{a handful of } all the ways we mother
1.
We imagine our fall from grace to be accompanied by drama. Swift. A speeding through red lights. An observable tragedy. A mistake of epic proportions that divides a life into a before and after story. For it to happen slowly was never a brief thought. A leaking air mattress, deflating overnight. A slippery slide with shoes on. The beginning of things being not quite right was surely something we would feel. Surely. But it seems, we noticed it the same as the turning of the planet. We don’t believe we’re spinning when the horizon stays unmoved. It can’t be, we remark to ourselves. It mustn’t be, we confirm to ourselves back. And then one day, the air seems still of birdsong and quite suddenly we notice. Huh, we say. Come to think of it, we haven’t heard birdsong for a while.
I imagine:
All the ways to bottle birdsong. My hands craft a forest in a snow globe.
Here, my son says, handing it to his child. Your grandma made you this.
The note reads:
These are the songs that keep you safe.
Future heirlooms of bottled birdsong and hand-crafted forest scenes.
This is what I witnessed, I want to say. I breathe these words inside the bottle too.
My son is 8 years old.
In my mind’s eye:
I watch them open up the bottle, observing my own thoughts as though they’re someone else’s dream.
They look up, pause as though the airs been snagged with sound.
A cellular
remembering.
2.
See up there? He points to further up the hill. The abundance of Kānuka?
I look to the dividing line of trees.
Early succession trees, so I am told. When the forests have been cleared, and it’s the bare earth that remains, it’s the Kānuka that moves in first to make her place.
Kānuka, she shoots towards the sun, creates a canopy under which the slower growing trees and plants can grow. She has capacity to live and to protect on land that is stressed and open to the light.
Oh, I say. Kānuka is a mother.
I read:
Kānuka is a nurse plant for many species. Over time, her need for light and fast paced growth means she is replaced by those who she has tended to and nurtured.
Kānuka is a mothering tree, I repeat back to myself.
3.
I feel the urgency to write the testimony of the forest through the movement of my pen upon the page. A voice inside my head says it’s arrogant to assume I could create something that might represent the sacred, that my hands are not holy enough to lip read the songs of newly open blooms, or to translate the murmurings of the soon to be forgotten. But still I try.
My wondering would like me to believe that perhaps it’s possible to write the sound of bird’s wings so someone reading can name them by the way they cut the air when in mid-flight, that words on a page could act as substitute ears in places absent from the murmurings of insects.
I’ll use my fingers to block littered and belligerent opinion, permanently affix my noise cancelling headphones to silence voices that tell me I’m oversensitive, naïve, or idealistic, trapped within reality as common sense as fairy tales.
Because I don’t know what to do to protect the many things I love, I start with this:
The Tūī flies as a feat of acrobatics. A flapping, and a whirring, a second or two of silence.
The Tūī flies and I listen, I look up. The sky chooses to be silent so birds can be heard within it.
I dream this is the start of the dissent, an uprising of sorts.
I imagine:
We hear the flapping of the wings, as a collective we look up, and at the same time and out loud we say,
enough.
I imagine:
That collectively we mother
earth.
4.
How’s mum life? I am asked.
Mum life. It’s such a weird phrase.
In my head:
You know, I’m really not so sure. Some days I want to rewind the childing process. Reverse the hurricane and earthquake that is birth. Stop them being exposed to everything that’s hard about the outside. Suck them in, draw them back, pull them back inside, a safe keeping, safe holding, en-wombing. A statement of physical fact. That if you make decisions that affect them, you’ll have to take me first.
I read the news last night, I want to say, and sometimes I think I love them so much I wish I hadn’t had them.
But then:
Just this morning a shaft of light appeared through the kitchen window. And we twirled and spun around, dancing with dust fairies, upward reaching, arms, branches, reaching, the top of the canopy, upwards towards the open sun.
The seed of Kānuka cracked within us, we spun. Light demanding, light seeking, light being.
Kānuka, mothering tree, mothering me.
I reply:
Good thanks. You know– busy.
5.
From The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak.
“Plants pick up vibrations and many flowers are shaped like bowls so as to better trap sound waves, some of which are not too high for the human ear. Trees are full of songs, and we are not too shy to sing them.”
The seed of Kānuka cracked within us, we spun. Light demanding, light seeking, light being.
Trees are full of songs,
And we are not too shy to sing them.
6.
Imagine you are in your kitchen, perhaps making a cup of tea, maybe you eating something. You are concerned with something quite inconsequential. How it seems like you are always cleaning up. How you wish that there was a place to sit that did not need clearing of the toys or of the LEGO. You are alone, for now, but still you talk. To the flowers in the vase that’s been moved over to the bookcase. The cactus that sits alone upon the window (not really alone—you’re talking with them, including them in conversation after all). You look up and you notice—icing sugar. A valley that’s been dusted. A warm snow of Kānuka flowers that blossomed in between of your last looking and your noticing right now. Flower watching, tree observing. A kaleidoscope of worlds shapeshifting every second. How does anything get done when there is so much to observe?
A memory:
Making sponge cake in the kitchen. A child of the 80’s. A delicacy was the sponge cake. No icing, just a sieve, a handful of icing sugar. A sprinking of whiteness on the top.
A sprinkling of remembering,
what’s important
in the shape of cake
and flowers.
7.
One day, you’ll see a small Kānuka barely beyond breast feeding rooted on the hard side of the road. You look—her leaves are covered in dust, the residue of passing cars. You get down on your knees, finger her gently. You wonder if this is what praying feels like. You do what you can to loosen the shards of hard ground around her, take her tender roots from the ground. A couple snap. You immediately feel terrible, apologise out loud. You travel with her in a cupped hand, protected underneath your shirt. Take her over to the paddock that you own. It’s more protected here. You grab a trowel, make a hole—not too big but not too small, place her inside and cover the hole over. You say you understand this might feel like a rough day, but things will be better moving forward.
You sit down next to her for a while, to keep her company and start to write.
You remember a quote that you write at the top of the page, circle round to not forget.
“Gardening is a contract with hope” – Elissa Altman
Maybe planting is what praying feels like when it’s led by the movement of the hands.
8.
My eldest child is fast asleep. His eyes seem even bigger when their closed, a pale skin coloured universe. His blanket is crumpled down around his knees, kicked off in the movements just moments prior to drifting off. I pull it up, tuck it underneath his shoulders and his chin. The sleeping sees the skin take on a different colour, makes other things stand out. The freckles sprinkled round his face, seeds released from the confines of the pod.
I trace the line of freckles with my finger, an air pocket existing between fingertips and face.
A constellation, a garden, a pathway
a portal
to the future.
9.
If you wish to bottle birdsong, the instructions you need to follow look like this:
Allow yourself to pause, treat the moment as though experiencing something sacred (you are). Find all the ways it’s possible to listen without ears. Invite the notes to trickle down your throat, disperse into your bloodstream, be carried to your cells, into muscles, let them make decoctions with your tears.
I bottle birdsong every morning just this way.
In my mind’s eye:
I see you walking up and down the forest pathways close to home. You are pausing, hearing, insisting that you learn the notes of every soundscape. This is a favourite habit, wanting to converse with the sounds you hear in song. The Tūī and the Bellbird, the Thrush and the cheeping of the Fantail. Collecting tunes within your arms, bottling them up just as I have done, storing them on shelves within your home.
I think:
Let it be intergenerational
birdsong
that we find
within our bones.
