filaments

if X then...why?

My grip on sanity. Photo by Michael Rodger

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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Last week, a coach the size of a London double-decker bus somehow managed to find itself stuck at the top of our lane. The driver claimed he’d broken down, but on being pressed admitted that he was stuck and could see no way of driving through the narrow roads of the village. Not much happens in our village, and so a small crowd of onlookers slowly amassed as the poor driver became steadily more distressed. At one point, he could be overheard on the phone saying, earnestly, “I’ll die here! It’s a tiny village with tiny houses and no water! I’m going to die here!”—a fear quelled shortly after, when a villager brought him a bottle of iced water from their fridge. While some of the onlookers worked hard on the mental gymnastics required for them to find a way to blame this man’s lack of directionality on immigrants, others took to action and had every car parked in the vicinity moved, so that the driver (who did not die in our tiny, allegedly waterless village) could perform a 300 point turn, and make his bid for freedom. I suppose we all have our version of narrow lanes, times when unfamiliar terrain sees the walls of the world close in on us. Funnily enough, the first panic attack I ever had was in a Propositional Logic class in college. The linear causality that we were being taught, the kind which surgically slices up the world into clean-edged binaries of “If X then Y, X therefore Y”, had felt like a spiritual assault. Like I was watching a poem, out in the wild, grazing in dappled light, suddenly snared, caged and forced to live out their existence behind the parallel lines of literalism. None of the circular, spiralling, shifting and relational patterns found in nature, grief and a real lived experience belonged in that room, and so it became devoid of air. I failed that class, choosing instead to sit on the grass outdoors, wondering why it is that beauty seems to demand a witness, as though it wants us to engage with it… If X then Y me that.

Fate would have it that this week has involved me navigating a significant amount of physical pain. Such is my relationship with modernity that I will, on most days, edge dangerously close to overwhelm; but give me more than 48 hours of unrelenting pain and the filaments which tether me to sanity begin to grow frayed and brittle. Seeing me wide-eyed and rigid, David, in his relentless love and wisdom, offers me a deceptively simple instruction: find a place that doesn’t hurt. And so I do. I close my eyes and turn as much of my focus as is available, towards the back and palm of my left hand. As I focus and breathe (and focus, and breathe) this hand becomes an island untouched by the storm which rages on the mainland of my body. The tempest remains untempered, but the two co-exist, and the island serves as proof of peace. Pain demands to be witnessed, but so does beauty, and so does the casual majesty of the thirty Goldfinches which have just landed in the Apple tree. There’s a Fox cub who comes and sits next to the Raspberry bush, testing each berry for its readiness by softly tugging on it with his front teeth. Sometimes he comes by during the golden hour, and sits, blinking sleepily in the warm glow of the lowering sun—and in that pocket of me watching him, nothing hurts at all.

Someone recently asked me for my thoughts on ‘digital resurrection’, the growing trend in which technology is being used to create interactive digital representations of people who have died. There are AI-generated videos that simulate someone’s appearance and mannerisms, voice synthesis programs trained on recordings of speech patterns, and immersive holographic projections that can engage in realtime conversation. I have endless compassion for the suffering of anyone who has lost anyone. And I think that this trend is entirely predictable, and entirely symptomatic of a culture with a pathological relationship to Death, the dead, and grieving. Raising the dead is for the gods alone and the fact that we’re trying speaks to the heights that our species’ god complex has reached. If we related to mortality, others’ and our own, in a sane and holistic way then the dead would be integrated into their communities, and no one would be willing to choose a deeply confusing hallucination of a loved one over their real and ongoing relationship with them. A healthy relationship with Death acts as a filter, separating the sediment of hollow pursuits from the crystalline waters of meaning.

For whatever reason, we all seem to have been tasked with incarnating during a time when the suffering of ourselves, our planet and our human and non-human kin is streamed both on demand and unbidden into the collective psyche. It’s enough to make us go mad—and, I fear, it might. The barrage of intensity looks unlikely to wane, and so strengthening the filaments which bind us to sanity (by which I mean honesty, compassion, discernment and interdependence) seems more important than ever. How, though, to find a space from which to view the larger picture? How to find steady footing amidst such a violent storm?

Whether truly relating to our beloved dead,

a peaceful island hand,

the grass outside a suffocating classroom,

or a Fox cub blinking in the sun:

we must find a place that doesn’t hurt,

and from there, relate to the pain.

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Yours in aimless flight…

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Friends, a couple of things. Firstly, if you feel called to relate to mortality in a more sane and holistic way, The Deep End (a course that invites a reconsideration of our relationship with Death) is coming this month, you can learn more about it here. Also, I recently had the staggering honour of releasing Acorn, the miraculous juvenile Wren, into the wild. He is now the King of a Conifer tree in our garden.

Long may he reign.