013 | The Brahminy Kite

Everything is connected

For the first tale in the Good Grief anthology, I wrote a story about the White-Bellied Sea Eagle - the bird I’ve always shared a unique spiritual connection with. Some unexplained wonders occurred in the aftermath of losing my father to suicide that only reinforced to me that the world around us is much more connected than we sometimes allow ourselves to believe.

Over time similar encounters have played out with a local Brahminy Kite - sometimes known as the red-backed sea eagle. Close friends of my dad – a number of them independently of each other – noticed the presence of one in a particular place on the Lennox boardwalk that they’re sure never used to sit there of a morning before.

I often watch it fly by in the place where we created smoke after Dad’s memorial as a final ritual to share good memories, and let the ancestors and the Country we live on to acknowledge the loss. The Brahminy usually soars over my head not long after I arrive at the volcanic headland, before eventually veering down under the cliffs and cruising off along the coastline. It’s always with an eerie timing that’s hard to ignore. I could go on re-hashing a whole range of wild experiences I’ve had — like when a White-Bellied Sea Eagle and Brahminy Kite drew a circle in the sky in unison for almost an hour as I spoke to a friend who’d also lost someone close — but I think you catch my drift.

A couple of days after recounting my experiences with this coastal raptor to an old friend, I arrived back at my car from an early morning fish to find a Brahminy feather placed carefully under my windscreen wiper. As it turned out, her young son had found it down at the beach and generously passed it on to me for safekeeping. It still sits beside a candle under a photo of Dad in our living room. I admire the beautiful ochre-like plumage every day.

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When I first wrote a version of this story months ago my mum was on the other side of the planet, in England, having markedly similar interactions with Red Kites while hiking through the countryside. These birds fall into the same genetic family as the Brahminy. So while Dad was watching over me here in Australia, it felt as though he was reaching Mum 10,000kms away. Red Kites were hunted to extinction across England in the 1800s but managed to survive in very small pockets in Wales, were reintroduced across England in the 1980s and 1990s and the populations have been increasing ever since.

The Red Kites are just one of the countless thousands of species who’ve suffered under modern colonialism and capitalist expansion. Something coined in The Overstory — the book I’m currently reading — as “the suicide economy.” During a year-long tree-sit in a thousand year old California Redwood tree, a character called Nick elaborates on this theme,

“We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”

This same character, a few chapters later, is suddenly spraying graffitied letters on a wall, as part of a plot by a bunch of forest activists to send a message. The spraypaint reads,

CONTROL KILLS
CONNECTION HEALS

The story of the red kites is a story you can find across the world. One where connection wins out over control. Those tales aren’t always easy to find but they are there. For centuries we have found ourselves in an ever-increasing inertia to seek control in almost all aspects of our lives. At the end of the day almost everything remains uncertain. The challenge is finding the beauty in the unknown.

I find it hard to put into words how this connection with a bird has helped me over the past year. It’s the recognition of something bigger, the knowledge that there is some sort of higher power beyond our own little orbits. And speaking of orbits, allow me to go on another tangent. Bear with me.

In a recent article by Julia Baird on ABC, where she subtly denounced the star-studded Blue Origin Space flight, she spoke about an astronomer named Carl Sagan. He described the earth as a pale blue dot in a photo taken from the Voyager 1 spacecraft on 14 February, 1990. It’s worth noting here that Sagan never actually went to space himself, but the words that flowed out of him after looking at that photo are something truly special. Much like Baird did in her article, I’m including the quote in full because it just seems wrong to chop it up.

…you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

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Placing the suffering I have endured this past year in this context somehow lightens the load I’ve felt on my shoulders, if only momentarily. Just living life away on a mote of dust in a sunbeam. Whether it’s a Brahminys or a blue planet – these kinds of stories are yet another reminder that the natural world holds answers to the most difficult questions we can ever face in life. We’ve been trying to control for too long. Connection with the wonder, beauty and chaos of all these living systems around us is our past present and future all wrapped up together as one.