Crying for Birds-Sower

Thoughts on mourning, empathy and action.

The first part of this is from the vault. I wrote it in the fall and couldn’t find a way to finish and post it. The second part was from last week, with some edits today. a constant reminder for myself, I have chosen this as a selfish platform, this substack was a birthday gift to myself, a place to explore. Private but for sharing. In this space, I am not an educator or an activist. I’m digging around in my thoughts as I grow and learn.

Pt. 1- Dec 2023-Crying for Birds

Three weeks ago I had 17 fat birds in my backyard. Today it’s empty. The pond is broken. The neighbors' abandoned woods littered with feathers that held names and little personalities. Toast. My last from the original flock, purchased on a sweet summer evening in 2020 from a farm girl two hours away who tossed them in the plastic bin in my ex-girlfriend's Honda and we drove home with grand dreams of farm babies and an egg stand and. I’ll stop the diatribe. Don’t buy birds with a girl you’ve known for 3 months. Or do. 

She implied she didn’t think I could handle the birds when she left. But I had a house and a life and she took the dog and now all our chickens are dead, and the ones I got this spring are dead and the ones I raised this summer are dead and the ones I took over from my friend who needed to rehome them this fall, are mostly alive and living at my mom's house. Because I’m almost 30 and my mother is still rescuing me. 

Cursed. And stupid? 

It wasn’t just the raccoon, an animal I have long loved, and now would gladly kick.  It was the hawk and the night and somehow the cold pond and the illness and I know these birds are made for eating. I don’t eat them. I eat fish though and they’re alive and that’s something I imagine I’ll have to address in myself. 

The fish died too. The pond broke and I didn’t fix it in time and it’s dead. 

And I’m crying over chickens. And there are dogs dying in the shelter down the road. And there’s children in the cold on the corner of Moreland. And there's Haiti and Ukraine and Palestine and Sudan and it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and we are not designed to absorb this. 

I cry over birds. And the goldfish. And the dogs down the road. I cannot weave past the wall of vines that holds back the gulf of grief waiting on the other side. But we have to try right? To dance the edge of the void? To look until we shake? 

I will stop here to remind you that this writing is for personal use only. This letter is exclusively for me. I am not qualified to even pretend to be qualified to speak on any world conflict. I highly recommend Fariha Róisín’s substack How To Cure a Ghost as a resource on the genocide happening in Palestine and the history that led here, to push past your fear of looking and stretch yourself into scratching the surface of understanding. 

Back to the void then? Back to scratching the surface? To peering into the depth of mourning? 

Perhaps that's enough for this very moment. This is not about action or solutions. Just trying. Stretching. Breathing into it as it aches. 

Pt. 2. Sower-June 2024

I finished Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower this week. I found it in a flea market a month or so, ago alongside a pile of other sci-fi paperbacks from the early 2000s.
The rest of the paperbacks have mysteriously disappeared and only this one remained for me to read. It was this one that I was supposed to read at this moment in time.

The book begins in 2024. It's set in California, The main character is the daughter of a Baptist preacher, and the United States is collapsing at a rapid pace.

The main character, Lauren, begins to compile pieces of knowledge that have come to her, into a collection of thoughts And wisdom, And ultimately become the beginning of a new faith.

The core basis of this faith is God is Change.



I'm largely off Instagram these days for a multitude of reasons but I try and log in once a day to read and to learn and to get the information that I'm not going to get on large media outlets and to force myself to move past my discomfort and fear and to hold space and mourn for the genocide in Palestine.


Today these slides came on my main feed from a creator that I don't even follow yet.

I'll stop here and sit with that sentence that I just typed. Something about an old faith and a new faith.

A Creator that I don't even follow yet.


I'll share the slides here.

itschinwosu

A post shared by @itschinwosu

Lauren, our Sower, calls herself a sharer. She experiences any physical pain that she witnesses with her own eyes. Forced to even live through a sort of death when she watches others die. It's excruciating.
This condition is brought on by choices her mother made while she was in utero. There's something there too. But not the main point of this.

I think there is a fear that we may too be swallowed whole if we look.

We will.

We will also die a sort of death. And it is excruciating. And it should be.

In our story, Lauren journeys North, gathering as she goes, a small group, almost accidentally. She shares her food, she promises to protect them if they protect her, she teaches them to write and some to shoot, she learns from them, and along the way she offers them hope, in the form of her faith, initially under the guise of poems.


I think where I'm going with this is, that she could look down on her road North and feel no one else's pain, but she looks up. She feels their pain and then she feeds them. I think where I'm going with this is empathy and action must go hand in hand. That's where change happens. That's where god happens.

Indeed, you cannot look deep into all of the world's suffering and comprehend it. But every day you can choose to find what you can handle that day, And choose a singular action to pair with it. And this will grow like a muscle, And this will grow like a seed.

I think here I started trying to write with the thought of you, the reader, reading it, and now I've sort of lost the finish line. Do you see what I'm scratching at? I left this piece for a few days and it scabbed over and now I am sitting in front of it again, pulling at it and waiting for the truth and the point to ooze out. There's a child in the next room singing the same pop song chorus on repeat while she plays Legos. It was supposed to be rest time but that doesn't feel restful.

I think we're getting there. To empathy and action. To look at suffering every day and stretch our capacity for the realities of our collapsing. To exercise the muscles of activism and in so doing building, daily, a sustainable practice of action. You could spend lots of energy focused on what you aren't able to do, or you could take a single step and see how far it takes you and how much you do have to offer. I believe that's it for now.