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A torrent of warnings, stories, adages, poems, threats, how-tos, real estate info, survival tips and non sequitur jokes are available for those who tap in. Everything talks, you just have to be willing to listen.
Fight or flight is sort of a rhetorical question for me. I took to the air, soaring above the benches and unlit candles, whizzing past stained glass windows and through the hole the bus made.
So there we were. A rejected crow with an identity crisis partnering a bloodhound with the IQ of boiled pudding. We were perhaps the most pathetic excuse for an attempted murder on the face of the earth.
The trauma of nearly being eaten by my best friend was the single greatest pain I had ever known.
Butterflies live short lives because they have mastered the art of living. They serve to pass it on with luminous bursts of joy, bright flickers from the other side.
The paper-winged ones are truth-tellers, postage-stamp sized messengers who paint the air into a watercolor of magic and taste with their feet. We are best advised not to blast them with Roundup.
I missed our tree in our home, how it would bleed sap when it recalled memories too painful to share because it knew that holding things in is toxic.
All the winged, even fungus gnats, know that you cannot fly if you’re carrying too much weight with you. It’s a well-known adage, actually: “The light of heart is free to fly.” Woodpeckers inscribe it into a lot of trees, those vandalizing assholes.
It seemed that being female meant to be prey, even among your own species.
I hoped my presence had at least provided a little comfort, because it had done absolutely fuck all to dispel our stereotype as the harbingers of death.
Listen; life is worth a fight. Expectation must be shed like winter leaves. Even in death, there is wondrous beauty. And death is not The End.
You see my children who stand at my feet. One day, I will crumble and shatter to the forest floor where my bones will feed a thousand hungry mouths and my children will stretch for the sun.
Life is as beautiful as it is deadly. Fungi might be friend or foe. Breathe. Listen. Look.
If you are alive—whether of blood or bark—you will be struck by pain, love, longing, fear, anger, and the particular ache of sadness. There will be joys that quiver your leaves and betrayals that will sever your roots, poisoning the water you pull. These are the varying notes in the music of living. Look up, to close your eyes is to stagnate. To rot and stop the song.
My gift to you is to know that we are here, all around you, talking to one another and dreaming of your success. Sorcery is everywhere, in the silver stroll of a slug and lighting up the very veins of you. Open those beautiful eyes to a world who is a mosaic of magic. She is just waiting for you to notice.
Just like how after the big thing went down with Tiffany S., Big Jim battened down the hatches, taking up residency in the basement with World of Warcraft, Jägermeister, and Papa John’s on speed dial. He’d gone to ground.
Rejecting a part of myself had been rejecting all of myself in a world where you needed to believe in yourself to survive.
“Don’t shackle yourself to an ideal. Always go with the tide; listen for guidance.
I cannot recommend this to you enough: find something that you believe in, right down deep in the depths of your silvery plumage, and then throw your heart at it, blood and valves and veins and all.
Her name translated as “Survivor,” but she told me she didn’t like it much. I asked her why and she said because she is a female and all females are survivors so it was massively redundant.
Trust, it turned out, was a very beautiful and fragile thing with a taste like wild raspberries and experienced only by the very brave.
I missed Big Jim and the life I’d known. But I also felt the love that sizzled and frothed around us, a love that touched through life and extended to the bones of six beings. Sometimes you can feel two very different things at once—both searing pain and joy, feelings as deep as the ocean.
And everyone on earth knows that if you have the respect of a cat, it means your soul is one worth being around.
When you have the power to stand up to oppression, you must.
We all begin and end in blood, life’s liquid. Roam, rove, conquer the land with our bodies. We are never lost and we never arrive, as The Pack seeks the journey.
And as we protect The Pack from the hunters, we will fall in love with each moment, singing to a moon that has loved us since we were stars.
I extolled the virtues of MoFos, such as the varied histories of different cultures, the beauty in their physical differences, their creations, laughter, and love. I told them about how MoFos dedicate an hour to happiness every day with Pabst Blue Ribbon and heavily discounted tater tots. I told them about how even though MoFos weren’t born with wings, they made their own and put them on airplanes and maxi pads, and about how they flushed all their poops out to Echo—the crows thought this was super hilarious. I explained birthday cake as a spongy mattress of awesome with hidden rivers of
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I had a hell of a time trying to explain Christmas, so I summarized it as “a fat MoFo in a red suit died and then came back and cached his treasures in a big red bag and sometimes MoFos went to the mall to sit on his crotch.”
A favorite thing was when I talked about the food palace called Denny’s and its magical dish of eggs and ham and cheese and sauce—man, they fucking loved that shit. Sometimes out of nowhere they’d just chant, “Moons Over My Hammy! Moons Over My Hammy!” Honestly, they became big MoFo fans; I’m pretty sure I converted them all. There were, sadly, some things that were just impossible to explain, like the plot of Inception and CrossFit.
how we are all connected by a web that looks gossamer but is stronger than a chain-link fence.
