrified, and in awe and wonder, I exhaled the breath I’d been holding and drew my arm into my body, to hold her face inches from my own. She was electric. Humming with skill and latent power. I marvelled at how a being could simultaneously be so still and so fiercesome. We held each other in regard for a moment, before the falconer, smiling, said “She likes you”. “I like her” I whispered, before our photograph was taken, and I handed her back to the falconer. Thanking them both.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Someone in the village has been feeding the Kites. There’s an unusual number, wheeling above the valley—David counted forty, the other day, spinning a languid gyre. I’ve a cricked neck from holding my face parallel to the sky, and at times they hover so low I can see the whites of their glassy eyes. Their constant spectre is as intimidating as it is hypnotic, and they drift overhead like a half-remembered dream, while we press on below. One eye on the sky. I find myself envious of their honeyed glide. The grace with which they seem to meet the day. I have, of late, become increasingly irritated by my seeming inability to feel a sense of ease. The news cycle exhausts and demoralises. What was a creeping sense of disquiet has become a steady march of dread, and the crumbling of systems which long presented themselves as trustworthy continues unabated—each passing week seeing the circle of complicity widen, and the nature of what was being protected grow ever darker. The news is magnetic interference and my mind a compass needle that cannot find true north. I am exquisitely disoriented by this moment in time. My defensive go-to, since childhood, in the face of confusion and unrest, is to sense-make. The tumult that infused my youngest years saw understanding become sword and shield—and confusion my mortal enemy. Those grasping arms served me well; until, of course, they didn’t. Until wielding tools of rationale became as insane as the thing I was fighting. Some things will not yield to understanding. Certain darknesses have no angle from which they begin to resolve, and to keep searching for one eventually becomes its own kind of madness.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Just as the Crocuses rose tentatively out of the earth, the Song Thrushes started to sing. Together they announce that time rolls on, and that Spring—while still sleeping—stirs. Daybreak has become jubilant, and the Song Thrush insists I close my eyes to better see the complexity of her call. These dewy mornings, each one an invitation to come to life, to join the throng of beings alive. Of beings born and not yet died—of which, in the long view of history, there are surprisingly few. How fortunate we are, for this brief time, to be among them.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Over the last few weeks I have somehow become caught in a relentless cycle of relocating Ladybirds—or Ladybugs, for my friends in North America. David’s office is the designated ‘safe room’ for our tiny, colourful friends, and I’ll tiptoe in, hands cupped, trying not to disturb. “Another?” he’ll say, without looking up, as I deliver the bug to a windowsill lined with half-raisins and bottle lids of shallow water. Our little devotions blend into life like wallpaper. There is a twice-daily sweep for ‘the overturned’; the ones who fall onto their backs and cannot right themselves. It’s a logistical type of love and, essentially, a small liturgy for a world that I do not know how to save. I feel a certain kinship with ‘the overturned’. So often, these days, I find myself upside down, and reliant upon something larger than I to regain my footing. Death is surely larger than I, and I will sometimes wrap my thumb and fingers around my forearm, closing my eyes, picturing the bones therein. They tell me that I am temporary, and that I am made of the world. They remind me of how, somewhere in the area of spacetime we’ve labelled as ‘the future’, these bones are already dry, flesh-bare and exposed. And so the feel of their soft, warm current-day cover lands me squarely in the present—which, it seems, is the only place I am sane. Acknowledgement of my temporality rights me.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Recently, in the middle of the night, I was held within the grasp of some quite impressive physical pain. I felt distinctly as though there were shards of glass in each of my shoulder, elbow, wrist, and finger joints, with even the slightest of movements causing them to grind, pierce and slice. 2 a.m. always has a habit of welcoming uncharacteristic ways of thinking for me, but bring pain into the mix and things quickly get out of hand. The blend of darkness, cold, seeming solitude, and agony sees a narrowing of my thinking, a funnelling, whereby any potential for relief is chipped away to reveal only a point which swears that this, this suffering, is the only true thing—and not just in this moment, but the only true thing which has ever been. Nothing has ever been good; I have only been delusional. Nothing will ever be good, either, and the sooner this is accepted, the better. We should all stop heaving ourselves up the sheer face of this summit-less mountain of false hope and accept our fate. Happy New Year, by the way!

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

A couple of years ago a Tawny Owl came into the rescue centre. She was found orphaned, and had been hand-reared by a pair of well-meaning members of the public. When Pigeon (the Owl) arrived she believed wholeheartedly that she was human and had no idea that she was, in fact, a Bird of prey. Upon first being introduced to other Tawny Owls she was terrified, clinging to the wildlife manager for dear life and refusing to look the creatures that she so resembled in the eye. Owls are particularly prone to imprinting. At the rescue centre, baby Owls are fed using tweezers concealed within an Owl hand-puppet; their human carers masked by mirrored visors, all to ensure the Owls imprint only upon their own Owl-ness. Over time, Pigeon, through gentle and persistent proximity, began to remember her true self and, eventually, she relaxed around her kin. I wonder whether I was in fact raised by Birds, and my unease around human beings will one day wear off. At the end of the season, Pigeon was released back into the wild along with the Tawnys whom she had once so feared. Back into a world that retreats as the light withdraws from the day; but not she—for the night is hers, and the dark thick with potential.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

The Crows looked like shadow puppets in the half light this morning. The unfolding corvid drama has become quite Shakespearean since one of our Crows decided to make an example of a Magpie by pinning him to the ground and pulling the feathers from his back. The truly wild racket that exploded out of the larger Magpie contingent brought me outdoors, from where I intervened and watched to ensure that the victim was not seriously wounded. Amazingly, not five minutes later, both parties had returned to their respective patches of nuts and seeds. Perhaps, like me, corvids reserve their grudges solely for human beings.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

The temperature, here, has plummeted. Every year on the eve of the dawn that brings the first frost I spend the night fitful and restless, gripped by worry for the little Birds. I lay there, picturing myself with a set of vast wings, folding over and around each songbird, in the way that mama Swans enfold their signets. When the sun rises and the Blue Tits appear—peeping out from the Conifer like little Christmas decorations—my lungs return to their full capacity. I am reminded that they are made for this. That countless Blue Tits have faced countless Winters, and that nature knows exactly what it is doing. It is I who am lost to worry and fear.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

This week has seen us return to the loving embrace of a vitally autumnal England; the vibrancy of which, even on the greyest of days, soothes my aching heart—parts of which remain firmly entrenched within a pair of four-legged beings in Africa. I dream of them, and the kisses of mine which belong upon their foreheads hang in the cold morning air, nowhere to land. Grateful, then, am I to have walked into the time of year which feels most like home—a concept which, to me, seems quite amorphous. My beloved is home. The winged, are home. The earth in which my mother’s bones rest, is home. Slowly, this body of mine becomes home. Home is where twenty-two Magpies polkadot the lawn, and where three large Crows police them. It is where wings both wide and miniature manipulate the air to their will, and where tiny lungs compel the sun to rise—so that they might once again sing it to sleep. Reverence to these beings who dance with the days, who speak dusk and dawn, and keep time with the ancient rhythm. May I only ever become more birdlike.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

At dusk we watched as the rain moved through the valley as a singular, animate force. The sweep of her pale grey skirt kissing each tree individually, before finding the ground so that she might merge with them. This endless, loving loop of life, of transformation and becoming, is poetry and dance united. It is the simplest of great complexities and confirms to me my suspicion that the universe likes to wink at itself through the medium of paradox.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds. And Dogs.

We arrived in South Africa, last week. The flight was long and arduous, and instantly forgotten upon arriving in a world where nature reveals herself in a succession of relentless explosions—shape, form, colour, sound and scent erupt in each direction. From here it’s clear that the big bang marked the start of an almighty, cosmic exhale upon which the word ‘life’ was spoken—and from here the word still resounds as loudly as it did when our species was but a twinkle in time’s eye.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

I have stood, before, barefoot on grass, encased in iron armour, begging to be unburdened—and never have I been denied. Goldcrest and Nuthatch pull at buckle and clasp, and with constraints cast off I am met by the breeze as beloved. Delivered, once again, to the moment.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Each September I join the migration. As the Geese leave their Arctic shores and return carrying the dawn, I leave the shores of constant doing and return to myself carrying the wounds of Summer. The fall makes permissible my proclivity to cocoon, to burrow into book and memory and the long list of things demanding to be felt. To be with oneself is patient, painful and ancient work; easily neglected, oft overlooked. I turned 40 at the weekend. An arbitrary way marker, essentially, and yet a point of some potency as I am now older than my mother lived to be. Naturally, a review insisted itself be conducted. It came as a serpent wearing a bowler hat, who led me, unbidden, winding through not only the last four decades as I know them but through the years as they’d have appeared on alternate paths. A dendritic patchwork of unlived lives, but regardless of route each path moved with the same undulation of existence. Seed became mouse became soil became grass became rabbit who met car and became Crow. Life arched her back towards Death in ecstatic union, and their love propelled the wheel upon which this all turns. Being raised, in part, by a ghost made the threads which bind life, love and Death all the more clear to see.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

A few days ago I was rushing out of my little office, irritated by some terrible injustice (or, more likely, inconvenience) when I noticed a Bee on ground below. He looked exhausted, so I fetched some sugar water and a paintbrush and knelt on the grass, hunched over with my face a couple of inches from the earth, offering him a drink. Suddenly, I felt a nearby presence. A short, soft rustling sound edged closer, and then a young Robin appeared in my periphery. “Hello” I said, politely, not moving from my Bee-tending position. While clearly each their own sovereign beings, I do find myself eyeing wild Birds as tiny emissaries, representatives of life, seemingly on a mission to pull awareness back towards a state of presence and wonder. The Robin flicked some leaves with his head, and then hopped closer. And closer. And then, closer still. He must have been a Robin from the rescue centre who’d been released in the garden earlier in the year because, in his seeming fascination with what was unfolding, he came to stand as close to the Bee as I was; body perfectly still, head moving in punctuated angles. So close, the little Robin came, that I felt compelled to utter, “Please don’t eat him”. A request he honoured as the three of us, in our motley little triangle, each did our own thing; together. Our interspecies gathering ended as the Bee, satiated, took to the air, the Robin darted to the Rose bush, and I returned to my desk. Clueless as to what had irritated me, prior.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Last week, a coach the size of a London double-decker bus somehow managed to find itself stuck at the top of our lane. The driver claimed he’d broken down, but on being pressed admitted that he was stuck and could see no way of driving through the narrow roads of the village. Not much happens in our village, and so a small crowd of onlookers slowly amassed as the poor driver became steadily more distressed. At one point, he could be overheard on the phone saying, earnestly, “I’ll die here! It’s a tiny village with tiny houses and no water! I’m going to die here!”—a fear quelled shortly after, when a villager brought him a bottle of iced water from their fridge. While some of the onlookers worked hard on the mental gymnastics required for them to find a way to blame this man’s lack of directionality on immigrants, others took to action and had every car parked in the vicinity moved, so that the driver (who did not die in our tiny, allegedly waterless village) could perform a 300 point turn, and make his bid for freedom. I suppose we all have our version of narrow lanes, times when unfamiliar terrain sees the walls of the world close in on us. Funnily enough, the first panic attack I ever had was in a Propositional Logic class in college. The linear causality that we were being taught, the kind which surgically slices up the world into clean-edged binaries of “If X then Y, X therefore Y”, had felt like a spiritual assault. Like I was watching a poem, out in the wild, grazing in dappled light, suddenly snared, caged and forced to live out their existence behind the parallel lines of literalism. None of the circular, spiralling, shifting and relational patterns found in nature, grief and a real lived experience belonged in that room, and so it became devoid of air. I failed that class, choosing instead to sit on the grass outdoors, wondering why it is that beauty seems to demand a witness, as though it wants us to engage with it… If X then Y me that.

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