Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
Each September I join the migration. As the Geese leave their Arctic shores and return carrying the dawn, I leave the shores of constant doing and return to myself carrying the wounds of Summer. The fall makes permissible my proclivity to cocoon, to burrow into book and memory and the long list of things demanding to be felt. To be with oneself is patient, painful and ancient work; easily neglected, oft overlooked. I turned 40 at the weekend. An arbitrary way marker, essentially, and yet a point of some potency as I am now older than my mother lived to be. Naturally, a review insisted itself be conducted. It came as a serpent wearing a bowler hat, who led me, unbidden, winding through not only the last four decades as I know them but through the years as they’d have appeared on alternate paths. A dendritic patchwork of unlived lives, but regardless of route each path moved with the same undulation of existence. Seed became mouse became soil became grass became rabbit who met car and became Crow. Life arched her back towards Death in ecstatic union, and their love propelled the wheel upon which this all turns. Being raised, in part, by a ghost made the threads which bind life, love and Death all the more clear to see.