{"id":9565,"date":"2024-12-08T13:11:55","date_gmt":"2024-12-08T17:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-herons-antidote-to-fear-of-death-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-12-08T13:11:55","modified_gmt":"2024-12-08T17:11:55","slug":"a-herons-antidote-to-fear-of-death-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-herons-antidote-to-fear-of-death-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"A Heron\u2019s Antidote to Fear of Death \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

They didn\u2019t imagine it, the dying dinosaurs, that they would grow wings and become birds, become the laboratory in which evolution invented dreams<\/a> and the cathedral in which it invented faith<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is grandeur in this view of life,\u201d Darwin consoled himself as his beloved daughter was dying<\/a>, 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 \u2014 the losses, the endings, the falterings of hope \u2014 forgetting somehow that every ending is a beginning in retrograde, that what may seem like a terminus may be a transformation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Great white heron, Holbox Island. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These are the thoughts thinking themselves through me as I watch a great white heron rising from the water\u2019s edge, from this boundary line between worlds, this lapping memory of how life emerged from non-life. <\/p>\n

Because my bird divinations<\/a> began with its great blue cousin, I cannot help but ask the majestic white bird for a message. <\/p>\n

Combing the eleven pages of Audubon\u2019s ornithological text about the species, I follow the usual process and let the words rearrange themselves into this koan from the unconscious:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, available as stand-alone print<\/a> benefitting the Audubon Society.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Working on this divination, I was reminded of a long-ago counterpart \u2014 one of Mary Oliver\u2019s least known poems, found in her 2003 collection What Do We Know<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) and read here by 19-year-old poet, artist, and heron-lover Rose Hanzlik<\/a> to the sound of Debussy\u2019s \u201cReverie.\u201d<\/p>\n