empty handed

and a tornado of innumerable Blue Tits

A Rorschach inkblot. I see a Great Horned Owl and a fallen empire.

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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There is a thick fog weighing in the valley. It crept in one night and has stayed for days. I don’t know how to feel about it, as I cannot tell whether it is suffocating or cradling me. Midweek, its soft cocoon shielded me from the potential insult of the sun, but yesterday it wrapped its hands around my throat and prevented me from breathing in the view. Perhaps, like Death, this Rorschachian fog is a mirror. Life refracts through each of us like prisms. The spectrum that we cast—and therefore see—is determined by our inner geometry.

As the temperature here cools, the fattening instinct of our local Birds becomes nothing short of ferocious. There is a constant, frenetic hoard of Blue Tits at our garden feeders. The tiny, bold beings dart and sing, and fan their impossibly small wings in an adorable attempt to intimidate whenever there is debate over whose turn it is.

When they land on the feeder by the kitchen window, their staccato pecking sounds as though it could be Morse code. David and I once made a note of the dots and dashes of their pecks, just to see what kind of gibberish it translated to. Strangely, it spelled out: your human delusions of superiority will be your undoing.

In amongst the tornado of innumerable Blue Tits there stands a lone Robin. He waits for his moment, a break in the chaos, so that he might swoop and steal away a single sunflower seed. As the days shorten and the Winter nears, the Robin becomes a solitary being and adopts a more melancholy song. I can only assume that we are related. The human world feels less invitational by the day, and the pull towards retreat and isolation has become four horses strong.

The density of the fog distorts acoustics, and the caws of the Crows no longer reflect their true positions. The garden becomes a hall of mirrors, and I become still. What else to do, when a place so familiar seems alien, than stand in the disorientation of it?

I want so much to be able to give you something. I so deeply wish to be someone who could dive into the depths of these dark waters and retrieve a pearl to hold aloft and say, “Look! Hope!” —but every time, I come up spluttering and empty handed. I know it’s there, fundamental structure of the universe that it is, and I know that when my heart has knitted itself just a little more together, I’ll reach it.

So, while I tend to my inner geometry, in the hopes of once again casting a spectrum not entirely blue, I offer you someone else’s pearl…¹

ON HARD DAYS by

Amanda Cooke

On days when hopelessness reigns, remember, you came here
to love and to liberate.

In a sea of indifference,
be an island of tiny kindnesses, each an illumination of the truth of our belonging to each other.

On hard days, find that part of you that longs to love more, stay close to it let it lead, light up let yourself
be found, otherwise,
how will we ever find our way
back to each other?

Yours in aimless flight…

1. Amanda’s pearl of a poem is taken from her book Reunion Songs, which is for me a source of much comfort. Now more than ever.