Dawn Chorus

Dawn Chorus

I like birds. – Eels

Somehow in the last three or four years, I have fallen in love with birds. I don’t really know anything about them, but I have an app and some binoculars and a North American field guide from the 90’s (or so) that I used to leaf through as a little kid. That’s all to say, I could learn about birds and maybe get to know quite a lot about them. In the digital age especially, the resources to learn about birds are abundant. If I were so inclined, I could join a “birding” club. There’s even a whole science about birds called “ornithology”, although, as with just about all the “-ologies”, I should just leave that stuff to experts.

Even though, experts are just people…turns out.

But as much as I’ve grown in fascination for birds, I don’t think I loved them because I knew about them.

-//-

I remember first being conscious of a budding interest in birds a few years ago, on the heels of a very hard time. Some friends had offered me “refuge” in their home for a few days, where I was invited to turn my phone off, get some much needed sleep, read, pray, fast, veg out, whatever; but mostly be silent and still in the provided solitude. It was a huge gift of space to dwell uninterrupted in a mostly empty house, and the room I spent the majority of my time in had a bed near a sliding glass door facing the back garden. Above the garden, on the deck overlooking the yard, were bird feeders loaded with a specific cocktail of seed meant to attract certain birds. Lured in by the special seed cocktail, Goldfinches (and three obese squirrels) were, for those quiet days, my only company. Often I would sit or lie on the edge of the bed and watch the finches flitting to and fro, from cedar trees to feeders, pecking and chirping away: joyous.

Internal silence is very hard for me, but, as if by magic, while enjoying the sight of those finches, I’d found I’d stumbled into the only real silence I’d had in many, many months (and would probably have again for many more). I enjoyed those birds so much that, long after I re-entered regular life, I began to see and watch birds everywhere I went. It wasn’t, like, a decision: “I’m gonna be a ‘bird person’ now.” It just happened organically.

-//-

Fast forward a few years ago to not-too-many days ago…

I am in a deep Darkness, and inside this Darkness I am confused, disoriented, very afraid. On the edge of true despair.

On top of this (or maybe, in part, because of it) I haven’t been able to sleep without drugs of some kind in nine days, and even then, it’s a toss up. Insomnia happens to me in small doses often; in huge helpings, occasionally. The huge helpings of insomnia have happened enough times now that I know what “to do” and what “not to do” about it. I mostly comply with “sleep hygiene” protocols, if only as prevention. But you know, sometimes, I can do everything “right” and I’ll still be wide awake, sometimes for a couple consecutive days, surrounded in external silence yet trapped in a screaming, frenetic brain.

I’m not afraid of insomnia. I am afraid of my brain breaking. You don’t need a doctor to tell you that a brain without sleep may go “boom”.

Words fail here, but I’m at least arrogant enough to try:

A Darkness had come to me in that first of many sleepless nights (the night of my thirty-first birthday). When it arrived, it was if I could no longer “see” anything… real, or perceived.

It’s the kind of Darkness that establishes itself as permanent and inevitable, and I believed it.

The kind of Darkness that devours questions like, “What does this mean? What is happening to me?” and any replies or theories one might receive or conceive of.

A Darkness that swallows up all distinctions, significance, or sense, until all that’s left are two “demons”: fear and despair, despair and fear (it’s always those two fuckers, isn’t it?)

In the midst of this Darkness, the “Analyst” within me had nothing to work with. No more data: it was now all in the file folder labeled “junk”. The “Mystic” in me found no more meaning in the words or symbols one might use to label matters of belief (or lack thereof): atheism, agnosticism, deism, determinism, stoicism, Darwinism, cynicism, even nihilism. These words were no longer of any use.

And for the first time in my life, the “Why” question, my most beloved and hated question, seemed to me, in that Darkness, the emptiest word in the human language.

This Darkness had no narrative, nothing to “make sense” of itself. It was as if it had no presence in my neocortex, no foothold for my sentience to step into. It even brought into question the very nature of sentience, of reality, leaving only animalistic, “Old Brain” feelings in my body: “fear”, “despair”, even a kind of disgust.

It’s the kind of Darkness that I can only try to describe now, having now been through it (at least, I hope); because, when “in” it, there is no describing it. No questions, no words; just an experience… an affliction. It is happening to you, whether you want it or not… and you know in you heart that there is nothing to be done. It just is, whether “you are” , or…not.

That is, until you hear the birds start singing…

They sing in the darkness, sometimes the darkest part of the morning.

And you remember that there is a world outside your mind, and outside of its many (many) questions. Outside of your literal and figurative “view”.

There is a Reality…

And then the sun comes up.

-//-

Four days ago, a journal entry:

Yesterday, I tried to fold laundry, but instead I collapsed into my own knees and wept. Desperate, I did the thing we were told in Sunday school never to do, and played “magic Bible”…randomly opening it and reading the first thing I laid eyes on. As I did so, I said out loud in sobs: “Just fucking help me out here”… to maybe God, maybe myself, maybe no one at all.

This is what I read:

“Ship your grain across the sea; after many days, you may receive a return. Invest in seven ventures, yes, in eight: you do not know what disaster may come upon the land. If clouds are full of water, they pour rain on the earth. Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there it will lie. Whoever watches the wind will not sow, whoever looks at the clouds with not reap. As you do not know the path of wind, or how the body is formed in the mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.

Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let your hands not be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well. Light is sweet, and it pleases the eye to see the sun. However many years anyone may live, let them enjoy them all. But let them remember the days of darkness, for there will be many. Everything to come is meaningless.”

And I went onto highlight the “loud” verses following this:

“Remember your Creator…”

Remember him…”

and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to the God who gave it.”

-//-

Over the past few weeks, I have been invited to ask myself: “What is certainty to you, JumpSeat?”

And my answer is forming out of this admittance: “If I do not know, I cannot understand, and therefore…maybe… I am not expected to understand.

“Maybe… my ability to know, to understand, to perceive reality as it actually is, is not the most important thing about me. It’s not even necessarily within my grasp. Maybe, to try to grasp at it is to try to do what God has already done, is already doing, will do long after I am dead, or insane, or both.

“MAYBE, Something is trying to tell me: “I do not love you because you are able to understand things… I do not love you even if you are sometimes able to know things… You do not, and cannot know, as much you as you think. It would be cruel of me to expect otherwise from you.”

Why does this feel like relief?

And such a relief, too.

-//-

Obviously, I still don’t know what is happening to me. I don’t know if I’m going crazy, or if I’m beginning to be sane for the first time. I don’t know. And maybe that’s okay.

Having now looked into the Darkness, I can agree with the nihilists on at least one thing:

Some things really don’t matter all that much… perhaps most things I’m tempted to believe matter a great deal. But this is all assuming, of course, that the most important thing about me is not my faculties, or my sanity, or my ability to understand, or my ability to know.

Maybe… the most important thing about me is that I’m loved?

And if that’s Reality (or at least a piece of it.. .maybe the only piece I need to bother about hanging onto right now), I am free to rest, and watch the sun come up, and sing with the birds in their dawn chorus, and enjoy the inevitable return of the light.

But I will not forget the days of darkness, because… I dunno. Maybe the darkness is the only thing keeping some of us humble? Honest?

Ironically… sane??

I dunno.

“There will be many days of darkness,” but for now, this one is passed.

The birds knew the light was coming before I did. I suppose I have much to learn from them.

-//-

My Dearest Friend’s favorite Bible passage reads:

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”

-Matt. 6:26-27 –

Comments are closed.