embers

first flights and final words

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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I remember being young, not quite ten, and dreaming that I was flying over the moonlit rooftops of the houses in the village. When I awoke from the dream, my mother stood watching in the doorway of my bedroom, leaning against the frame, head tilted, serene. The night and the moon had painted the whole scene blue. I watched her watch me for a while and then drifted back to sleep, not in the least bit troubled by her gaze, or by the fact that she had died many years before. To this day, I remain unconcerned as to whether that night featured a dream within a dream or some kind of visitation. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to me.

I think of Autumn as the season to which I belong. I will swoon at our Silver Birches, which are this morning bedecked in jewels, dewy diamonds on the tip of every leaf, brazenly casting prisms every which way. This time of year typically brings a different kind of life into me, and so it has been disheartening to find myself, of late, experiencing this season as though from a distance. Its beauty is writ large as ever, but it’s as though it is behind thick glass in a museum.

In my early twenties, following some months in rehab for a drug dependency I had developed in my teens, I had the distinct feeling that I had undergone open-heart surgery and had been sent back out into the world without having been stitched up. The sensation never faded, and since then, all that I turn my attention towards hurtles instantly through my wide-open sternum. My ribcage has become home to a thousand little Birds. It houses first flights and final words, and it begrudgingly hosts graceless politicians, alongside whom live the bruised and bloodied children of the wars they refuse to end. It holds my fear for the fate of this intolerably beautiful world.

At times, when my ribs are too full, my psyche will dress me in armour to prevent the incoming. It’s heavy, and it’s cumbersome, but it works. The issue, of course, is that the armour cannot distinguish between beauty and pain. It turns the volume of life down, indiscriminately. When my time comes, I want Death to proudly put its arm around me and walk me out of this world saying, “Wow, you poured yourself into that…” and so, I must surrender these defences.

What awaits is a Daliesque landscape, where breathtaking despair plays chess with love, and hopelessness waltzes with truth. All must be felt. To avoid one is to avoid them all, and I have made a pact with Death to never again shy away from life.

“Look for the embers,” says my love, as he guides me out of my constriction and more fully into the world. The embers he refers to are the points of light in the darkness. They are the tiny sparks of beauty that burrow their way through the museum glass and remind us that we are not lost. They are the stars that watch over every dark night of the soul.

I keep getting the sense that we’re standing on a precipice, staring out at distinctly murky waters as storm clouds gather in the distance. My pervading hope is that we take flight from the cliff edge, rather than fall. But I don’t know… All I know, as much as anything can be known, is that our embers are as deserving of our protection as they are our attention. Existence forms a web, not a ladder, and it is wise to tend to that which sustains us in the face of adversity.

My embers today came in the form of a Chaffinch, who for weeks has been trying to perch on the feeder that the Blue Tits use, and losing his balance each time—until today. Today, my little feathered ember steadied himself and gorged on sunflower seeds in the October sun.

I don’t understand how it came to be that the triumph of a Chaffinch could break through glass, or why it is that beauty seems to sometimes need a darkness from which to germinate; but the universe is under no obligation to make sense to me.

Yours in aimless flight…

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Friends, after this post was first published, the multi-talented

Debjit Banerjee

composed a wonderful piece of music, in response. I asked Debjit if he would be open to me placing his composition under my voiceover, and he kindly agreed. You can listen to the result above, and see him playing the piece in the link below. I do hope you enjoy. Please check out Debjit’s work over at Breather.

"our embers are as deserving of our protection as they are our attention"