The Teachings of Birds | Ancestry & embodied wisdom
The art of noticing. The art of weaving our senses and imaginations into life. The art of being spirited away by the world. The art of being enlivened and entangled.
I walked the coastal cliffs this morning. It was a beautiful spring morning, with intense blue skies and strong yet soft sunlight that fell lightly on my skin. I felt embraced by a cocktail of warm air and cool breeze colluding at the edge of land and sea, with its entanglement of the sweetnesses gifted by all the erupting flowers and the intoxicating scents of the ocean. This embrace was stirring. It tickled something in my soul. It felt deeply familiar, even though I’ve only lived here for a few years. I know this sensation from another time, perhaps. I feel it woven into my being.
Since moving to Portugal, I’ve observed my body respond to this place. It’s had me contemplating how places are part of us. I don’t mean this in some abstract sense; since being here, I’ve felt my skin change texture, my body change shape, my bodily tensions dissipate, my appetite change, even my cycle change rhythm. Being here feels natural, somehow. It would be easy to reconcile this if I knew that I had ancestors from here, but as far as I know, I don’t. I do sit in lines that stretch into Eastern and Southern Europe and my motherland of the British Isles; perhaps there are similarities between those places and here that awaken something in me.
As I folded into the day on those cliffs, I witnessed an incredible phenomenon: trains of white birds, streaming in groups of four to ten, flying up the coastline. I watched them for a good while, and the train continued and continued, group by group. Fascinated, I observed how they surfed the air torrents created just as the waves crest; even from my distance, with my strained eyes, I could see that they needed minimal effort to soar and glide, riding the updrafts and drifting with gravity. What wisdom: these small beings carrying knowledge in their bodies of how to move with the world.
The Spring equinox has just passed; did these birds know it was time to go, from wherever they were to wherever they are going? Where is where and where? These birds were too far away for me to determine who they are. Maybe they are Little Egrets migrating from the West African coast or southern part of Portugal on their journey to the British Isles. Perhaps, like me, they have distinct places woven into their beings.
I love the contemplation of greater wisdoms. Marvels like avian migration only more deeply entrench this love. Tiny bodies moving together and in concert with the elements to travel vast distances – it’s incredible when you think about it. Wisdom, like all things, is relational; it holds us and exists between all things. It is also embodied; it lives beyond the mind. I suspect that these birds aren’t using their cognition to navigate their journey; they know the way – to go and to move – in their bodies. Perhaps some of the birds in this train have never made this northward journey before, yet the journey is encoded in them. They were born knowing, like babies knowing how to feed, newborn giraffes knowing how to walk, freshly hatched sea turtles knowing to head to the ocean, and salmon knowing their way home to natal streams.
What greater wisdoms am I enveloped by? What embodied wisdoms live within me but are likely hushed by cognition and reason?
Our human world – that is to say, our modern societies – doesn’t tend to follow the laws of nature. We’ve determined other rules, which don’t marry up with how the world actually is, and bizarrely and tragically, we’ve got lost in them, believing that the rules of modern societies are actually our human nature: that we are inherently hyper-competitive, needing to always produce and consume, fighting to survive in a world that creates hierarchies of value through the currency of money. Narratives perpetuate this. History is written to codify this story. You better be “fit” otherwise you won’t survive.
On the contrary, I would suggest that being involved in greater wisdoms and listening to embodied wisdom is natural – it is our human nature. It asks us to bear ancestral knowledge passed down and between since time immemorial. But what does this mean when we have rent, mortgages and bills to pay – when we live in a human world that’s out of whack with the nature of nature? For me at least, there’s an internal wrestling – between my rational brain and my intuitive feelings. This wrestling never feels resolved, and there are no winners. (I speak about this in Art, Imagination and the Tension of Making Money).
As I reflect on these birds on their great journey, the prevailing feeling is awe. Staring out across the vast Atlantic, a wild beast in her own right, I observed a phenomenon that’s likely been happening for thousands of years, if not more. There was nothing in my view that, in essence, didn’t look the same 4,000 years ago – is my guess. But of course, as steadfast as this phenomenon is, all the components are different: there would be different birds, different waves, different coastline formations and different compositions of water (I wonder where the water molecules in the ocean today would have been 4,000 years ago? Locked up in a glacier or held in a bogland, perhaps?)
Everything is always changing and shifting. Nothing is ever fixed. When I bring awareness to it, I feel spring rising in me. Perhaps I, too, like the birds, sense the Spring equinox and embody the shifting of the seasons. This year, I tried to winter, in many ways unsuccessfully. But unlike past years, I acknowledged a different, seasonal self: one with deep linages of ancestors who spent winters sheltering from the elements, huddled around fires, in relationship with the darker, colder months.
My parting thought here is on questioning what it means “to season” – to winter, to spring, to autumn and to summer? I say this as someone who has only ever lived in latitudes with four seasons; I remember having dinner with friends in Borneo and speaking about dream travel destinations and being shocked and amazed by the responses: “autumn in New England”; “spring in Japan”; “winter in the Alps”. To season will mean something very different to each of us, based on who we are and what ancestry and places are woven into us. I suggest that we “season” not as a cognitive practice but as an embodied one that entangles us in greater wisdoms of the world. May this be one way to bring us back into the nature of nature – or, rather, into our nature as nature.
This is a thought-wandering (or thought-yarning, appreciating that my most intriguing inquiries arise through conversations with peers and friends and through engaging with the world and sources of inspiration). In this style, I write in a stream of consciousness, giving myself permission to channel what arises as I write into the flow without the usual process of over-editing and censoring myself. I must say, this feels quite vulnerable. Likely, I will get things “wrong”, change my opinion and/or deepen my understanding. I write from my own perspective, framed by my experience as a White woman who grew up in the UK, between the city and the countryside, and now lives on the Atlantic Coast of Portugal. Learn more here.
Recommendation
In each Substack, I want to share «something» that has nourished me, shaped me and/or has become tangled up in my way of seeing and being in the world. For sure, I want these «somethings» to be beyond media, and certainly beyond book recommendations. When contemplating what to include here, I felt an embodied practice would be good, but I’m no expert on this. That said, the simple act of slowing down or stopping to notice “the small and significant” things and who we are in response to (and entanglement with) them is an easy place to start.
Birds, Art, Life, Death by Kyo Maclear
This book came to mind when I was thinking of what to recommend. I read it years ago, so the content doesn’t feel fresh enough to discuss specifically. But I remember Maclear wrestling with tensions and seeking slowness and meaning amid uncertainty. There’s melancholy, magic and introspection. Birds are instrumental to her personal journey, as she explores the parallels between birdwatching and artistry, highlighting the ways in which both pursuits offer avenues for contemplation, wonder and renewal.
One sentence on the back of the book reads, “Kyo urges us to find a subtle but restorative meaning in the everyday.” I resonate with this: how beings such as birds – and all of nature – can shift our perspectives in transformative ways that enliven our daily lives.