Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
While it’s still only the middle of February, I feel acutely aware of how quickly baby Bird season is approaching; and how their arrival will dictate a significant shift in pace and focus. I find it comforting to consider the huge amount of effort that the birth of these tiny creatures will inspire; it feels proportionate to their importance.
That time of year holds a particular kind of intensity. When tending to those made fragile by their proximity to either one of life’s bookends, one must disarmour themselves in order to fully meet the being to whom they tend. When one hand is tending to life beginning and the other to life ending, one’s arms are stretched so widely open that the heart is entirely exposed—a most vulnerable and liberating state.
Now, I don’t want to shock any of you, but it’s raining here in England, and while I am duty bound to practice our national bonding ritual of complaining about the weather, I have a deep love of the rain. When we lived in California I missed it so much that I would listen to recordings of it. Now, should I ever find myself bemoaning it, I think of how Swifts bathe themselves by flying slowly through falling rain, thousands of feet in the air—for some reason that fact brings me the most exquisite sense of peace.
Swifts will start to return to these shores in late April, following their four week long journey from Africa, during which they will have eaten, mated and slept entirely on the wing. Swifts are miraculous, celestial beings who are able to fly at up to 70 miles per hour, over 18,000 feet in the air.
I quite often close my eyes and imagine what that must be like—what it must sound and feel like to soar through an expanse free of the material, flying at speed and at ease in a sky your very own. I hope that this is what Death feels like, that whatever part of us which is eternal experiences a sense of release and relief as the final exhale returns it to a state unbound by matter—an ecstatic liberation, reserved only for the winged, the enlightened, and the dead.
We know comparatively very little about Swifts. We know that they pair up for life, and that they return each year to the same nest, but because they spend so much of their lives airborne we can’t know them in the same way that we know many other Birds. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why they are globally endangered, because when we do not know or understand another being we become detached from the truth of it’s preciousness.
As I am writing and it is raining, there are a pair of Collared Doves in one of the big Oak trees. Both are tilting their soft, grey bodies as they extend a single wing directly upwards—as though they are petitioning God. I know one of these Doves, she was released here in the garden last year and we affectionately named her Tatty—because, at the time, she was. But here, now, offering a wing to the raindrops, she is a muse worthy of da Vinci’s attentions.
Watching her languid gestures makes me think of how much my perception of beauty has changed, over time. My heart breaks a little for how often I will have walked by it, without realisation or acknowledgement. How, having fallen for the lie of mandatory urgency and constant doing, blinkers had formed that I did not know were there. How I could look at a person in their elder years, and in response feel unease at their aged body, or relief that mine were not so—missing entirely the visual display of the depth of the season of life they were inhabiting. Overlooking the poignant stories co-authored by skin, nature and time.
Old age is not easy, but it is a privilege. While youth holds much to be revered and respected, I can’t help but wonder whether our pathological lauding of it speaks to a damaged relationship to wisdom. When I see someone inpatient at the pace with which an elderly body or mind must move, I feel an ache for the way in which that person will one day relate to their own aging—we are more often punished by our unkindnesses, than for them.
We are typically invited into new stages of life. Only after many refusals are we dragged. There seems to be so little resistance, in nature—it’s almost as though we’ve come to believe that we are separate to it, perhaps in the hope that we might somehow escape our ultimate destiny.
This year, I will become older than my mother was when she died. I’ve noticed that a rather entitled part of me had felt as though I were owed life, up to now, but the years that lie ahead are so clearly gifts. I hope that I am able to meet them, unarmored and grateful, while she soars, like a Swift, in the inevitable.
Yours in aimless flight…