One morning I was standing at the kitchen window after meditation/study group. The view is much less colorful than the picture of artwork accompanying this post (Twenty Seven Birds by Jennifer Lommers available for purchase here). It's winter where I live, and the only landscape colors I see are white and brown, snow and trees. But WOW all the brown, red, and blue birds! Without the obscuring foliage of spring, summer, and fall, they are available for stark viewing. I'm not a birder, not usually tuned in to these tiny magnificent creatures and whatever good or bad stuff they're up to, and I am a paid navel gazer, so it's breathtaking to look up and out and see so much flying around.
Therapy and to some extent meditation practice, for me, involves settling down and being available to what's flying around inside, especially to what's obscured by the typical practices of not looking and not knowing what's going on, to what's enshrouded in the typical comfort and efficiency of assuming, presuming, and projecting what's happening in me -- all of which availability to my own birds (especially the ones thought to be bad actors) is in the service of having a better understanding of what's going on with others and their birds. Not to solve them so much as become familiar with them, which familiarity tends to take much of the fight and fright right out of them.
Life serves up kitchen windows and stark winter scenes now and then that leave us unable to ignore our unruly birds -- the racing thoughts, rising anger or anxiety, pained bodies, lost or broken hearts that overwhelm us when someone dies or leaves, we get injured or called out, we remember some terrible unacceptable thing, we age and get cancer or one of its cousins and time starts passing so fast... Times like these, we are plunged into plain sight, blinded to the usual ways of knowing and living. We are, if only for a moment before we dissociate again, fully available to all possibilities, not just the ones we prefer. What we call trauma, bad things that break all the rules, can make us look where we normally wouldn't, be exposed to the vague or vivid depths of mind and life in ways we think we didn't sign up for and shouldn't have to, and really experience our vulnerability. We rail against that. We feel attacked by and afraid of that. We begrudge the gnarly birds, ours or others' and their causes. We survive them at best and do what we can to dissociate from them better going forward.
Enter therapy, a thing we take on because after a while we just have to. Dissociation itself splinters and we can't not see -- feelings and memories however refused and distorted for however long are now symptoms and diagnoses, patterns progressed to crises of body or identity or faith. Family, friends, and bosses also can't not see and can't not say some version of "you gotta do something about your birds because they've breached the window and are making a mess..." Ideally, there is some choice before the breach to place ourselves at the kitchen window of our mind, body, life, beliefs, and all the ways we identify ourselves that are being challenged by change -- and to look, really look. (But hey, we are stubborn, so we tend to wait until we just have to.)
Whenever and however we get to the window, and whoever's birds we present as the problem, the thoughts and questions about them are usually related to WHY? There's incessant energy (money, strategies, missions, weapons) given to the search for that one bird that caused whatever the thing that has gone so wrong. As if finding that one bird and, I don't know, sitting it down and giving it a good talking to, giving it a hug or whatever it has always needed, killing it and every one like it? will solve things. It won't. (That just makes us that bird, makes us and ours the new cause that someone else and theirs will hunt down one horrible day.) Focusing on that one bird we think caused everything, whether deemed yours or someone else's, even if we could nail that guy down, changes nothing, just keeps the problem going.
Getting to know the birds -- our own birds in our own yard bodies -- lightly tracing their patterns and habitats in order to develop the ability to recognize how they influence us and our view of the neighbors' birds/yards in any present moment we can is imho very important to do. Because wisdom and compassion. Because there is no wise way to handle something we won't behold, no way to work for the greater good with something we flat out deny in ourselves and reflexively assign to others. Whether mine or yours, there is no unhaving the birds already born and flying around. Yet, we try to argue and ignore them out of existence. Mine being right and yours being wrong will flip sides a billion times. Mine mattering and yours not is killing us. Thinking birds, mine or yours, to be problems to unhave (solve) in the first place, ills to treat (destroy) inside ourselves or enemies to annihilate out there in the second place, is a common approach that begs for heroes and saviors to conquer the bad guys, and in that conventional case, we are lost and helpless and nuts.
Alternatively, there is an empowered and sane relationship with birds for each of us to establish, starting small and intimate. There is a possibility of not being surprised, afraid, or compelled by our own skittish birds that we could explore. There is a not ignoring or indulging of their logic right off the bat that we could practice. There is an orienting to them honestly before doing a single thing to, with, or in the name of them that we could venture. Especially our aggressive, embarrassing, shameful ones. Before those troubled little monsters fly out of our mouths or fists and shatter our integrity or someone else's heart or face, contributing to the same righteousness that fuels the war out there that we think is more important, their movements are apparent in our very own minds and bodies. If we can pause and notice our birds right here, somewhere between denial and expression (or explosion) of them, something different, if relatively boring compared to the headlines we love to hate, might happen.
Stopping looking away right here, stopping arguing with our own discomforts, stopping solving via canceling or conquering our own tiny powerful birds and each others'... Starting staying and staying looking, and looking starkly, changes everything.
No one else is privy to or capable of this level of daring personal awareness and engagement but us. No one can intimately ultimately experience the subtle movements of our selves and our lives, relative to other selves and their lives, but us. That solo inward work is our right and responsibility, I think, and if done honestly, is confusing, hard, and scary. If it weren't, everyone would be doing it, and the headlines would be very different. My encouragement and respect to all who are bringing their own birds into plain sight in the cool light of whatever winter landscape reveals them. For the benefit of all birds, I'm happy to be with you at the window.
PS: There's an Alanis song for everything, and here's the one for this.