Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
When I was 20, I sat in a coffee shop eavesdropping on the phone call of a man at the table next to me. When he ended the call, I leaned in his direction and apologised, Britishly, before asking if he was (as the call suggested) a flying instructor, as I had wanted to learn to fly a plane in an effort to abate my fear of air travel. He was, indeed, and the two of us talked a while about the basics, how turbulence works, his life, his adventures as a pilot and how the world appears, and how one’s perspective changes, from thousands of feet in the air. He gave me his card and we agreed to have a lesson together the following week. It felt like fate.
That was a Thursday, and on the Saturday I saw on the cover of a local newspaper that on Friday, a pilot and his student were killed when the engine of their small plane had failed during a lesson the day before. The pilot was rightly hailed a hero for having managed to avoid a residential area, ensuring no further fatalities. I knew that it was him before I read the article. Sometimes you just know. My twenty year old mind wanted to understand—why? How? What did it mean? When, of course, all it meant was that as surely as clouds gather and clouds part, people meet and people die. Each consecutive frame of life has the potential to be world-shifting, and with our proximity to the great unknown so often obscured, each moment is best treated as as sacred as the final days.
How difficult a task, though, when living in a culture blind to sacrality, virtually mandated to deny nature the reverence owed it so that it might be ravaged for the profit of kings. In the news I see a line of billionaires, the behaviour of each suggestive that they are collectively suffering from a profound kind of spiritual poverty. The creation of extreme wealth seems fuelled by the same energy which powers the hunt for immortality—a pathological avoidance of vulnerability and reliance upon others. There is a deep and deeply denied wound at the heart of these searches, one which, ignored, becomes malignant and creates unhinged ways of being. And presidents.
Some years ago a young Long-Tailed Tit came to land and settle on my collarbone. In that moment I came to know that, just as the branches of trees, my bones grew so that Birds might perch upon them. True wealth will not be found in dominance of the wild; only in submission to it. Death is the wild. It is the seasons, cycles and passing of time. It is democratic in its commitment to equality and the rule of law. It is a limitation to be experienced, not solved. Like the wild, Death’s innate humbling quality is a gift which sees it treated as rival and opponent by those unwilling to accept their true, ephemeral nature.
Circumstance had it a little while back that I frequented the most beautiful garden of a hospice. The grounds were kept by people who seemed acutely aware of the work that the roses themselves were doing to support the hospice residents. Each day, a family would wheel the bed of a very sick young boy out into the garden to listen to the demanding chirps of the Sparrows nesting in the eaves above. The love and the joy that this family cultivated during their time there had an impact-radius which reached far beyond themselves.
One afternoon, an uncle came to visit and had climbed onto the bed with his iPad and started showing the boy pictures of a trip he’d been on, swiping one after the other and occasionally giving some context. The boy began to giggle, and then so did his mother and his grandparents, clearly confusing the uncle, until the kid said, laughing “Uncle Tom, I’m blind now, remember?!”. The uncle flopped on the bed, holding his head and loudly calling himself an idiot, before joining the boy and his family as they met unimaginable tragedy with roaring laughter. Sometimes, in devastation, we are both destroyed and made anew.
There are ways of being which leave us both humbled and enlarged, broken and blessed, simultaneously emptied and made impossibly rich. I ache for the wounded hearts untended, and for all the beings that they will, in turn, wound in mindless effort to heal themselves. I was once told that the world looks different from thousands of feet in the air. It looks different from within a hospice garden, too. Far more sane.
Imagine that…
Yours in aimless flight.
Dear Chloe, I don't know why your notes from a beautiful hospice garden has me thinking (though I often am) of my beautiful mother.
On a glorious June day, she took a glass of wine outside into the sunshine saying, 'life is too short to be where I don't want to be'. She drank her wine with my father next to her, happy, to be there in that moment as they always were. When they had finished she said she would take the ironing, abandoned in the kitchen, outside to the terrace to finish. As my father passed her an extension lead through the window to plug in she collapsed onto the stones she stood on, the ironing untouched. By the time he reached the her her heart had stopped beating.
We didn't even know she was sick. She was 52 years old. Five years later my father died of cancer, induced, we believe, by his broken heart. It was his 58th birthday.
It takes time but from my own grief came this knowledge "Sometimes, in devastation, we are both destroyed and made anew." Thank you for your powerful reminder, we none of us know the number of our days, they may be many, they may be few, live each one as if it might be the last and love the moment you are in always.🦋
I read this in the waiting room at the hospital, accidentally far too early for an appointment – a slight inconvenience that now feels like a gift. Thank you for writing this 🕊️