Oh, How Little I Know
There is a bird.
Far off, in the distance. Way beyond the blackberries promised to sweet, sharp crumbles.
It is not a kite. Nor a buzzard. And it doesn’t quite match the right shape for a raven. No black cross. No diamond-wedged tail.
I squint my already tired eyes at it, watch as it rises and lifts above the allotments, past the neatly drawn rows of houses. The flat light rendering it featureless. A conundrum creature; obscured by mist and distance. And there is no wrapping my head around its strange spluttering flight, like a cold old car engine that can’t quite start. I let it go. Leave it to the horizon, to disperse into an afterthought. An ever-nagging, yet never-answered question.
Hidden in the wayward wild beyond the fence, a robin summons rain with its song; unseen alchemy cast well within the thicket. A familiar, sweet sound, its notes as well-known as a worn-in pair of shoes, or a well-thumbed book. It is tempting to linger on it, in a comforting place, but that unidentified figure of a bird, now well out of sight beyond the horizon, pulls me to sit with the unknowing instead. As the mist sinks into the vale, masking roads and hedgerows, footpaths and villages, the scratchy woollen-jumper feeling of uncertainty wraps around me.
Jackdaws jink along roofs of houses containing whole families of lives that will live out unknown to all but their own web. I may, by chance, meet the friend of a friend of a cousin, of a neighbour of someone who once brushed shoulders with me in a crowded supermarket isle. But the intricacy of our lives will go unnoticed by the next. Same for the people passing in the steady stream of cars that make up the bee-drone of traffic lingering beneath the robin song. And, that’s just in this hilltop town. Zooming out and up in my minds eye, soaring above it all with a buzzard’s eye view, thermal riding, my mind spins with the enormity of it all.
The odd drop of rain centres me for a second. My toes, open to the elements in sandals because I didn’t know what shoes to wear on this not-quite-autumnal September day, wriggle like expectant earthworms. I’m momentarily grounded by the promise of precipitation, but the relief doesn’t last long.
This time it is the breeze that sends me whirring. It catches in the thin silver hoops that hug my ear lobes giving voice to this unseen being. In hollow moans and soft whispers, it spills its secrets to me. Secrets I am unable to decipher. A knowing, not for human consumption. The crow that crowns the rising ash knows them though, with wild ears she hears of lifts and shifts, rises and falls. She cocks her head, ruffles her feathers, tentatively tests the air with a wing. Not yet, it tells her, rest a while longer.
Below us all, past the houses and the traffic, there will be more secrets. Desire lines carved by badgers, run through by deer and foxes, all driven by an animal desire we can never truly understand. Lives lived based on scent, slight sound, and the stirring of muscles controlled as if by sixth senses. How does the owl map the woods? What does the snail feel as its scrapes across gravel? Can the kestrel feel each breath of breeze bend its feathers as it masters the wind?
There are whole worlds happening around us, whole lives lived without our knowing.
I’m certain there was a time when I would be frustrated by that idea. That I would have strained after that black shape of a bird for as long as possible. It would have played on my mind as I trawled through bird guides and online forums for some kind of answer. And I do want to know. I want to know all these things, all the names, all the lives of these creatures. I want to know them better, their struggles, their hardships, as well as the solutions they need. I aim to strive for as much knowledge as possible.
But, stood here in my sandals staring at a mist that won’t lift, I settle into the idea that not all things are for us. There is a certain kind of magic in not knowing. As crow lifts from her perch and aims for the space beyond the horizon, something shifts in me. A reassurance, perhaps. A definite feeling: oh, how little I know, and how much I love it.
