points in space and time

meetings and undulations in the continuum

Little golden-crested genius, by Vincent van Zalinge

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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I caught a Robin midair last week (yes, it was a juvenile Robin, but it’s not like it was a fledgling, so it’s still impressive). It was one of those moments when time slows down and you suddenly know exactly how the next few moments are going to play out, as though you’d reversed time to get to where you are now. Somehow, I knew exactly where he was going and all I had to do was let my arm extend to the point in space and time where he and my hand had met before… As I walked him back to his little aviary he looked me dead in the eye and mouthed, “Fuck you”.

Peak baby Bird season is a most precious and unrelenting time. The smallest of babies are on a twenty minute feeding schedule, and sheer volume dictates that as soon as one round has finished another must immediately begin. At home there is a Sparrow on a constant loop of catching mayflies and delivering them to the gaping maws that crowd at the mouth of her nest under the eaves of our home, before returning to the sky and her winged-insect hunt. She looks as frazzled as I do. Deep bow to you, little feathered mama.

There are times, these days, when my brain simply stops agreeing to produce coherent thoughts. It usually kicks in during the late afternoon, and it’s an interesting phenomena to witness from within. Last week I stopped at the pharmacy on the way home, and the whole time I was there a part of my brain kept telling me that I urgently needed to leave because there were Birds in my car, and I had to get them home. It was as though a dream had superimposed itself too firmly over my waking world and while, logically, I knew there were no Birds in the car I was so tired that logic was putting up very little fight. It’s extraordinary, how tenuous our grip on what we perceive to be reality really is.

Back at home I sat, dazed, watching the Greek drama that’s been playing out between David and a squirrel. The squirrel is very much David’s nemesis, but I believe that the squirrel sees David as his sensei—setting him carefully considered and ever more complex assignments in which he must find a way to reach the birdseed. One day, the squirrel will come to know that he himself was the birdseed all along, and their dance as student and teacher will come to an end.

We have a nest of three Goldcrests at the rescue centre at the moment. They are impossibly small Birds (the smallest of all the Birds which inhabit these cursed shores of the United Kingdom), with the three of them weighing in at a whopping 11 grams, combined. They will each eat exactly three of the tiniest mouthfuls of baby Bird food from the end of an artist’s paintbrush typically used to render the minutest of detail, before closing their mouths and tucking their tiny heads under their tiny wings and drifting off into satisfied slumber.

Whenever I see a Bird with its head tucked beneath a wing I experience an intense lurching sensation. So vulnerable is the sight that I find myself wanting to use my body to form a fortress around them, so that they might sleep a little more safely in this entirely unpredictable world that we co-inhabit. The Goldcrests are, of course, no less vulnerable than we are in the grand scheme of things—while the inflated human ego tends to minimise the true extent of our defencelessness, the predation of our hearts and minds by the ill-intentioned is no less serious a threat.

How is it that at our first meeting, this little mass of feathers know that the big, strange being with the paintbrush is here with the sole purpose of carefully placing food into their mouths?  An unspoken wisdom abounds within the natural world and, deaf to a silence that might save us, it seems as though we are trying to compete with it, rather than attune to it. It is a strange pathology, the need to compete with the very thing from which we emerged. Perhaps our innate knowing that each of us will, one day, be humbled by it creates some psychic tension which we don’t know how to process, outside of futile attempts at domination. How strange we must seem, to the non-human. How lost and frantic we must look.

Hood, our young semi-resident Robin, recently brought a friend over. The friend, who David has named Olivia (because “It suits her”) stood and watched as Hood demonstrated the art of disturbing an area of leaves, turning up the earth and eating the tiny grubs there in. Olivia eventually followed suit and the pair feasted as David watched over them, his chest swollen with pride.

I am so easily overwhelmed in moments like these. My mentor (Death) has made me acutely aware of how improbable and how fragile any and all of life’s unfoldings truly are. The fact that the cosmic undulations which are all too briefly manifesting as David, Hood, Olivia and I have each coincided within the same point of spacetime is the most beautiful and ordinary of miracles.

Once again I find myself without coherent thought, only a sense of the parallel meanderings of life, pulsating arrhythmically around me.

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Yours in aimless flight…