It’s unusual how, in a universe ruled by relentless change, human beings starvation for fidelity — our our bodies wired for homeostasis, our minds hooked on behavior, our hearts craving for eternal love. We dwell as patterns unaware of perpetuating themselves, our aching resistance to vary mirrored within the routines and rituals and relationship formulae out of which we construct the superstructure of perception that homes all of our actions, reactions, and selections.
It isn’t straightforward, reconfiguring this superstructure to suit one thing new — a brand new follow, a brand new individual, a brand new approach of being. The extra transformative the brand new component, the tougher it’s to determine it into the sample of life as we all know it — a sample formed by what we consider about love, that deepest sinew of the self.
This delicate, troublesome, wildly rewarding reconfiguration is what Terry Tempest Williams explores in When Ladies Had been Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice (public library) — a hovering meditation on life, love, and the tales we inform ourselves about who we’re, sparked by an surprising revelation: When, in her mid-fifties, on the actual age her mom was when she died, Williams lastly opened the journals her mom had bequeathed her, she was staggered to search out all of them clean — a form of “second dying” that catalyzed a profound reckoning with the which means of voice, of phrases, of how we write the story of who we’re and the way we revise it, lensed by means of the love of birds she shared together with her mom.
Williams writes:
Love is to life what life is to dying. And so we danger the whole lot attempting to the touch the ineffable by touching one another. Time and again. Time and again… Patterned habits alternates like shadow and lightweight… We are able to change, evolve, and rework our personal conditioning. We are able to select to maneuver like water quite than be molded like clay. Life spirals in after which spirals out on any given day. It doesn’t must be a technique, one fact, one voice. Nor does love must be all or nothing.
As a result of we endure a congenital blindness to what lies on the opposite aspect of transformation — a blindness brilliantly illustrated by the Vampire Downside thought experiment — it’s usually likelihood, not selection, that brings concerning the profoundest change. Life sweeps us astray — a horrible analysis arrives, an unimagined alternative emerges, an surprising individual enters the center — and instantly we should start once more, rebuilding the superstructure of being on this new terrain. (“It may occur any time…”)
Williams finds inconceivable comfort for the problem of change in her encounter with a chicken misplaced. The painted bunting — probably the most exuberantly coloured chicken north of Mexico, which so confused Linnaeus with its unique plumage that he falsely categorized it as native to India; a species now thought to orient by the pole star throughout migration — “had flown in on the tail of a blizzard, been blown astray, and stayed,” making a brand new life in Maine, a brand new sample of being: Every day simply earlier than daybreak, the painted bunting alighted to a neighbor’s chicken feeder like clockwork.
Watching the chicken one snowy morning, Williams writes:
At 6:43 a.m. the painted bunting arrived, like a dream between the crease of shadow and lightweight. His silhouette grew towards coloration for the seven brief minutes he stayed. And when daybreak struck his tiny feathered again, he ignited like a flame: pink, blue, and inexperienced.
[…]
The bunting received caught in a storm and stayed. I’ve been seized in a storm of my very own making. Whirlwind. World-wind. Distracted and displaced. Within the wounding of changing into misplaced, I can appropriate myself.
Echoing Emerson’s indictment that “individuals want to be settled [but] solely so far as they’re unsettled is there any hope for them,” Williams provides:
We are able to take flight from our lives in a type apart from denial and return to our genuine selves… Unintended sightings, whether or not witnessed in a mind or on a winter daybreak, remind us there is no such thing as a such factor as certainty.
A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated discovering magnificence within the uncertainty of being within the interlude between two world wars, Williams provides:
I need to really feel each the sweetness and the ache of the age we live in. I need to survive my life with out changing into numb. I need to communicate and comprehend phrases of wounding with out having these phrases change into the panorama the place I dwell. I need to possess a light-weight contact that may elevate darkness to the realm of stars.
This vascular malformation may bleed and burst. Or I can merely go on residing, appreciating my situation as a weak human being in a weak world, guided by the songs of birds. What’s time, sacred time, however the acceleration of consciousness? There are such a lot of methods to vary the sentences we now have been given.
Complement these fragments of the fully fantastic When Ladies Had been Birds with Milan Kundera on life’s central ambivalence of understanding what we actually need, Rebecca Solnit on how we discover ourselves by getting misplaced, and George Saunders on the braveness of uncertainty, then revisit Williams on our duty to awe.
