They didn’t imagine it, the dying dinosaurs, that they would grow wings and become birds, become the laboratory in which evolution invented dreams and the cathedral in which it invented faith.
“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin consoled himself as his beloved daughter was dying, for he knew that death is the engine of life, that across the history of natural selection the death of the individual is what ensured the adaptation and survival of the species. And yet against this natural grandeur, we suffer the smallness of our imagination about death, as about the myriad small deaths punctuating life — the losses, the endings, the falterings of hope — forgetting somehow that every ending is a beginning in retrograde, that what may seem like a terminus may be a transformation.
These are the thoughts thinking themselves through me as I watch a great white heron rising from the water’s edge, from this boundary line between worlds, this lapping memory of how life emerged from non-life.
Because my bird divinations began with its great blue cousin, I cannot help but ask the majestic white bird for a message.
Combing the eleven pages of Audubon’s ornithological text about the species, I follow the usual process and let the words rearrange themselves into this koan from the unconscious:
Working on this divination, I was reminded of a long-ago counterpart — one of Mary Oliver’s least known poems, found in her 2003 collection What Do We Know (public library) and read 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 OliverSo heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wingsopen
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticksof the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it isthat death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailedback into itself —
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miraclebut the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy bodyinto a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.
Complement with the poetic science of what happens when we die and astronomer Rebecca Elson’s magnificent poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” then revisit the great blue heron as a lens on our search for meaning.
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletter
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
