mycelium
Birds of prey and infant stars
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
I recently sat down at my desk when, not a moment later, I heard a sound which I knew to be a Blackbird in distress. Rushing outdoors, I expected to see some territorial battle playing out between a pair of males, but saw nothing. Then, again, the screech of a distressed Blackbird, the sound quickly leading me to one of the large conifers in the garden. I knelt down to part the branches in the shady skirt of the tree, and met an eye. “A Pigeon?” I thought. But, as my own eyes adjusted to the dark understory, I saw that no, not a Pigeon. A Kestrel. A male Kestrel, stood atop one of our Blackbirds, talons firmly wrapped as the songbird lay open-beaked and gasping.
A lengthy moral debate played out within a fraction of a second. “This is nature, who are you to intervene?”, said my head. “You are the Blackbirds friend”, replied my heart. Trusting the latter more, I reached in with both arms in slightly unhinged attempt to remove the Bird of prey from said friend’s body. The Kestrel darted out through the other side of the conifer, landing on the lawn some ten feet away, Blackbird still in grip. I charged towards them, demanding, “Let him go!” The Kestrel spread his wings as wide as he could—which is Bird of prey for “Fuck off”—and I stopped. Something instinctual locked my skeleton; fear, no doubt, of what the talons holding the Blackbird could, quite justifiably, do to me. But the songbird gasped again and I became unstuck, lurching towards the pair. The Kestrel took off, Blackbird still in grip, and I gave chase, momentarily losing sight of both, before seeing him, again, flying up and out of the garden—this time, empty-taloned.
I spent the next part of the day meticulously searching for a wounded Blackbird, and after coming up empty-handed I was left to assume that he was not so wounded as to be unable to fly. I relentlessly berated myself, both for getting involved and for not rugby tackling the Kestrel. Sometimes there is no right answer.
The not-knowing of the fate of the Blackbird gripped my ribcage like mycelium grown around tree roots. It continually amazes me, how I can be so comfortable with not-knowing, how I can delight, nay dance, in the great cosmic unknowability of life…but the unknowability of how my Blackbird friend fares…that is intolerable.
There comes a point, for every being, when Life and Death will meet and confer, before Life ultimately decides that the moment has come to defer to her oldest and dearest friend. Life knows well when she is no longer the most appropriate keeper of a soul, when it is time to surrender yet another of her charges to the wisdom of her companion, lover and ally; Death—long suffering and much maligned, Death. He who clears a path for the emerging. He who rewards the tenured with their return to the everything. He whose sacred shadows render his love light. Life eventually lays every being she has ever known at his feet; such is the depth of her trust in him.
Life and Death, married under the arches of Time, their union forming infant stars and ghost nebula. Their marriage the very propellant of the cycles which wheel us through existence. She infused in everything and, so, he too. Her love for him is cosmic and necessary, with only the human ego finding insult in his work—for the human ego struggles to conceive of a story un-reliant upon its presence.
Our relationship with Death is just that, a relationship; reciprocal, nuanced, dynamic. It is a wondrous thing, to welcome the fact of our mortality into our lives. What it does over time is nothing short of miraculous. A steady drip feed of relating to the imposing and elusive concept of Death gradually shifts what it is to us—and, perhaps, even what it is. Physicist Max Planck famously said that, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Maybe, then, in the gradual shifting of the way in which we look at Death, our own, personal Death—hanging static like a dark and shiny glass bauble somewhere in the block of spacetime—changes. If, when we arrive at that very point, we have glanced in Death’s direction over and again, if we have asked questions of him, if we have come to know him as much as any being can while still firmly in the grip of his beloved Life, then perhaps our ultimate meeting with him comes not as insult or injustice, but more as the long awaited and most welcome meeting of a life long pen-pal. Beautiful friendships can blossom over great distances, and befriending him by whom we are foretold to one day be ushered from the world, seems a wise and worthy undertaking.
And, who knows, if we can make a companion of Death, think of what and whom else we might manage to take into our hearts…
Yours in aimless flight…
Oh, dear Chloe who finds the courage to look, and look, and listen for it all…thank you.
I imagine I am one of many who waits for your posts, cheers when they arrive, and is so grateful for these moments of reading and being transported by your words to the places of awe and wonder and mystery. If you had a PO Box for mail, I would pen a note and send it across the oceans just to thank you. Blessings to you — kate
As someone living with a terminal illness, I found this moving. I thought I'd made friends with death - I'd had plenty of prompts - until a medical emergency in 2020 plunged me into agony and back into fear and sadness. Before this, a painless peaceful death had seemed acceptable but, perhaps, I'd just been fooling myself. I have since stabilised.