Saturday morning twitterings

It's cold today. Well, not Northern Hemispherean-wear-19-layers-and-mufflers-in-the-snow cold, but cold comparatively speaking cold. Cold enough to have the heater on cold. Which, considering it will be summer in nine days, is cold. (In other news, it will also be my birthday in nine days as well. Mark it down and send me presents - December 1, Susie's birthday. Get it? Got it? Good. You know, when I think about it, it was nice, neat birthing by my parents to deliver me on the first day of my favourite season).

It's cold and I have the heater on. Eight degrees Celsius/46 degrees Fahrenheit. Raining. Storms brewing. Especially cold considering last week we had a hot spell where it reached 35 degrees Celsius/95 Fahrenheit. Melbourne weather has always been changeable. Most of the time it keeps things interesting. However, such a variation in temperature has caused many people I have seen around the city and on the train to be spending the last several days yawning.

It has been overcast and drear for three or four days. They are all running into each other. I miss the sun. It came out this morning, for about five minutes. I went and sat on the front step and let that beautiful golden vitamin D seep into my bones :)

I have prepared myself. Got some DVDs last night. Brought pens and pencils and erasers and pencil sharpeners out into the lounge and here I shall be plonked today, I think, with the heater going and the wind blowing outside, when it's not raining or hailing. I can only pray that we get some sort of decent thunderstorm, while Lester is away at his dad's so that I can enjoy it without feeling guilty that my dog is shaking himself into pieces beside me :)

There is a blackbird that lives outside my window. I listened to him yesterday singing his funny little tunes that have very little melody to them. Still, they have a charm of their own. He's going now, as I speak. He only stops when the rain gets hard. Sings through showers and wind. Last Monday at my art therapy session we sat outside and were harassed by animals. I had Elly with me, brought her in the car for the long drive and the nice walk afterwards. She cried in the car. Could hear us outside. I had to go get her, and put her on her lead, and have her sit. Which she did do, eventually. Actually, she was pretty good after a while. Maggie spoke sweet soothing words to her and she lapped up the attention. After a while she lay down and let me draw things with charcoal and oil pastels in peace.

Well, relative peace if I ignored the beautiful king parrots hanging around outside Maggie's house waiting for seed. They are on a good wicket. The young male, a teenager, cheekily flew very close to my head on several occasions, on his flight from the tree to the top of the roof, to the brickwork away to my right where he lapped up the seed. Several days previously he had apparently sung the most beautiful melody to woo his potential love interest. And yet, when it came to food, he was happy to try to peck her to keep her away. Indeed, she had been gouged at some point. A potentially violent relationship. Probably best not to go there. However, I have no idea of the mating habits of king parrots. Perhaps it's a whirlwind courtship followed by some babies followed by divorce. See, who said parrots and humans had nothing in common? ;) I'm not really that cynical, dear readers, not really, deep down. Deep down I want happily ever afters for everybody. They just seem a bit thin on the ground at this point in time.

So today here I am with the blackbird outside my window whose song is no less endearing because it's not beautiful like the king parrot. I'm sure the blackbird knows of things the king parrot will never know of. Of course, the blackbird is not caught up in existential angst and self-conscious conundrums about its state of being. It just does what it does. It's never been told that it lacks something in its blackbirdiness. It probably wouldn't believe it even if it was told that. It would seem absurd. It could sit next to a king parrot and not feel in the least bit inferior because its worth is not based on comparisons. The blackbird sees and hears and thinks blackbirdy things and it does them, instinctively, without questioning. It sings its funny little songs without melody, but are those songs any lesser because they are not the Beethoven of the king parrot? There is charm in the strange warbling that comes from this bird. I like to think that it is more into experimental music than beautiful parrot lilts. It's songs have no rhyme nor reason to them, and yet some parts of them sound familiar to me, as if he (she?) has sung them before. Complex little portions that change beat, tone and time within themselves. The blackbird doesn't have inferiority complexes that it doesn't sing like a king parrot. For all we know, the king parrot feels stilted in its 4/4 timing and has a latent yearning to break free and be a punk.

But I doubt it. Because that is the beauty of animals, is it not? That they just go on and do and be themselves and fill up their own confines because nothing has taught them that how they are is wrong and that they need to change their nature. They just be. Whereas for us self-conscious, wounded souls the way to be ourselves so often seem to be in ways that seem counter intuitive - to get bigger we need to go smaller (but it's not the going smaller of wounding by others, even though it may look the same on the outside), to learn to love better we first need to acknowledge and embrace how we hate and fear. I think Lewis Carroll was onto something with his Alice stories. It's so much harder and more complex for us, isn't it? How nice if we could fly away from it all, from ourselves, from the endless repetition of monkey mind.

I think we can. I think that place is called God. It is a place where comparisons cease (bliss). A place where you can go on in your life and be and do and think your own thoughts and be your own you and see things in your own way - where you are free to be yourself in a greater measure than any human being has allowed. And yet also it is a place of safety, where you learn the discipline of love and how in this space discipline doesn't even feel like that because it is so wrapped up in love that you don't experience it as discipline.

But you have to believe it before you see it. And sometimes, believing it requires a lot of work. It is not surprising to me at all, in this topsy turvy land of paradoxes that we must strive to enter that rest.

Hey, happy Saturday, bloggers. The sun has come out for a brief spell and I'm heading outside :)

Pix: king parrot: Jon Bragg blackbird: Lip Kee