A letter.
Dear Jane,
I would like to ask you to pause for a moment and consider what you could say to us that could help us move forward with the challenges we all face. Perhaps you can lift us into a more joyful state.
From, Seeker Of Joyful States
Dear Seeker of Joyful States,
Let’s start with a story. The patch of land on which I live, I know and tend to intimately. Within it, there are one or two pockets I know more deeply still; those I’ve spent more time in, looked at more often, those I feel a greater sense of kinship with.
The trees outside my wooden panelled office are one such place. All around, they cocoon me in my book adorned, computer tapping space. The one directly to the front, beneath the window straight ahead, is not concerned with height, but with width. Her green arms, with their tightly spindled leaves spread out in all directions, maintain a constant resting state of impending embrace, an arboreal dream catcher.
Facing front, there’s an apple tree. Her apples and my taste buds don’t get on. Their slightly sour taste makes my face screw up. I don’t tell her this of course; a friendship preserved by the omission of unnecessary truths. Her gnarled arms and over-knuckled fingers, old and youthful in equal amounts, are all at once ordered and chaotic, an intriguing maze that draws the eyes upward without allowing them to reach a specific destination.
The knobby bits that stick out from the branches, it turns out, provide the perfect resting place for the hooks from which my nectar feeders hang. Naïvely, I started with just one, wondering if anyone would come, a solitary bright orange, sugar filled lantern hanging suspended in the sky.
Word soon spread in avian society that there was a new dealer in town. An innocent one, they probably chuckled to themselves, foreseeing my future as an dedicated nectar peddler, an open all hours enthusiastic feeder of feathered friends in need of their next hit.
Inspired by an idea I recently read to create a pen-and-paper only, no technology corner, I bought a fold up beach chair made of some man made washable fabric and a cheap, olive coloured fluffy blanket that compels you to say “Gosh! isn’t this soft?!” every time you touch it, despite have done so many times before. They delight me, not least of all because I’d been looking at much more expensive versions when they stumbled in my way. A bargain always adds an intangible certain something-something to a purchase.
So, I took my $30 beach chair, unfolded it, slung the blanket over the top and placed it on the rug inside my office, faced towards the tree where my nectar feeders hang.
And every morning, I sit, with my notebook on my knee, writing pen in one hand, coffee in the other, and I watch.
The first few days my nectar feeder hung, it attracted the Tuis. This was the expectation. The Tui, a native bird to New Zealand, are honey eaters, of a size you’d need both hands to hold, with elegant features, a finely contoured head, and eyes that assert that they’re clear of their place in the world.
From a distance, the unknowing eye might think they are black; up close, their feathers shine with peacock iridescence, like an expensive piece of jade seen beneath a layer of crystal water.
On their throat are two white tufts, conductors of the orchestra to their very distinct song. Their tune is a stand out in my island forest and to the human ear haphazard, arriving like a series of audible fairy lights undergoing intermittent power surges. At the start, they make a hollow tapping sound, before briefly breaking out at maracas, trilling momentarily, descending to a low note and before using their whole body to crescendo with a loud climatic squawk and then looping the track back round again.
One pauses feeding, looks at me directly.
You’re welcome, I said, as though doing him a favour. We both know the favour is reversed. Today, he’s feeling gracious, let’s me think that he believes me.
Overnight, the Tui’s spread the news. At first they talked to the Kaka, the big mountain Parrots. The sound of them landing on the guttering before leap frogging to the tree makes me jump. They came, stood on my nectar platform and inquired with their beak. Feeling it out, tasting with their tongues, hanging off the side and upside down. Their brown and green plumage with burnt orange flushes, crawl all over and under and through my tree as if gravity was something they could choose.
I didn’t expect you, I told them. But I’m glad that you are here.
Me and the Tui’s and the Kaka.
Then came the Wax Eyes. So many Wax Eyes. Birds the colour of silken moss and lichen, the green hues blending to yellow without transition. An ombre work of art. Their white rimmed eyes, their body forming a kind of perfection that makes you wonder if their even real.
All along the Wax Eyes had been there. I had never seen so many, arriving like forest confetti. Perfect winged gifts dancing right aside my window.
Where is this story leading, you may ask? Well, directly to the first part of my answer which is:
Both within challenge and without, we have to find our metaphorical nectar feeder. A space that allows us to make an offering, sit down and pay attention, to something other than ourselves.
We have to take the time to notice what’s already with us; what beauty is camouflaged amongst the leaves, what requires a little more sweetness on our part to make itself visible.
Challenge narrows our focus. Wonder widens it. And life in its details is wondrous if we are still enough and interested enough to seek it out.
It’s not something that can be forced. But we can let it find us by creating the right conditions, asking the right questions.
This story I’ve just told you about my office and my chair and the trees and the birds. In some ways you could say it’s nothing special. And I guess that’s what I love about it. It’s both ordinary and extraordinary.
What makes it one or the other- ordinary or extraordinary- is how much I’m paying attention. Einstein said, “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” Watching the birds remind me of that decision, and I do my best to remind myself as often as I can. That I believe the universe to be friendly. Because it’s from this space- the space of believing things to be innately friendly instead of hostile, wonder filled instead of challenged- that I can meet the hard things that inevitably come up and not lose my gentleness. Or at least, have a place where I find it returns to me if I do.
You are here. This is a very good start. Remind yourself over and over that you are here, a glorious human-wildling-creature whose shape is defined by the edges of your skin.
And because you are here, anything is possible. If we really allow ourselves to be new.
What does it mean to let ourselves be new? It means letting go of the story that keeps us stuck in one place. It means waking up and letting things be revealed to us rather than presupposing how things are going to happen with all our silent, thought based incantations that make themselves known in our realities.
We are spell casters, magic weavers, experience procurers, if we choose to take the essence of our energy and intention and cast it in the right direction.
Letting ourselves be new means embracing our animal body, with all its impossible imperfection, and accepting where we are in the dance. It means moving in the world not within the landscape but as a part of it.
Humbling ourselves to nature and returning to it, again and again and again.
So, now that you are paying attention. Now that you have tasted wonder seeking. Now you have remembered your animal body. Now you must remember what you love and follow it. Not as something nice to do, or a thing you’ll start once you’ve considered you’ve worked hard enough to deserve it. But as a prescription, a balm, a reminder of your purpose, a gesture of pleasure activism.
Following what you love is your purpose for being here made animate. A way of serving yourself so you, in turn, can serve others. A way of standing for what’s important to you so you have the internal means to stand also for what’s important to others, both human and non-human.
If it feels hard, start gently. What’s possible within what’s possible? Start there.
And perhaps, as a parting word, don’t argue against your own happiness. If you desire something, don’t let your own excuses get in the way of it.
Leave behind the bones of your old stories; protect your wildness.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Terry Tempest Williams.
“To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace.”
Much love,
xx Jane
