Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Over the years, I have experienced the distinct joy of witnessing various little Birds emerge from their shells. A pinprick of a hole marking intention, cracks forming, the first breach of the beak, and the gradual appearance of damp feather and pink skin. It is, as with any birth, a long and arduous process. I’ve often tried to imagine how it must be for the hatchling themselves; to reach the point of growth where the thing that formed to protect them has simply become too small, and, in order to live, one must fight their way out of it. It would seem that life favours this pattern, one where an integral step in the growth of a living thing is its meeting the hard edge of its own armour, and either suffering the struggle of the breakthrough, or ceasing to participate in the endless unfurling upon which life insists. Perhaps, then, I do have some vague understanding of the hatchling’s experience. Whenever I have found myself pressed up against some seemingly immovable force preventing my continued becoming—whether grief, resistance, addiction, or fear—and I have fought my way out, through the hard shell of the thing, I too have surfaced soft, raw, and unsteady, but eager to be fed by the world, and to orient towards my place in it.

This season, at the rescue centre, I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of joining the small team of people who bottle feed the Deer fawns. I was shocked, at first, by just how tiny they are—and how stomach-churningly perfect. Most of them are newborn Fallow Deer (think Bambi) but the Roe fawn, Pierre, is even smaller, barely 10 inches tall. Preventing imprinting is paramount, and the babies must learn the heartbreaking truth that humans are best avoided, so as soon as they are able they will feed from a bottle rack, but while they’re learning, one or two of us—dressed in overalls to mask our scents, and totally silent so they don’t associate human sounds with food—join them in the fawn-shed each mealtime. I had braced myself for it being an arduous task, imagining that much coaxing be required, but, because I go on to tend the baby Birds, I’ve only given the first feed of the day; and, first thing, the fawns are most enthusiastic. They squeak like dog toys, smell like vanilla, and have no concept of personal space. While feeding two, with a bottle in each hand, the others climb up and run their soft little curious mouths over any exposed skin—namely my neck and ears. It is shockingly intimate, and the silence only adds to the intensity of it. One by one, after feeding, they curl into a circle and drift to sleep. On finishing, I sprinkle some rose petals for them. Because that’s their favourite snack. Because they are literal cherubs. So sweet the fleeting experience, that when I leave the shed and continue on with the morning’s tasks, I sometimes wonder whether it even happened. Confirmation exists in how soft I am rendered. How their exquisite vulnerability awakens my own. Life continually offers me opportunities to have my heart broken—and I gladly take each one. Returning, like the tide, to the shores of deeply loving that which may well not survive.

Earlier this week I went straight from the fawns into the baby Bird unit, where I saw that one of the Blackbirds was not herself. She was a young fledgling, fresh out of the nest, who had been catted and brought in two days prior. She’d a small wound on her wing, but no other obvious injuries, so she joined a small gang of other Blackbirds. That day, though, she stopped eating, and began to breathe heavily. I put her in an incubator, for some warmth and some quiet, but I could see that her eyes were becoming distant, and soon it became clear that she was actively dying. Her Death throes began, and were particularly violent. She stretched, and arched, head and wings all pinning backwards, as though her heart were trying to leave her chest. She’d suddenly go limp, and I’d release the breath I’d been holding; and then, it would start again. It went on for 45 minutes. I think, sometimes, that love is like a Horse: large, majestic, full of power, and needing to run. It’s a magnificent beast, but it’s one that, at times, we need to temper. As I watched this sweet Bird, my Horse flared its nostrils and paced the room, restless, agitated, desperate to act—but allowing it to would have meant intervening in this unstoppable thing. There are times when restraint is not the absence of love, but rather the maturation of it. It looks like reining the Horse close and whispering “Wait, love. We have to wait.” Between the Blackbird in her dying and I in my witnessing, there was no shortage of suffering in that room. The least I could do was hold on to what was mine—to ensure that my love did not bolt for the door, and in the doing make her dying about me.

Hatching is an endurance test that lasts many hours, and sometimes days. It’s exhausting work that requires thousands of individual pecks, and the struggle is visible throughout. Should someone decide to intervene, to take the struggle from the Bird and peel back the shell themselves, the Bird will die—because the struggle is not incidental. Each peck builds muscle required for the Bird to thrive. And not all Birds survive hatching, but a Bird relieved of its struggle arrives in the world loved into helplessness. The resistance of the shell is the making of those who break through it.

I wonder, at times, whether Death is a shell. Whether dying may be akin to hatching, to breaking through some impossible thing in order that we might spread our wings. If, indeed, it is, how gracious of life to offer before us so many chances to practice.

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Yours in aimless flight…

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

When I was young, I would sometimes walk to the churchyard and lay on the grass next to my mother’s grave. The boundaries between self, ground, bone, now, and then, all become rather permeable in certain places, and this was one of them. At times I’d have the vague sense of someone watching me from a distance, and I wonder whether perhaps it was me, here, in the future. Once, an elderly man (who, in hindsight was probably in his fifties) came and asked me if I was alright. I sat up, answering that I was, and he asked if he might sit with me a while. I obliged him, and he went on to share that his daughter was buried in the churchyard, having died many years ago, as a baby. We sat together quietly in our longing, beneath a sky scored by the dark bodies of a hundred Swifts. Their cries, like wind navigating narrow gaps, became the keening that neither I nor this gentleman were afforded. And now, it is June, and the Swifts have again returned—though fewer, and fewer, with every passing year. The sky no longer filled, only dappled—how it, too, must long for what it’s lost.

Statistics are hands, pointing in the direction of unfolding extinctions, and while they make legible the raging ecocide, figures cannot capture the splendour, the genius, nor the ruthless beauty of the individual beings who are victims of it. A 68% decrease in population over the last twenty years, becomes something else entirely once a single Swift wafts your hair back as she builds the strength in her wings. The hundreds of millions of Sparrows lost in the last few decades were each once nestlings, like the ones who gummily latch onto my fingertips as I feed their insatiable siblings. These numbers land as though I myself am being ripped from root and sky. They break my heart into a thousand Starlings, who murmurate longingly over the newly developed grasslands they once called home.

Recently, my brother pointed out a Bird, “Oh look, a Bullfinch!”, he said, excitedly. To which my six (going on thirty) year old niece rolled her eyes and, seemingly exhausted by her father’s incompetence, countered, “Daddy, that’s a Chaffinch”. The pride that flooded my body saw me grow a foot taller, right then and there. Watching this exquisite little being come to know and love her avian kin is a hope-giving thing. At a time when optimism ebbs from my shores, she makes me question whether the architects of environmental destruction are as unstoppable as they appear, or whether those who dare look—and then dare fall in love—might hold a kind of power that is yet to be reckoned with. After all, protection is love condensed into a force field—and her love, like mine, is ferocious. It is a Bear, ready to sink her teeth into the necks of those who would bring her cubs harm, while those same teeth softly carry their warm little bodies gently to the den. May she never learn to temper it.

Life is a single breath, taken and then returned, and that devastating uniformity is what makes each one so precious. The sociopathic hierarchies our culture has inherited were invented by a people taught that they were separate from, and likely condemned by, the very thing which had created them—and in response to their disenfranchisement they built a ladder, and dominated every rung they perceived as beneath them; because the sense of superiority masked the pain of disconnection. But, like any masked thing, the fact of its existence remains and, whether engaged with or not, pain always finds a way to be expressed. Ecocide, then, is the logical conclusion to this severance—if that which created us will not love us, better to kill it, than feel the pain of its refusal. Ecocide is deicide is suicide. It is our collective response to feeling orphaned, and not knowing how to be with the grief of it. The tragedy, of course—beside the mountains of dead and dying, and the silence where once there was birdsong—is that it was never even true. That we have always belonged, more completely than we could bear, but that we were handed a set of goggles many generations ago, and we’re still wondering around thinking they’re our eyes.

My love for the living world has, over the years, seen my compassion for the human species become negligible. The irony there being that misanthropy is, essentially, self-hatred. That in a world so deeply interconnected, hatred of anything is hatred of everything, and in this way I contribute to the issue. But, when I consider the unabated, frankly insane destruction carried out by my own species as in fact being the behaviour of a psyche made mad by grief—by an unmetabolised orphaning—I can actually make some sense of it. I can’t excuse it, not for a moment, but I edge toward understanding it. And from there I am less compelled to write off my species, entire. From there, I can ask if they are alright, and whether I might sit with them, a while.

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Yours in aimless flight…

Friends, I wanted to share a book I’ve fallen in love with and which I had on my mind while I was writing the above. Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss is a really stunning blend of natural history, art, poetry, and activism. Their foreword says that it asks not “What is that bird?” but “Who is that bird?” which is something I think about an awful lot. Hopefully the pair behind the book won’t mind me sharing some images from it. I opted for some of the Birds mentioned in this fortnights post, but it’s bursting with all manner of winged beings who are ruthlessly beautiful, like the book itself.

Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

Last week, the Roses conspired to all bloom in unison, like a choir. The Mayflies, ever true to their name, are bobbing up and down like orchestral music—until a Sparrow swoops, snapping a note from the air to deliver it, still humming, to her brood. The Birds are frantic with young-tending, territorial disputes and melodic declarations of their aliveness. I, as ever, am in the grip of dissonance, marvelling at the crescendo of late-Spring from inside a body unconvinced by the idea of holding itself together. My contradictions clash, like Magpies and Crows, midair. Sometimes I am a boulder—grounded and steady—while the sea, wild and raging, thrashes, frenzied, around me. Sometimes, I am the sea. The concept of being a coherent individual with a consistent set of thoughts and behaviours feels as foreign to me as the concept of being a Stick Insect.

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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.

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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…

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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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