Feathered

What happens when you have the misfortune of witnessing a pigeon being crushed under the wheel of a truck? What does it do to your day when you see this supernal being that is suppose to be air-borne, celeritous, sensing the slightest bit of threat way before it approaches it, free and unbridled, bouncing on a busy street (the last place it belongs to) and then being splattered open by a raging 100-tonne machine, pressing it’s body into a sheet of blood and feathers, dispersing some fragments into that paused air?

All you do is flinch away, your insides lurching, like someone squeezed your heart out right when it was pounding its heaviest.

And you go on.

Into the affairs of our lives, shook by helplessness until the next most routine occurrence tries to send us into the most settled state. So we watch the fireflies get caught up in a burning flame, setting their wings on fire and we learn to get use to it. We watch a butterfly crash into a car and fall down with the most silent thud and we learn to get used to it. We watch ourselves free fall, and we comfortably get used to the acceleration after the initial jolt, like it was a state of rest.

Or we settle down, in slow motion, like that broken aloof feather, the gravity pulling us down after all, and then sweeping us into another draft of unsettling air, to be again thrown up and then eventually settled.

And so we tread through our daily lives knowing that things, people, events will turn on us, abandoning their affiliations towards us, deserting us. We live in the constant, dormant fear of loss. A phone call can toss our world into a trench of miseries. A wrong turn can scatter the atoms of our lives into something amorphous. Breaking us into pieces and then making us back again, almost.

We go on. We get used to everything. Everything.

“We are all miracles” – from the movie, Little Children

art - Black Sand Feather, abstract landscape

artiste - Ross Alford

url - here