Like Birds

The magnolia blooms are holding on for dear life, against the raging thunderstorm.

So stunning the white of the magnolia and the star jasmine against the overwhelming infinite green. Even outside my urban window, Louisiana is swampy and breathtakingly leafy.

So incredibly lonely is the human heart that feels this lushness. Forever a witness to life’s coming and going, forever a part of the cosmic dance and apart from it, too. How else could it be for one who thinks and writes?

Aware in humans of these layers of meaning, those lines of contradiction, and slivers of hatred and attraction that for others seem concealed, I live this life in partial understanding and partial alienation.

I am coming to accept this underlying human sadness, against which everything shows up precious, poignant and tender.

A sort of madness is my genetic and psychic inheritance, so I don’t fool around with this consciousness anymore; I place life on the altar of life like life asked me to. Belonging is the sacrifice made for self-knowledge, suffering is the currency with which I buy, morsel by morsel, a little freedom from history’s grinding wheel.

To be on this Earth is a privilege – to be immanent, to be alive. How to convince you that beyond the gates of nihilism, there is a felt, elementary beauty that’s reaching out from behind everything?

It never really left me, even in the pit of despair, even now as I sit with a smoldering heart, cheeks nested in cupped palms by the window. I might be naïve but this hope is not. It is an eagle-eyed, big-hearted hope that knows and trusts itself. It knows life will flow no matter what, and counts on one showing up and doing what one needs to. A human being can live, perhaps, without desires; she can’t live without this.

The sky outside is grey, the day is gloomy. The mind finds no comfortable perch on which to safely rest. In the shade of the magnolia tree, sheltered among the branches and the glossy leaves, a little Carolina wren. Incessant tapping of raindrops on the roof, and a palpable electric sense indicating the next lighting strike is near. The animating force in the tiny bird chest trembles; the air is filled with a sweet melodious sound. And the hen in the chicken coop dips her beak in a small fresh puddle, scooping up water. She tilts her head back, rapidly opening and closing her mouth to let the sky itself flow down her throat.