The river
and the children we once were
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
We are all still the children we once were. It is inescapable. When I was little, I had a rabbit; Snuffles. He was snow white with black speckling down the centre of his back. One morning I went to his hutch with fresh greens, and he was laying dead, as stiff as a board. I knew, by then, what Death was. I recognised its permanence and felt the weight of its presence. I sensed the shift in the intensity of the moment. The quietening. The delicate, almost balletic, way with which everything was suddenly handled.
My aunt lined a shoebox with hay, and I gently (so gently) placed his rigid body inside. We would bury him that afternoon, making a little headstone and planting a rose so that his grave could be just like my mothers.
This was the early 90’s, and there was something called Viral Haemorrhagic Disease killing large numbers of wild rabbits in the UK. In a field near the house I saw a rabbit which had been dead for a while—its body in an active state of decay. I found myself transfixed by a thing once animate, now more earth than being. A variety of little bugs happily weaved their ways in, on and around the rabbit, and I wondered as to whether the same thing had happened to my mother—a thought which prompted the complicated merging of a genuine curiosity with a violent sense of longing.
That quiet, balletic, careful tone does not move in and out of life—it is a river running constantly underneath it, a flow of reverence which we can sometimes fall into when Death is near, or present. Birds, too, offer portals to this place. They are themselves invitations to momentarily let go of the struggle and, instead, slip into the clear waters of attunement.