Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
Of all the sacred texts, nature is my favourite—and in this season it has much to profess. There are many a proverb, drama and tragedy being told in the garden alone; not least via the ceaseless attempts at courting by the Wood Pigeons who, time and again, seem to be faced with merciless rejection; in spite of their impressive invitational bows and hops. May we all know their perseverance.
Do you ever look at a thing which you perceive to be external to yourself, and the longer you look at it, the more beautiful it becomes? You can do it with almost anything. I do it with David, sometimes. I’ll lose myself as I watch him and eventually some of the convenient identifiers which my brain uses to categorise him—human, man, mine—begin to fall away. Always, from there, he emerges as a much truer form of himself: being, pulse of existence, perfect expression of the universe. We’ll do this with Birds, sometimes, too. I once watched a Collared Dove and began to see her as a living poem, penned by existence as a love letter to itself. How better to say “I love you” than with wings.
When we look long enough to see, there is beauty to be witnessed in the most unexpected of places. When the body changes as it prepares to die we are witness to the working of an ancient intelligence, one woven into spiral shapes which began to tell our stories long before we were born. As the matter to spirit ratio of a being tilts ever more in favour of the spirit, what remains in the physical can serve as a visual reminder of just how great a transformation is taking place. There is little more beautiful than the active display of natures intelligence.
Essentially, we are all temporary arrangements of atoms and molecules. So precise is their arrangement that people actually recognise this bundle of cosmic elements and electrical impulses as ‘you’ and ‘me’—but there will come a day when this corporal self will become significantly less orderly. So much so, in fact, that parts of the current me will eventually become part of the earth, or a tree, or, God willing, a Bird (please, please a Bird). If matter is indeed neither created nor destroyed, only transformed from one state to another, then we ourselves are neither created nor destroyed, only transformed from one state to another.
It was David’s birthday this week (Happy Birthday, my love) and he shared his birthday with three hatchling Starlings, all of whom were born at the rescue centre. There is something both mesmerising and oddly confronting about a soon-to-hatch egg. Perhaps because it is such a clear example of something existing in liminal space—a being both in and yet not in the world. I sometimes feel as though I am both in and yet not in the world, that I too must fight to break into the world from inside of it—my shell made up of everything that I refuse to love.
The emergence of these tiny beings reminds me of exactly where I am. They remind me that I do not yet inhabit the mysterious land of That Which Has Passed, nor do I live in the potent world of That Still To Come.
Instead, my beloved, you and I, and now these three Starlings, live momentarily in the realm of That Which Is. We inhabit the Here, and are innervated by the current of the Now.
While watching a heart rate monitor recently it occurred to me that In many ways life is like one massive singular heart beat—a sudden skyward propulsion of energy and vitality, naturally followed by it’s equal and opposite return—all held on either side by periods of rest, in the before and the after.
How grateful I am, to be mortal. To be subject to Death is to be in possession of a great certainty—and the certainty of my inevitable return to a period of non-existence highlights, by contrast, the preciousness of That Which Is.
The longer I look at life, the more it seems to emerge as a truer form of itself, and the more beautiful it becomes.
Yours in aimless flight…
"While watching a heart rate monitor recently it occurred to me that In many ways life is like one massive singular heart beat—a sudden skyward propulsion of energy and vitality, naturally followed by it’s equal and opposite return—all held on either side by periods of rest, in the before and the after." I found this part breath-taking, Chloe. Such a beautiful image.
It is a magic trick you perform every single time you dispatch one of these posts. I don’t know how you do it, delving so deeply into the great mystery and surfacing with these beautiful insights each time. I never considered the liminal state of an egg but it really is a perfect physical manifestation of something so abstract. Please wish David a happy birthday for me and thank you this.