When I was very young, I had a best friend named Carly, and she had a budgie named Roger, a little parakeet of yellow and gold, who lived in a very small cage. Roger was, as they say, born in captivity, so his sense of the world was equally small. And because it was the 80s, our understanding of what a bird (or any animal, really) might need was apparently quite small also.
Both being young, we thought loving Roger meant giving him his seed on time, cleaning out his cage, and pressing our probably-grubby-still-growing noses between the bars to tell him all about our day.
And perhaps, at that moment, Roger thought that was what freedom was too.
That all air was tinged with the faint smell of disinfectant, that wings only flapped for two seconds at a time, and that preening yourself was the most interesting part of a 24 hour cycle.
One fateful afternoon, Roger’s cage was sitting on the back deck when the weather turned windy. You can probably guess what happened next—we both watched it unfold in slow motion. The cage tipped over, the small door popped open on its way down, and Roger just sat there, stunned, staring at this opening with no hands to hold him back.
After what felt like forever, Roger moved toward the door and flew away.
Out into that wild, vast world.
Carly and I were devastated (I felt he was my bird as much as hers), but at the same time, we understood (or at least hoped) that maybe Roger was happier. Our tiny selves did have some understanding, after all, that birds were meant for bigger things than cages.
Can you imagine what that must have felt like? For Roger I mean?
Holy crap, I imagine him saying. This is wild! One can only hope he didn’t go completely off the rails.
I really hope he found his happy ending.
I wonder if he thought about a different form of freedom, or if he really thought there was none.
We do this all the time, us humans- convince ourselves of only one type of freedom.
This morning as I sat down to write. I was tired, grumpy even, and my brain felt completely devoid of inspiration. And when you get to that point, your mind can convince you that you’re in a little cage, where you play the same patterns, where you keep placing your attention on things which are upsetting and disturbing that keep you spinning around in the same old cycles of thought.
I don’t have a lot for you today, but the one thing I can share is that I do know it’s possible to open the door up of the cage.
That there are always different realities available to us than the one that feels the most present or familiar.
You can start by reminding yourself that there’s no need to be impressive. That you just need to do something, anything, to pull you out of the spin cycle and drop you back into your creative heart, your creative brain.
So I write. Badly and not that interestingly, but nonetheless with good intention.
I draw shapes that make no sense. I draw a lot of bad birds.
I talk to people doing interesting things, let myself ride the winds of their creative energy.
I talk to my mountain parrots who visit me and tell them I’ll fill up the nectar feeder soon.
They aren’t massive things, but they are reminders:
That we aren’t in a cage.
That we don’t belong to the abyss of bad news, no matter how much of it we’re fed.
And that what we make doesn’t have to be good.
That the fact we have mind to make it all it sometimes the only liberation that we need.
A drawing / painting from this week for you xx