{"id":12122,"date":"2025-12-22T20:02:50","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T00:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/if-birds-ran-the-world-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T20:02:50","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T00:02:50","slug":"if-birds-ran-the-world-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/if-birds-ran-the-world-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"If Birds Ran the World \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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<\/a>Soaring hollow-boned and prehistoric over our infant species, birds live their lives indifferent to ours. They are not giving us signs, but we make of them omens<\/a> and draw from them divinations<\/a>. They furnish our best metaphors<\/a> and the neural infrastructure of our dreams<\/a>. They challenge our assumptions about the deepest measure of intelligence<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Because birds so beguile us, they magnetize our attention, and anything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In every reflection, a reckoning; in every reckoning, a possibility \u2014 a glimpse of us better than ourselves. <\/p>\n

That is what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott<\/strong> (January 23, 1930\u2013March 17, 2017) conjures up in his shamanic poem \u201cThe Season of Phantasmal Peace\u201d \u2014 an eternal vision for reprieve from the worst in us, written in the final years of the Cold War, the war that could have ended the world but was abated, not because we are perfect but because we are perfectible, because peace is possible<\/a>, because, as Maya Angelou wrote in another eternal mirror of a poem, we are the possible<\/a>.<\/p>\n