Golfball
Love, Long Tailed Tits, Beethoven and Birdsong
Hello. This post is about Birds (Death only gets a fleeting mention).
I was recently told that if you’re struggling to write you should just start writing; as in, literally write anything, just put your stream of consciousness down. So, I tried that and, in the spirit of shameless self-expression (just kidding, there’s loads of shame), I thought I’d share what I wrote when I tried that:
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have nothing to say. There’s nothing there. I want to write about a bird that I love but I can’t feel my body. Help. Why can’t I feel my body? I want to be in a bubble bath in the middle of a field of lavender, smoking opium and listening to Beethoven and Birdsong, but I’m hunched miserably over my laptop like a character from a dystopian novel about lower-tier-non-transhumans living in the year 2043.”
That latter thought prompted me to close my laptop and look outside.
The first thing I saw was a Sparrow teaching her fledglings how to use the bird-feeder which hangs on our rosebush. One of them had the hang of it, the other two were using the opportunity to sit on the bird feeder as their mother took seeds and deposited them directly into their mouths. They yelled incessantly at her, and their siblings, whenever they did not have a mouth full of food.
As this scene unfolded, my beloved suggested that we humans can be much like these tiny Sparrows; essentially indignant when we are not having our every need taken care of—a part of us desperate for a return to that brief time when we were cared for, absolutely.