My 16 year old grandson loves birds, and for a while there, until he discovered drones, girls and guitars, he drew many of them, some of them below. Now his bird life is more or less restricted to life with Alex, his pet cockatiel.
My life with birds, on the other hand, grows richer and richer: kookaburras, currawongs and crows in my back yard, lorikeets and honeyeaters swinging from the trees sucking nectar, and all kinds of other birds that fly, cry, perch and chatter around my home. This afternoon, a young kookaburra swung on a hanging pot plant as others looked on, and when I went outside to check on something, no one fluttered away, but looked at me intently.
Kingfisher, 2013
Alex at the window, 2015
Last week, as Alise and I sat in a park by the sea in Kingscliff, a flock of corellas that has been foraging on the grass rose in a flurry and flew over us, then wheeled back to fly over us again. We were talking of deep spiritual matters, as we often do, and both of us felt that the birds were responding to our conversation. That is not the first time. Several times, I have been speaking with someone about spirits finding ways to communicate with us, or telling them of some of my strange experiences with birds, and there on the fence appears a special bird or a group of them as though listening in approvingly.
And I have already written somewhere about the hawks that kept appearing to guide me through New Zealand, and the osprey, perhaps, or sea hawk that caught a fish from another in midair then flew away, and circled back over me three times to give me a lesson.
unfinished 3D bird, 2015.
Birds are the messengers from heaven, intermediaries between the invisible world and this. When they want to tell us something, they break with their usual behaviour to catch our attention, and the wise person watches with an open heart, and listens for the message that the heart hears. It is always what we need to hear at that time, a reminder, a precaution, a lesson, like the lesson of the sea hawk that taught me that if we are to achieve our goals, mind, heart and will must act in unison towards those goals.
It is not for nothing that Hermes, messenger of the gods, wears feathers sandals, or that like the trickster bird, he can appear to be doing nothing or acting silly when he is really carrying a message of great importance.
Galah 14 Dec 2015.
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