Hi everyone! We’ve made it to the almost-end of February in this strangest little month of the year. I am a few days early but I want to start this post by wishing my partner a VERY happy six year sobriety day (the 25th!). Max, I am endlessly grateful that you are the exact person you are, becoming the exact person you will be next. Six years ago you started us on the path to ourselves and to each other and my life with you feels like the biggest embarrassment of riches. I love you and I am proud of you.
Today’s essay is about airport birds. Maybe it’s that my own interest in birds is creating some confirmation bias, but I feel like so much of what I’ve been reading lately is from artists I love talking about birds, so when some little grey winged cuties swooped by my head at the Chicago airport, I wrote half of this essay in the notes app on my phone while waiting in the boarding line. I hope it passes along some of that unexpected joy to you!
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airport birds
The birds of Concourse C in O’Hare Airport are a surprise every single time one flits past my head, which happens not infrequently in the two hours I spend waiting to board my plane home. I arrived here early, wanting no avoidable complications on this return trip. I am trying to, in my way, control things again. But I can’t control this small bit of unexpected joy, and that is just fine with me.
When I was small, I talked to birds. I once told my uncle about it, relieved to have someone listen so raptly. And he did for a few minutes, before turning to laugh at my whimsy with other adults in that type of careless betrayal that adults often inflict on children without even noticing. All these years later I can only say this: fellow adults may we all be secure enough in ourselves to take children seriously.
At some point, later in childhood, I stopped talking to birds, not wanting to seem strange. What happened next was almost immediate. When I stopped talking to birds, I stopped noticing them completely, which is incredible if you think about it. I forgot to notice that there are tiny singing, flying beings in our midst every single day. Creatures with bones lighter than air.
If you don’t notice the singing, you won’t notice the silence. The world is losing things so rapidly due to a combination of our neglect and active harm. Birds, humans, other mammals, bugs, reptiles, and plants just existing one day and not existing the next. So much loss, and yet, so much resilience. I will say it again, in case you missed it: there are tiny birds that live in O’Hare Airport. They swoop in on self-made wind, completely unafraid of humans, collecting the crumbs at our feet. They make a life out of the scraps we don’t even notice we’re wasting. They bring a bit of the wild to this incredibly tame place. They do not fit here, and yet they are the only thing that makes any sense.
Two hours later, when I am in a metal tube that is climbing into the sky, I place one hand on the image of a raven on my right arm. I ask for safe flight. Like so much sober rediscovery, I am back to talking to birds. It feels right, as I travel through their sky. I think of the birds of myth, of Freya, the goddess of love and war who becomes a hawk with the donning of one magical cloak. I think of Odin is counseled by two ravens, Huggin and Munin, Thought and Memory. What is memory if not a bird?
I remember my grandmother teaching me my very first Portuguese word, the word for “little sparrow.” How she said it into my ear like a gift, one of the most enduring ones I have ever received in these 35 years. How I always insisted on pronouncing it just a little bit wrong, until I finally googled it in my late 20s during that first sober year and learned I had instead been saying “the sparrow in you.” May we talk to those birds too, those tiny, free-winged things beating in the chest.
When I land it is an unseasonably warm day, if such a thing exists anymore in the era of climate change. Still, winter has been here, leaving the treetops bare. In the car on the way home, I can see the nests of birds hidden in the angles of tree limbs, exposed by the winter’s barrenness. This too is magic. The making of a home from gathered things, each carefully chosen. The way that nests can be any size or shape, how each one looks different. When we pass an Osprey box, a local initiative to ensure these birds have access to safe nesting places, I can see the edges of chaos in their giant bowl-shaped homes. The tiny discarded nest of a Warbling is a work of art, woven tight as a tiny basket. The hair of a cat just brushed on a front porch, hay placed on the creek bed to prevent erosion, so many small twigs, a blue scrap of fabric. It is made of forgotten things and it is beautiful.
I notice birds again. One of the many gifts of sobriety, I delight in them. I do not yet know their names, but in the sounds of their voices, I am starting to recognize friends. Something in the way the airport birds and the roadside birds, and the giant Ospreys just returning, make something so beautiful out of nothing. Make scraps into a whole life in the most unexpected of places. Something about how resilience can be, not heavy, but feather-light if we let it.
Assorted, rad thing(s):
A section of this newsletter where I share what I have been reading, watching, or otherwise consuming lately.
The forest knows where you are by Freya Rohn: I really, really enjoyed this beautiful essay as a consideration of non-human neighbors as sentient participants in our lives who interact with us whether we notice it or not.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy: Max recommended this to me, as someone who graduated high school right in the middle of the Raunch Era of the mid-to-late aughts. We’ve discussed it a bunch since because we both appreciate that this book exists and also don’t like it! This review kind of sums up how I feel about it better than I can. It is 100% worth a read, if only for the way it is an artifact of the era it is critiquing.
The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay: I LOVE the original Book of Delights more than I can say in the space provided here. I have read it many times and was thrilled to learn that he wrote another addition. And while some of the magic is there, I didn’t connect with it in the way I did with the original. That said, I love a book of short essays so much, and its beautiful cover art did inspire last week’s essay on dandelions!
That’s all for this month friends, I will see you in March!
with love,
lisa
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