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

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

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

These are the ideas pondering themselves by way of me as I watch an ideal 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 hen divinations started with its nice blue cousin, I can not assist however ask the majestic white hen for a message.

Combing the eleven pages of Audubon’s ornithological textual content in regards to the species, I observe 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 — certainly one of Mary Oliver’s least recognized poems, present in her 2003 assortment What Do We Know (public library) and skim 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,
at all times it’s a shock
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she or he 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 demise is a gap within the floor,
how unbelievable
that ascension shouldn’t be doable,
although all the things appears so inert, so nailed

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

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

however the widespread 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
attempt 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.