Unknowing
Love, fear and laughing gods
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds, and every word of it is dedicated to the fiercely loving memory of the poet
.When I was little, whenever I saw an animal which had been killed on the countryside lanes, I used to insist that we stop and take it home for a proper burial. My aunt told me recently that she used to try to distract me by pointing at something skyward—but I was beady-eyed and on a mission. I felt a great sense of injustice that our rituals around Death were not extended to our wild non-human kin, and while I was vocal about that aspect of the motivation, there was another, more complicated layer to it. My mother had died when I was three years old, and so being around Death gave me a sense of connection to her. It was as though she existed in another world, and these pockets of reverence allowed me to place my hands against the edge of it. At times I thought I could sense her, doing the same. Both of us with our palms pressed against the wall separating our worlds.
I long for the wisdom I possessed as a child, for the trust I had in the imaginal realm, and the openness afforded me by my lack of a need to know. It seems that there are two fears that the majority of us are unwittingly gifted by our culture as we transition out of childhood: I don’t know what’s going to happen and I am not in control. They’re fears easily stirred by simply waking into modern life, and they’re fears often prevalent in the approach to Death. These fears are well worth working with, regardless of one’s proximity to their final moments, and they are fears best danced with by taking the hand of Unknowing.
Sometimes, I’ll imagine the embodiment of Unknowing coming to sit beside me. She is light, like a cloud, and featureless, like a marble sculpture yet defined. She emits the peace of a storm’s conclusion and she speaks in tongues of nothing-at-all. Some questions lead me to answers, but others lead me to her, where I lay my head in her barely-there lap and rest in ungraspability. No hope, no fear, like grace. Like grace. How sweet it can be, to yield. To abandon the quest, and lay down the arms of information and prediction, even for a moment, in order to surrender fully to the now. To the now, just as it is, in all its perfect imperfection.
Those two statements, those expressions of fears are, interestingly, almost always true if we look beneath the surface of them. And so they are, ironically, two well-disguised semblances of certainty. How often the thing we seek sits in the core of what we fear. Is that the distant thunder of a summer storm I hear, or the Gods laughing at how they cloak our desires in our terrors? The cosmic urging for us to face our fears would seem as insistent as a baby Bird.
We have a gang of four baby Magpies at home, who’ve now fledged and are boisterous and vocal juveniles. They look almost fully grown, but they give themselves away when a parent comes to join them in the garden and each one immediately rushes over, beaks gaping and wingtips aflutter. We gave them a paddling pool during the heatwave and I’ve rarely seen so much excitement. We kept a tea towel draped over the side, so that winged insects who found themselves in there could make an easy exit, but the Magpies thought we’d done it so they could repeatedly drag it six feet away after fighting over it. When we secured the tea-towel under a large stone, the four of them circled around with tilted heads, and quickly figured out that if two or more of them yanked at the same time, they could once again free the towel. I could watch these Birds for hours. And sometimes, I do. Every Magpie I have ever cared for has added to my abiding love for each member of the species, and perhaps even more so the ones who have died. Holding the truth of one’s fragility renders every head-tilt and wing-flutter of the others sacred. I become only ever more convinced that Death has a deep and enduring intention to teach us how best to love life. For he loves her so.
Recently, I was carrying a Crow, moving him from one spot to another. I had one hand wrapped around his wings and body, and was holding him to my chest in order to keep my other hand free. He saw that hand nearing a pot of food and let out a loud, excited caw. The sound waves of which resonated through my sternum and deep into my chest. For a moment, it felt as though we were one, singular thing. Then again, surely the boundaries of our individual selves are little more than arbitrary lines drawn through continuous fields of matter and energy. The natural world knows nothing of separation.
Death can seem like our departure from the natural order of things, but in reality it’s our fullest and most intimate participation in them. Death is bestowed upon everything blessed with the gift of life, no matter how loved it may be. To believe that this renders Death cruel, is to negate the wisdom of life and the persistence of love. There are certain recognitions so fundamental to human consciousness that they emerge spontaneously whenever and wherever people have listened deeply to what existence itself is saying—and one of them is that love is a force so powerful that it is unbound by time, untouched by Death, and unhindered by walls between worlds.
Yours in aimless flight…
What we desire is hidden in our fear. Thank you, Chloe, for the gift of this profound truth. I will carry it with me today. And a full-hearted yes to this: “love is a force so powerful that it is unbound by time, untouched by Death, and unhindered by walls between worlds.”
Dear Chloe, I really don't know how you write as you do, or how your words break me open with alarming regularity. I'm going to sit with this for a while...