A baby bird called me on my bullshit

Because loneliness is just living too fast

Every morning, I get up, make a flask of tea, and set off up the hill from my house. When I’ve walked for a while, I sit in a field and look out at this part of the world that’s claimed me.

In fact, I try to do more than look at it. Looking’s no good. It keeps you separate. I try to get still enough to feel it—to hear the birds sing in my blood and feel the green grass tickle the inside of my ribcage.

It doesn’t always work. The past few days, I’ve been busy and lonely. There’s nothing terrible going on. Just deadlines and a house that’s not guest-friendly yet, and my long-standing tendency to bury myself in overwork when things feel scary or uncertain.

This morning, I couldn’t settle, couldn’t attune to the birds or the slow seep of slugs. My mind was already racing through the day—its way of keeping me safe from feeling my present aloneness, and the sadness that sometimes comes with it.

So after a few minutes, I aborted the effort and set off home, having an imaginary conversation with the man who’s going to plaster over the Artex on my ceilings. Really transcendent stuff.

Then a pipe exploded in the hedgerow.

A pipe. In the hedgerow.

It was an ear-splitting squeak—the squeal of air shooting from a pipe at high pressure. I wheeled round. It kept going. For about ten seconds I stood on the dirt track and looked at the hedgerow, trying to see some buried, bursting irrigation pipe.

Then the sound stopped and I saw the beak of a tiny bird, closing.

It wasn’t a pipe, it was a little baby bird, crying out.

I blinked. Looked at the hedgerow again.

All along the bank, there were little hollows that had been cosied into nests. Tiny homes full of baby birds. Mothers out seeking food for them. Worms and snails and grasshoppers, doing—whatever they do? (Look, I’m not a naturalist. I’m doing my best here.)

I knew all this already. In my head, I know that I inhabit a living world. That there are untold hearts beating all around me, at any given moment. That’s why I have this little morning ritual in the first place.

But when I’m busy—or busying myself to avoid feeling things I don’t want to feel—I don’t know this anywhere except my head. I don’t feel it in my bones. I turn the people and the animals and everything else around me into burst pipes, at best, and I use that lie to keep telling myself I’m all alone and I will be until I can just get enough done, get through this next deadline, work until I’m good enough to reach some promised land where I will finally not be alone.

That baby bird absolutely called me on my bullshit. We’re here, she said. It’s here. We’re all already here.

I didn’t stay for long. It wasn’t me she was crying out for, after all. But her song slowed me down. The rest of the walk home, I waited until I’d fully landed in each step before I took the next. And by the time I arrived at my door, the past few days’ loneliness had passed. The colour had seeped back into things. I had remembered, down to my bones, that I’m never alone, and if I think I am, that’s just because I’m moving too fast for life to get in.

Love,

xx Ellie