A Heron’s Antidote to Worry of Dying – The Marginalian

They didn’t think about it, the dying dinosaurs, that they might develop wings and change into birds, change into the laboratory by which evolution invented desires and the cathedral by which it invented religion.

“There may be grandeur on this view of life,” Darwin consoled himself as his beloved daughter was dying, for he knew that loss of life is the engine of life, that throughout the historical past of pure choice the loss of life of the person is what ensured the difference and survival of the species. And but in opposition to this pure grandeur, we undergo the smallness of our creativeness about loss of life, as in regards to the myriad small deaths punctuating life — the losses, the endings, the falterings of hope — forgetting someway that each ending is a starting in retrograde, that what might appear to be a terminus could also be a metamorphosis.

These are the ideas considering themselves by way of me as I watch an excellent white heron rising from the water’s edge, from this boundary line between worlds, this lapping reminiscence of how life emerged from non-life.

As a result of my chook divinations started with its nice blue cousin, I can’t assist however ask the majestic white chook for a message.

Combing the eleven pages of Audubon’s ornithological textual content in regards to the species, I comply with the standard course of and let the phrases rearrange themselves into this koan from the unconscious:

Engaged on this divination, I used to be reminded of a long-ago counterpart — one among Mary Oliver’s least identified poems, present in her 2003 assortment What Do We Know (public library) and browse right here by 19-year-old poet, artist, and heron-lover Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Debussy’s “Reverie.”

HERON RISES FROM THE DARK, SUMMER POND
by Mary Oliver

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
all the time it’s a shock
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and he or she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer time pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the primary or the final time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I feel
how unlikely it’s

that loss of life is a gap within the floor,
how inconceivable
that ascension shouldn’t be potential,
although every part appears so inert, so nailed

again into itself —
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And particularly it’s great
that the summers are lengthy
and the ponds so darkish and so many,
and subsequently it isn’t a miracle

however the frequent factor,
this choice,
this trailing of the lengthy legs within the water,
this opening up of the heavy physique

into a brand new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
try towards the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

Complement with the poetic science of what occurs after we die and astronomer Rebecca Elson’s magnificent poem “Antidotes to Worry of Dying,” then revisit the good blue heron as a lens on our seek for that means.