Beholden

on sanity, grace, and the barely there space...

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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I have, for many years, often awoken in the middle of the night, always near 3am, and always in the fiercest grip of dread. I would lie in the pitch black, heart racing, trying to negotiate with the equally dark and insistent thoughts that plagued my mind. I often wondered whether I, or our home, was perhaps haunted. Or whether malevolence itself had some need of me, and so would come to visit in the witching hour. Anyway, it recently transpired that I’m hypoglycaemic and my blood sugar has been crashing in the middle of the night. And so for all my dark imaginings I was, in fact, more in need of a snack than an exorcism. It is a strange thing, to be so much at the will of a human body, and, perhaps even more so, to have only a meaning-making mind as the tool by which to interpret its signals—a mind that has to take its own sanity mostly on faith, with only the sea of other humans to weigh itself against. And no real clue whether they are a reliable measure, either.

Years ago, I was fostering a baby Goldfinch who, of an evening as the light began to fade, would flutter awkwardly to her favourite perch, ruffle her little body, tuck her head beneath a wing and promptly fall asleep. After a few minutes of slow, deep breathing she would, into the underside of her wing, start to sing. The sleep-singing of this tiny being was one of the most wondrous things I’d ever witnessed. It would, in the fleeting pocket of time in which it was contained, render me peaceful. Render me sane. I cannot summon grace, however hard I try. All I can do is organise my life in such a way that it becomes something of an invitation to it. This, in large part, is why much of my time is spent with members of other species, or with dying members of my own.

I once sat with a man near the end of his life who, following a stroke, had been left unable to speak. He tended to communicate with smiles, frowns, hand squeezes and a variety of hums; the pitch of each dictating their meaning. It’s extraordinary what can be communicated through humming alone, when needs must, and we gradually developed a language based as much in sense as in sound. He’d begun to spend most of the day sleeping, but would still wake from time to time for a sip of water, or to point to a framed photograph he wanted closer. One afternoon, as he slept, I was looking at the back of his hand as it rested in mine—marvelling at how the near-translucent, time-loved skin draped over tendon and bone like fabric—when suddenly, he gasped. His eyes and mouth opened widely and a look of sheer surprised delight spread across his face as he looked at the ceiling, and said, clear as a bell, “Oh! Oh how amazing!”. A single tear rolled from the corner of his eye down towards his hairline. I couldn’t help but look toward the ceiling myself, just in case, nor could I help but mirror the smile he was left with, even after he’d closed his eyes and fallen back into whatever state it was from which he had burst forth. Those four words were his last. He died a couple of days later, and while I don’t know what he saw, I know I saw him see it, and I know the wonder of the sight made its way through him, into me. Human perception is, after all, an instrument of survival. We did not evolve in order to see the world exactly as it is, we evolved to stay alive. So perhaps it makes sense that when we are dying, when staying alive is no longer the task at hand, perception starts to open to more of the world than it would usually allow in.

At home, Little Wing has somehow managed to ingratiate herself into a ready-made family of Blackbirds; an adult male, adult female, and their two juveniles, both the same age as her. We’d not once seen these Birds in the garden before. It is as though she’s conjured them. At the rescue centre, two of the Deer fawns died in close succession. Life fills my heart to bursting, and then puts on football boots and stamps on it. I notice a pull in myself, here, to try to explain why an animal for whom I’ve cared may have died, to defend myself, as though I might somehow be culpable. This, surely, the meaning-making mind and its refusal to sit with the simple isness of a thing. It is quite the rollercoaster, to drive, of an early morning past the mangled, barely recognisable body of a young Deer on the side of the road and, not an hour later, to hold a small posy of Roses, picked from the garden at dawn, as a group of fawns—alien and angelic—gently tug at the petals. There is something of the entirety of life in it. Would the fawns have seemed less exquisite, were it not for the sight of the mutilated Deer? I don’t know. Probably not. But I do feel all the more beholden to the gods for the current safety of each one. Sanity, I suspect, is relational—mislaid when I mistake myself for the centre, and returned upon remembering that I am but a strand in a cosmic latticework. Mercifully, the remembering tends to be done for me: by Birds, and by the dying, and by fawns being fed Roses in the early morning light.

There is a prayer, of sorts, that I’ve come to offer silently to any and all beings in their leaving:

Dear departing soul—whether ushered by time, or illness, or violence, whether riding on breeze or in storm—may the version of reality into which you now walk greet you with startling familiarity. May you be gentled by the love which has known you, and may the cosmos gather you, greedily, back in; delighted by you in Death as it was delighted by you in life. May you be granted any peace, or adventure, or reunion for which you have longed, and may you know what it means to love and be loved across the vast and barely there space that sits between the here and the beyond.

The vast and barely there space that sits between the here and the beyond.

Yours in aimless flight…

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