Lessons from the birds

8 January 2020

As the unfolding catastrophe that is the Australian bushfires rolls on, as I sit in my house with all windows closed, watching the smoke and wind batter at the thinning, drying trees I wonder how to cope. I wonder how I can resist breaking into pieces as the day after dayness of distress and fear tears at me. I wonder how to not stay numbly in front of Netflix, a haven of safety and a scratching of guilt: such cowardice these closed doors of my heart and mind feel. I wonder how to find a way forward.

I make plans for dismantling the structures of my life that are bound in the larger structures of wanting and taking and disconnection that have brought us here. I make a start: I list the items I need to renounce, I wonder what I can make instead of buy, I research what plants might help the birds and insects. I feel my body working harder and becoming more alive as it carries its bucket of vegetable washing water out to the stricken plants. I feel cleaner as I stop buying, as I sense the enoughness of what I have. I feel like I am seeing the earth and the plants and water as they are meant to be seen, and it I know this as love.

By night I step out, taste the smoke, try not to breathe. I see the half moon glowing, clear white turned to dirty orange by the haze and touch the three trees behind my house: one still strong, one actively dying, the other on the edge of dying. I hold my hands against their bark, I lean against them and whisper and listen. I hope for a mythic rising, an awakening: Ents, superheroes, mortals who take on the mantle of change. This seems the best chance, some stirring from deep, some sturdy sapling of courage, some awakening that finally allows the earth to bloom anew.

I sleep with a wet handkerchief over my face. In the small hours I look out at the red glow of the smoke haze and think of all the birds with no walls and windows to protect them, with no running tap and handkerchiefs. I fall back to sleep, because I must. In the morning I wake and listen: silence or song?

Like a background soundtrack the birds have been my guide. It becomes clear that when the smoke is thick there is no song, no sounds of baby galahs feeding, no screech of cockatoos. Each time they go silent I fear that they have died from the smoke, that I will go out and see the ground littered with their bodies. So far I have not been greeted with this grief and as soon as the smoke thins, as soon as there is the faintest wisp of blue in the sky there they are, swooping, feeding, calling, chirping, darting and dashing; perhaps not all that were there before, or with the same vigour, but still some, still calling out to each other, to the day.

I cannot claim to know the mind or heart of a bird, but I do not doubt that they experience fear and sadness as the smoke rolls in and surrounds them and the leaves become dry and brittle. They know the air is thick and smells of danger, all us animals do. Nor can they cannot escape the dwindling of seeds and insects and blossoms. And I take heart from their resurgence, from their grabbing each better moment and getting on with the stuff of life: food, each other, babies, fresh sky to surge through.

We say that animals do not understand death or know of their own dying, but I do not believe it. Maybe they do not foresee it as we do, or maybe they are simply less determined to run from the looming, more accepting of life having an end. But I think they know: parents hover beside a car struck child before leaving it, they flee danger and have alarm calls. Perhaps they are simply more willing to enjoy the gift of life while it is here and fly with life as it presents itself.

After the Great War we received the slogan, Lest We Forget. And as I go about a day with less smoke, as I cook my food and nap on the sofa, I do not forget, but I let it fall to one side for a while. I get on with the day, I enjoy my meal of vegetables and chicken, I savour the blue sky, I hop on my bike and fly around the neighbourhood revelling in the strength, still here, for now, in my body. And I know that when the next onslaught of smoke and fear and wind and heat and maybe flames comes that I will be more ready to cope and to attend to what needs my care.

As a child I somehow believed that if I held in myself all the distress I saw in my mother that I was helping her, as if her pain were shopping bags that were a little too heavy. It was a comfort, I guess, to think I could help save her and thus myself. And it felt like an act of love, to see and help carry. I was also certain that it was my duty: to not try and lift these laden string bags overflowing with desperation must be an abandoning and I would not, above all, abandon.

One morning, as the smoke started, I sat and felt like the pain of the world was pouring into me. And then suddenly something changed. I looked up and saw the lime tree and realised that it could hold its own pain, within its stems and branches, rippling out into its leaves, touching the air. I had a sense of all beings pain sitting side by side quietly on the earth, us as comrades and friends, separate and together. I saw the green of the leaves again, the curve of the branches, the tree and the pain. And I felt my own held by my limbs and belly.

It has taken many years (and therapy) to realise that I didn’t help my mother, that she worked it out herself, that it wasn’t my job to carry her pain for her even if I could. Now, as a trauma therapist and spiritual carer, so many years on, it is an ongoing lesson that I cannot and should not carry the pain of those I work with. I may share elements of it when we are together, I may feel sharp edges and shaky terror, I may reflect its name and help find ways for it to become more bearable or to leave, but that is all. To pretend to do else denies strength, joins my pain with another’s pain in ways that creates its own storm that rains in dirty ash on others, and that drains my own wells dry and chars the gardens of my own living.

I know I need to stop, be silent, and listen – to the trees, the people, the stories of the deaths and rescues, to the numbers of the dead and dying. I need to see what is true and to feel the grief and the fear for this world I love tumbling and burning around me. I need to become comfortable with knowing that I, too, may die within this time of drying and burning.

And it is the birds who show me that it is ok to delight in a soft breeze coming through the window, to let myself be soothed by the gentle sounds of evening settling, even if this is the last evening of life or life as I have known it. These are the oases that let the springs run fresh, that help me to sit beside others and talk of pain. These are the memories that become the little light needed in darkness, that help me remember why we are here.

For my mother, Deborah Bird Rose, 1946-2018