On Birds and Things Being Bearable

The neighbour calls it ‘Hitchcock hour’ but I think of it as ‘the time twice a day when for a short moment absolutely everything is bearable because there are birds’. They are beaked noise, and hypnotic movement, and reassurance. A feathered reassurance darkening the sky at certain moments in their thousands, and I can never take a photograph of quite what it all means. There are things a person just knows are important, and in the mess and pain of the present world-everything those particulars can be harder to notice, but saying them aloud, marking them, is an importanat part of how beauty and care become bound to each other.

After I noted dawn time of the birds in the most recent newsletter, 7:33am, my partner put ‘7:37’ in pencil on the calender a couple of days later, and after confirming that it related to birds I then proceeded to add ‘7:45’ this morning. The roosting birds are marking the still-encroaching darkness, and then after December 21st they will begin to mark the lightening, the reverse awakening of things. Perhaps we will do this forever now.