the bird Woman

Have you felt it?  When the veil thins and worlds brush against one another, and the eyes-behind-the-eyes catch a glimpse of the strange, the beautiful, the maybe-just-possible, the True?  Though meaning has come to me through the events that I share here, I do not intend to present fully-digested tales with a moral or a message.  I perceive these happenings as sentient beings in their own right, that have purposes of their own, and that have, by some chance or plan, intersected my path.  These stories have been traveling with me for some time now, and I have a sense now that they wish to walk out and encounter others, encounter you.  

I think back to a Nature Writing course my senior year of college, and to a particular book by Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey. Out of all the books that I read through my academic career, this one sticks out of the dusty bookshelf in the back of my mind.  As a 20-year-old floating, as I was, along the surface of the world, I couldn’t quite describe then why it grabbed me, how it whispered to the profound longing for depth and connection that has driven my life.  So The Immense Journey waited in the recesses of memory and of my childhood closet, until I recently went to dig it out and dust it off.  The chapter The Judgement of the Birds is a mirror of what I wish to do here, to see from an “inverted angle” the miraculous queerness of the world, to hear and reflect the singing of Life.  It therefore feels right to begin with the tale of the Bird Woman. 

The Bird Woman

It has been my experience that the “flimsiest of screens”[1] that part this world from the next, this mode of consciousness from the next, tend to dissolve most readily in circumstances already steeped in the liminal:  alone on a desert road, at night in a hospital corridor, at waypoints and in wild places.  The encounter with the Bird Woman happened at dawn, at a bus stop, at the very beginning of a long-anticipated cross-continental Journey. 

Two older but not quite elderly women approach me.  The tall one asks straight away - “might you help my friend?  She has trouble getting around airports, and she can’t ride the escalators.” I don’t remember what I said, but I must have given a satisfactory indication of consent because she cheerily says to her companion, “well, you’re in good hands then!” and departs.  We board the bus. I assume the slight woman now sitting beside me is quite unused to travel, perhaps she hasn’t been to an airport in decades.  A lot has changed, I suppose, now that we’re all expected to navigate the entire journey by app, never talking to another human.  She likely lives a sedentary life, and due to injury or illness has become unstable on her feet.  I wonder what unusual event prompted her to brave the bus and the plane and the travails of travel. 

You might imagine what soon happened to all of these unspoken assumptions, as this is a fae-touched tale[2]. 

My seatmate immediately launches into tales of her extensive travels all around the country, from coast to coast and to most states in between.  She has been staying with her friend here in Boulder, Colorado to have access to Rocky Mountain National Park and the birding opportunities to be found there.  Specifically, she speaks enthusiastically, poetically, about walking alone up to watch the water dippers dart behind Ouzel Falls.  Now this is when I realize something truly odd is afoot, because I know Ouzel Falls, and I know the only trail leading there – it’s more than five miles of rough, high-altitude terrain, with a thousand feet of elevation gain.  This woman is not a stranger to travel; she does not have trouble navigating the wilds; she’s definitely not incapable of a strenuous climb.  Huh.  Next, she pulls out her phone and shows me the personal website that she maintains to document the bird species that she passionately and patiently seeks to photograph; she’s clearly more technologically savvy than I am.

Yet her bewilderment is palpable when we arrive at the bustling expanse of Denver International Airport.  Despite being built for flight, the airport is clearly not a place for birds, or for bird people.  The same fluorescent light always beating down, the same music playing 24 hours a day.  There is no dawn chorus to mark time.  The ground is too flat and walls too white and the lines too linear here.  The vaulted ceilings give the illusion of sky, but it’s not an illusion that will hold for long, not for those with wings. 

An imposing escalator stretches from the bus stop up to the terminal.  A definite no for my companion.  We find the nearest elevator, then navigate the maze of never-ending airport construction to check her bags, get her boarding pass.  We locate the elevator down to the security line, and I point out and describe in as much detail as I can where to go from there.  She seems nervous, but we say our goodbyes as I depart to check in for my upcoming flight. 

I’ve thought about her a lot, especially since recognizing my own neurodivergence, since hearing so many stories of how different nervous systems navigate the world, since discovering how fundamentally alive and capable I feel in the wild places, since realizing how the strange combination of busyness and linearity that define an airport, and most of modern life, grates against my being.  I’m slowly remembering that there are more dimensions to this world than my mind and my legs can navigate; there are others that require heart and wings. 

~~~~~~~

Earlier in the summer that I meet the Bird Woman, I pay a visit to a dear place along a river in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  I had once camped there for several days, fasting, apart from humans but not alone, with the crawdads and the ducks and the constant presence of the water’s speech as she moved about the rocks and through a garden of reeds and over my body. It is a sweet reunion to hear this place again, to splash in the shallows, to hold my satchel above my head and plunge into deeper and darker currents.  As I climb, wade, and swim my way upstream I come to a bend, a luscious curve in the river‘s hip. The ripples lap against a small crescent of sandy shore guarded by high rock walls. Suddenly I see it, nestled into a branch, tucked within the overhang of the rock: a marvel, the perfect cup of a hummingbird nest, with three tiny beaks poking out. An exuberance fills me, a knowing of the decadent abundance of life, of hope and possibility.  “There are new things waiting to be born!”  This is the refrain, crystal clear, unadorned, incontrovertible, that echoes through the mountains and through my heart. 

The week after I meet the Bird Woman, I find myself in a Dutch wood, on land that has long been tended, prayed on, sung to.  Enchanted land.  I go out for a morning wander, thinking to visit the spiral labyrinth made entirely of moss that grows there, nestled in the forest. I am only a few steps into the trees when I am met by a horrific sight.  A baby heron lying on her back on the ground, beak opening and closing, soundlessly screaming, little legs kicking, neck bloody.  There is nothing to do but witness.  I sit there shaken to my core and watch her die, grateful that it is not more than a minute before she is still.  I leave a little altar of leaves and blackberries and stumble back out into the sunlight.  I rejoin my human companions; one of my teachers at this place, a shaman who navigates the world primarily by the constellations of her night dreams, approaches and tells me about a dream that came the night before, in which she feels honored to care for a dying bird child.

Fast forward a few summers.  I am far from home, wrestling with overwhelm and a general sense of lostness, finally in the process of coming to terms with this intellectually-familiar but never-before-personal concept of neurodivergence, 0f autism. I receive an unexpected text message from an autistic cousin.  We communicate deeply but infrequently, and I had not told her of the birds.  She too recounts to me a night dream.  In her dream, I am a small child crying over the body of a dead baby bird; people around me are telling me not to be upset, that it doesn’t matter because birds die all the time. My response to this dream is an awakening of an aliveness, a knowing that there are depths of feeling within me that have not flown for a long time, that are ready to take wing.

~~~~~~~

Now, in the present, I am blessed to have twin nephews, both sweet and precocious toddlers.  One of the twins is the vivacious life of the party.  His brother is introspective, playful but deeply sensitive.  He is not yet two years old, and he becomes visibly upset when he encounters trees that have been cut down; something within him knows to be devastated at the sight of these fallen beings.  

I rejoice because my nephew has a sensitivity that the Earth needs, and I worry because once he leaves the nest of home, he is going to encounter places that are not build for birds.  There is the potential overwhelm of an airport, or a chaotic classroom, but there is also a heavy cultural demand for, an imposition of, psychospiritual flatness.  I do not want him to be subject to a quashing of his multidimensional imaginings and emotions into two-dimensional boxes.  I don’t want anyone to tell him not to cry over a downed tree, or a dying bird, because it’s not important.  I don’t want anyone to tell him that it’s “just a dream,” “just your imagination,” and I definitely don’t want him to hear that he needs to “toughen up.”  We need the feelers, the deep imaginers, the wild dreamers.  There are new things, new perspectives, new ideas, waiting to be born, waiting to become the world we inhabit.  This is my prayer, that we may build safe nests for the birds among us, for the birds within us, that we may care for their woundings with reverence, and that we may create the spaces in which they can fly free.

[1] Quote from William James

[2] I have come to view dreams, Imaginings, Visions, and physical events as interwoven and to a degree interchangeable.  The events in this particular story, except where otherwise noted, did indeed transpire in the physical realm and are transcribed as faithfully as I can remember them, perhaps with an embellishment of detail here and a forgotten detail there.