the Auspices

a liminal prelude of both-and-neither

A Magpie, unburdened… Photo by Leon S

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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The air has shifted, here, and I am whispered to of Spring. The garden Birds have changed their song and become frenetic in discourse and display. Everywhere I look I see Crows and Magpies collecting bits of tree for their forthcoming nests, and I can sense the sea of soon-to-be feathered souls waiting, somewhere in the wings. In the garden, I watch a Magpie make multiple attempts to fly while holding an ambitiously-sized branch. Eventually, he lets it go—his discernment a timely reminder that sometimes we must put things down, simply because they are too heavy.

A rich and ancient conversation takes place, out of doors. In the late-Winter stirring, animal and plant are patient musicians eagerly awaiting their cues before the elements lift a baton, and the opening movement of Spring begins. It is a liminal prelude of both-and-neither, an ambiguous piece shimmering with potential. Why we two-legged beings seem to absent ourselves from this dialogue, why we no longer take the auspices, I am unsure. Perhaps because the capitalist behemoth sees to it that, while it continues on around us, we ourselves do not Winter. How far we have strayed from the original score.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on a couch with my mother, eating black olives from a small bowl. I was a strange child, with strange taste. As my mother was still alive I can have been no older than three, and the sense I have of the scene is one of two beings, quietly attuned to one another. Two beings, quietly attuned to one another. What an exquisite thing.

Traversing any kind of chaos, as an infant, will naturally sculpt an internal landscape which features some extreme topography. I came to learn of the deep and dark crevices of my own inner-terrain when, in my teens, I fell headfirst into one them. It was a cavernous, lonely place, but one of which I became rather fond; because it was quiet, and it was familiar. The suffering playing out on the surface of the world, alongside the minimal effort being made to prevent it, was unbearable to my younger self—that was, up unto the point where I discovered the armour that narcotics could provide.

The soft embrace of those drugs made all the sharp right-angles of life gently curved, so I could bump up against it without being wounded. I once asked a far more seasoned user than myself what the powerful painkiller I was about to take would feel like. “Like a hug from the woman your mother would have been,” he said. And, he was right. To this day I can feel an echo of that honeyed euphoria, and I suspect that times of stress will forever awaken the parts of me who long to return to it, but I know now that these hugs and soft edges come at a cost. To be numb to suffering is to be numb to life, it is to exit the very conversation that we are here to have.

I have come to believe that there is a wisdom in baring ones sternum to life, in choosing to acknowledge the unending suffering that the world is home to, and refusing to be deterred by it—choosing not to become numb to it, but to love it all the more.

Baby Bird season is a wingbeat away, and it feels a strange thing to look forward to, as all the Birds who will come through the rescue centre’s doors will do so because their start in life has not gone to plan. Most will be orphaned, some will be injured, some will die. But it is here that my commitment is put to the test, because here is where I love beings as fragile as spiders silk, and where I greet their suffering as though it is my own—because, of course, it is. Few things make me question whether there is any benevolence in the universe like the Death of a day old Bird; but the cosmos operates by its own logic, not mine.

Relating to life as though it does not wish to speak to and through us adds an unnecessary heaviness to existence—a heaviness which, as the Magpie will tell you, can be let go of. A conversation takes place, from within the whispered preparations of Spring to the dark and humbling magnificence of the likely minuscule layer of the universe with which we are acquainted. It is a dialogue which we can step back into at any time, by becoming quietly attuned to the world. Quietly attuned to the world. What an exquisite thing.

Yours in aimless flight…

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