lanterns
and the inexplicable gift of awareness
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
As a child I walked, one late summer evening, down to the river which runs through the village. A gentle stream of locals trickled from their homes and meandered, in hushed tones, to the water’s edge. A faint sense of electricity hung in the darkening air, and those gathered spoke softly, as though careful not to ignite it. The banks were lined by young and old, all nebulous forms in a dusk dimming faster than eyes could adjust to. And then, in the distance, it came; a solitary floating lantern.
The commanding little light turned every head, each gaze locked silently onto its tiny flame, housed precariously within paper walls, atop gentle and treacherous waters. Another two, five, twelve lanterns followed behind, like apparitions, and before we knew it a convoy of a hundred bobbing candles filled the river, and the glassy eyes of each observer. I was too young to know what had happened in Hiroshima, all those years before, but I wasn’t too young to sense the potency and complexity that was bound to this ritual. A prayer for peace, offered alongside an acknowledgement of barbarity. A piercing recognition of our species’ capacity for both creation and destruction.
In childhood, whenever my immediate world became too overwhelming, I would imagine myself stepping backwards out of my body, in order to stand behind it. Waves of fear, confusion or sadness could then crash upon my physical self while the part which felt more like ‘I’ sheltered, gratefully, in her wake. I’d find myself doing this upon learning details of the atrocity which led to the annual lantern remembering, and in response to countless other horrors committed by members of our species. When visiting some of The Killing Fields in Cambodia, the trick of leaving my body didn’t work. The tsunami of darkness that those places hold leaves no room for shelter.
A Peregrine Falcon will pluck a Starling from the sky with the same precision that a Hummingbird drinks nectar from a fuchsia; both exquisite acts in their perfection, and their necessity. Both acts a transmutation of life. No cruelty on the part of the Falcon, nor kindness on the part of the Hummingbird, but we—we who float paper lanterns in remembrance of our capacity for calculated slaughter—we choose. We can conceive of peace, and yet choose war. We know intimately what it is to suffer, and still we inflict suffering. The wound comes not from horror existing, but from there being an alternative—and horror being chosen, nonetheless.
Today, as with every other day, about a hundred and fifty thousand people around the world will die. They’ll slip away in hospital beds, in sleep, in love, in desperation, accident, violence, war. It is an exodus equal in size to a small city, and every being will be greeted by nature equally; our hierarchies of loss becoming meaningless outside of their living context. Beneath the moon I’ll wish a silent farewell to the daily departing city of souls. The way in which we speak to the world matters. It carries weight.
I fear, at times, that after decades of our species approaching nature with the language of terror and violence, she has finally adopted our tongue in effort to reply; and her responses seem clearer by the day. Her patience wanes. Our collective refusal to recognise ourselves in her sets us on a path of mutual destruction, and those in the seats of global power treat her as inanimate platform upon which to act out their egotistical theatre. How shocking it will be, when the stage swallows them whole.
We build monuments to honour the sacred, and in secret effort to become immortal, and all the while one hand honours what the other hand wounds. We have been taught to prioritise external stimuli over internal awareness. This modern world ensures that our attention fragments a thousand times a day, year round, and through this practice we lose ourselves. Through this practice we forget that we are organic matter mysteriously infused with the inexplicable gift of awareness. In the presence of someone’s dying time, or of a hatchling Bird, that mysterious gift becomes unfragmentable. Death and Birds see my fractured attentions flock to me like pilgrims to a sacred site.
In the precious first days and the sacred final hours, we arrive at the river’s edge; transfixed as light and darkness, being and non-being, dance. It is here that we speak the weighty and near-dead language of reverence. It is here, at last, that we remember.
Yours in aimless flight…
How do we know
that the horses like the harness,
that the dog enjoys the fetch,
that the tree likes the pruning,
or the rivers the dam?
It's a grand conceit to believe
that we know what's best
for any other living thing.
Maybe the earthquakes,
the fires, the floods,
are nature’s way of
shaking off the shackles
of the human arrogance
of progress.
Chloe, you’re a special person, a lantern yourself.