Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
At dusk we watched as the rain moved through the valley as a singular, animate force. The sweep of her pale grey skirt kissing each tree individually, before finding the ground so that she might merge with them. This endless, loving loop of life, of transformation and becoming, is poetry and dance united. It is the simplest of great complexities and confirms to me my suspicion that the universe likes to wink at itself through the medium of paradox.
Last week, we stayed in the hills of Plettenberg Bay, where monkey chatter weaves up through the canopy and Double-Collared Sunbirds dart about; their wings sounding different, deeper in tone, when the fine rain drums against them, quick as their heartbeats. The sky there is vast, and when I tilt my head back to look the expansive, cloudless blue in the eye, it always bids me dissolve. True spaciousness is in short supply in this modern world of ours, so when it appears I give myself over to it. I allow my already vague edges to dissipate and thin, and the temporary idea of “me” to drift into the history to which it will one day belong. Within that momentary pocket of forgetting exists a door through which I might walk and remember that I, too, am the rain and the valley and the Sunbird; and that my delighting in each, is the universe delighting in itself.
Years ago, a Harvard doctor attempted to calculate the likelihood of a singular human beings existence. Accounting for the odds of ones parents meeting, staying together, having a child, the odds of the specific sperm meeting the specific egg that created you—as opposed to a sibling—and the unbroken chain of survival and reproduction of all your ancestors for the past 4 billion years, he arrived at a figure: 1 in 10^2,685,000, which is 10 followed by over 2.6 million zeros1. Some similar equation then must apply to all the beings with whom we share a planetary home; which seems to me to implicate that the world is positively overflowing with the miraculous.
We visited a Bird sanctuary while in Plett. Birds of Eden spans six acres of restored indigenous forest, beneath a single mesh dome. It’s the largest free-flight sanctuary in the world and is home to over 3000 Birds, all of whom have been rescued from captivity and are learning to remember what it means to fly freely. We arrived early, so had the place to ourselves, and after walking through a nondescript wooden door we stepped out onto a platform overlooking a vast amphitheatre of native trees. For the first ten minutes David and I just stood, open mouthed, shocked by the scale of the expanse. It felt Jurassic, like deep time had defied history and stormed through the continuum so it could enshrine these Birds. Standing at the edge of the place somehow evoked the sense of being totally immersed within the intense concentration of life.
Gradually, some of the more curious Birds made their way in our direction. To the left, a child-sized Fruit Bat stretched their leathery wings and yawned. To the right a pair of Blue-and-Yellow Macaws, clearly knowledgeable of their own magnificence, swooped in perfect synchronicity. Before us, a Von der Decken’s Hornbill, came to flaunt some food she had and, as her audience, we were duly impressed. The sound of the place was suggestive of some ancient conversation, a polyphony of warning, seduction and of simple declarations of being alive.
As we slowly snaked our way through the understory, I began to feel more and more a constituent of the place, as though a thousands-year-old part of me had suddenly roused because it sensed that it had come home. I felt a physical sense of what it means to be winged and to be caged, and to then be released into the wide open air, and I burst into tears of relief. Later I wondered whether that might be what our moment of Death feels like. We spent hours in the sanctuary and, it having opened something in us which was not ready to be closed, we returned first thing the next day.
Back in Cape Town—lovingly watched over by a cloud cloaked mountain who moves significantly slower than the Sunbirds, but is surely no less animate—Bailey and I watch a pair of Cape White-Eyes building a nest. They busily gather materials which begin to form a cup of soft fibres which will soon welcome the tiny, winged meeting point of a pair of 4 billion year long lineages. And at some distant place upon that long and winding line of ancestry, there stands a creature who is grandmother to these Birds and I, both; a fact which, for some reason, makes me feel considerably more comfortable in my own skin. The miraculous exists in perpetuity regardless of whether it is witnessed or acknowledged, just as the sun continues to shine on the most overcast of days—but in our choosing to be observers, we part the clouds.
Yours in aimless flight…
There are doors through which we might walk to remember that Death need not be our adversary. If you’re curious, these themes and thresholds are explored in The Deep End, a course on re-relating to mortality…
And below, the sweet and magnificent Von Der Decken’s Hornbill who welcomed us:
I’d have written it out but if I wrote one zero per second—without stopping to eat or sleep—it would have taken me 31 days to finish.
I have been pondering why your prose so often touches me, and only have just figured it out. You remind me of one of my early heroes, Loren Eiseley. Among other reasons, I chose to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania because Eiseley was a professor there. It was my intention to enroll in his class in my sophomore year, having fulfilled the requisite freshman curriculum. Alas, Eiseley passed over to the next plane that summer. I hear whispers of his spirit in your poetical discourse. Thank you for that unintentional gift.
The Universe delighting in Themselves. I think of this often as I observe other beings—animate and inanimate—going about their existences. Smooth rock accepting the billion-year caress of water, insects busily accomplishing whatever is in them to accomplish, and on and on. I, too, think about the transition from this life to whatever awaits us; I’m full of anticipation with faith in love and in the redemption of all things.
What a privilege to experience the birds and their natural surroundings! A glimpse of pure goodness.