I am Heron-haunted

Every day he leads me along the paths beside the river. Every day as I make my journey, often with only him for company, I wonder if I am leading him. Perhaps we walk together, disparate creatures who possess some kind of peculiar connection; one that cannot be understood in the rational, logical world that I inhabit - a world from which I am becoming increasingly and willingly detached.

I inhabit many worlds which I understand better than the consensus reality that I have to deal with each day. I don’t get it at all. My worlds are internal. Physical. Emotional. Intellectual. Spiritual. The external world is too bizarre for me now. I have unburdened myself of most of my unnecessary baggage, gathered over years and years of passively allowing life to happen to me. Years of not thinking, of collecting experience without reflecting on what it all might mean.

The process of reflection is crucial. Coming to a firm conclusion or settling on an absolute meaning is less so. Conclusions and meanings should maybe never be fully reached as they are the states of mind responsible for creating barriers. Absolute beliefs close minds. Heron spends a lot of time reflecting, but is unflinching in his determination. Heron doesn’t possess or retain anything as inferior as knowledge. He has wisdom. Innate wisdom. Instinct. He’s an island though. I think I’m becoming one of those too.

I savour my corporeal presence on the physical earth. So much so that I go barefoot as often as I can when no one else is around, and when it isn’t too cold. I know how it feels to stand absolutely still in the cold river, just as Heron does. I take pleasure in my physicality and in this flesh vehicle I inhabit which enables me to feel the most exquisite of sensations. Mountains and forests know the sound of love. The trees understand the noise that pleasure makes. Of course love often brings pain as it becomes complicated by matters aside from the purely physical. But in the moment, there is nothing so blissful as love in communion with the earth.

We’re all one really. All the same. Borders, boundaries, differences, ceremonies, rituals, traditions are only man-made ways of taking control, of gaining power. Divide and conquer. The world has gone too far to ever resemble Utopia. But we are suffering, personally and collectively, from a monumental lack of imagination.

I am deeply sensitive. To individuals, to society, to the bigger picture. Emotions, though often frowned upon as an undesirable form of expression in a world that seeks to make everyone the unfeeling and unthinking same, are an intrinsic, inescapable part of the human condition. Western civilisation categorises them with the same duality it applies to everything. Ecstasy, joy, passion and pleasure exist alongside pain, sadness, guilt and grief, and we humans have been conditioned to frown upon the negative emotions.

Like all emotions, negative ones are best experienced fully in the moment in a quiet corner where wounds can be licked sufficiently well to seal out the chance of prolonged infection or permanent festering. The wallowing should not become habitual. The sufferer should not enjoy it too much, but they often do. Guilt is such a damaging emotion, but it is deep-seated in the sensitive, gentle soul. It has, by way of experience, worked its way in to the instinctive core. It thrives there, feeding on feel-good emotions, particularly pleasure. The more pleasure that is present, the more guilt survives, thrives and grows. And so, the sufferer, rather than do the difficult psychological work of changing their perception, builds walls to keep the pleasure out. Anyone who comes too close, must be punished. Heron tells me it is this he finds most puzzling about humans. I agree with him.

It is to the spiritual and symbolic worlds to which I turn in order to begin to understand why a bird has taken command of the richest and deepest part of my life. Why a bird has become my sole companion. Why we seem to commune on a level I do not understand. Native American Tribes believe that the animals which come to play a significant part in our lives, such as the Heron has in mine, hold the keys to our spiritual identity. If we focus on the characteristics of our totem animals, we internalise these.

I’m certain he’s a teacher, this Heron friend and companion of mine. I don’t know what it is he’s trying to teach me though, or what it is that I must now learn. A lot I suppose. We all have a lot to learn. Even the clever ones. Especially the clever ones. But the best and most important lessons are rarely obvious at the time of learning. A good teacher knows that. A good student is also aware.

I tread the same tracks every day. Occasionally I make a few intractable deviations. Just lately I have been venturing far outside the familiar. This, I tell myself, is a part of my self-expression, of my self-exploration. I have this need to call myself an explorer, even though (or maybe because) my days of exploring in a real sense are numbered. There is an inevitability that comes with the aging of the physical body. It becomes less able. At first it’s easy to deny, but pretty soon it accelerates. Wherever our mind may wander or our spirit may seek to play, that reality cannot be escaped. But we can fight it. In any case it is him, not me, who dips in and out of my explorations at will. He possesses an innate and unyielding determination that appears to defy anything worldly, even decay. Time is not something he is concerned with. His eyes appear sharp and unchanging; his heart, detached and ageless.

My walks are poetic because my mind is fantastical. My reality is different to most other realities that I have encountered. I have the body of a woman, but a mind that is less mature and a spirit in my heart that plays as it desires, somewhere between the two, not under my control. It seems invincible and all-powerful, my heart-spirit, directing my life in the most peculiar of ways and I have no choice but to follow. It’s not always a good thing having such a heart-spirit. It makes you love others unconditionally and when you love them unconditionally it leaves you completely open and defenceless. You have no choice but to tolerate their betrayal and rejection. Wrestling with the aftermath is one of the most difficult things in life, but it reveals who and what you really are. For me, it reveals the pain and depression that has always been a part of me. Sometimes I feel hopeless, worthless, unloved and unlovable. I feel alone and when that aloneness combines with rejection in particular, I feel more than a bit lonely. It’s the only time I ever feel lonely. Most of the time I love my aloneness. Heron and I have that in common.

My heart-spirit also makes it easy for me to feel a sense of belonging in the woods that I don’t feel elsewhere. It is impossible, though, even for the unimaginative, for those who are most grounded in the consensus reality, to walk in these untamed places without being touched in a pure and raw, even innocent, way. Most are not conscious of it. I am. I feel it acutely. I feel most things acutely. This is sometimes a blessing. Those times are wonderful, perhaps wondrous. More often, it is a curse.

And so, my fantastical and poetic mind, when it encounters the Heron, tries to enclose him in magical words. We’re all trying to capture him, we Heron-haunted folk. I’m not the only one you see. There are others. We are unlikely kin with the Heron as our middle ground, our sacred space. There is a sharing among us that is unusual. Honest; the kind of honesty that is usually relegated to a lost childhood. From what I know of the others, we all have a void in us that nothing has ever filled. An emptiness. We’re all content we Heron-haunted folk; accomplished even. To a point.

The photographer tries to capture him in a still mechanical image, mimicking his own fleeting perspective and transforming his apparition into a static, more enduring form. He may take pleasure in sharing the results, or he may relish the evidence of his passion in secret. It depends on the nature of his void. But he is the one who contains the most common perspective; the one we can all see if only we take the time to look. It requires detachment though. The kind of detachment I’m sure that Heron feels.

The painter tries to recreate his depth, his beauty, a perspective with oil on canvas in inspired brush strokes. Less mechanical; less representative too. The perceiver has free rein with his image. As free as the painter in its conception and execution. This is what most people think of when thinking of art. Writing is only understood in all of its artistic merit by its practitioners and their most initiated fans. Photography is not always artistic.

But Heron resists any attempts to make him to conform to something as ordinary as images or words, whether magical or not. He’s never going to be ‘like a vampire that the wind turned to limestone reanimated by the fresh water’. ‘Poacher’ is too obvious. And anyway, he has a perfect right to the abundance of his river abode. He may look as if he were ‘carved by a master lapidary’ and ‘every nerve and sinew’ may well ‘burn with a physical pain when some distant recollection evoked their memory’, but it is not enough. It doesn’t explain or portray his aloneness, his patience. Words are too limited, and limiting. His spirit is free and unbounded.

I am, in turn, delighted, fascinated, ecstatic when I see him. I am astounded by his beauty, his grace, his absolute stillness, his skill. But in a childlike way. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m a writer at all or if I’m just an eternal child. Perhaps they’re the same thing.

Some days, he’ll stand near me for a long time. It is as if neither of us wants to be the first to look away; to fly away. I usually drift first. But sometimes the presence of others causes him to take flight. Even his leaving is beautiful. It seems his huge grey wings are like liquid steel, moulding and caressing the air current as they rise and fall with great majesty, carrying his graceful form and spirit to unknown regions where I can never follow. Then I look at the photographer’s pictures and see that the heron’s wings are not cold and metallic. They’re warm and soft and fan-like. The kind of wings that seem capable of the most tender yet strong embrace. The Heron has spent a lot of time keeping his followers entranced.

It’s peculiar how things are connected. It almost seems that we’re enmeshed in some kind of tangled web that we don’t quite know is there, but that we’re often engaged in trying to escape. It may be a web of deceit or a web of truth. More likely it is a combination of both. Truth, clearly, is relative, even to its most honest proponents. I can’t help thinking that deceit and truth are only convenient labels we give to information, or to the words and actions of others, as a way of containing what we feel is rather too chaotic for our closed and ordered minds. Think about it.

Heron makes me wonder. He makes my inner life luxuriously busy. He makes my thoughts fly with his form, like Peter Pan across the evening sky, on their look out for the destination, Neverland.

One of the things Heron makes me wonder is whether he might be leading me astray. Is his charm and allure all it seems, or is it merely his way of distracting me? Of gaining attention for himself? Is it possible that birds have human qualities, or are we all just animals with animal qualities that we, mere humans, believe are so sophisticated? Maybe we should give in to our animalistic tendencies. Could it be a worse arrangement than the one we have now, surrounded and enveloped in bureaucracy? Can a bird be narcissistic? Is narcissism a trait of nature? Who knows?

Today, as I wandered, and as Heron thought to accompany me on my journey, my thoughts somehow turned to something else. Something quite random. Yet Heron is making me believe that nothing is really random.

It is in the woods I usually feel least distracted, most calm, very at home. I’m not a people person. A few I can tolerate reasonably well. I’m sure I’m considered by humans, those that think of me at all, anywhere along the scale of weird to quite friendly. Some humans I like a lot. Most of them I can find something in to love. I’ve always found it much easier to love someone than to like them. I love someone with my heart. I’ve got a very big and open heart. I like them with my soul. It’s not so responsive to mere human qualities. There’s one human that I like an awful lot. I think Heron knows this and likes him too.

Today, as my thoughts were largely confined to my surroundings, my travails along well-beaten paths, my forays into imagination when I had to choose between paths, my explorations of the paths that most others seems to ignore, I remembered – I once had a leader on my journey. I think that might be what Heron is trying to remind me of.

Today, as I turned away, with this realisation and memory firmly lodged in my consciousness, I swear he turned and winked at me. I admitted defeat, conceded that his patience for standing motionless, just observing, was greater than mine. But we all know that a winking Heron is an impossibility …