Little miracles

I’ll preface this essay by saying that this is not a story about a pigeon but a meditation on holding grief, inspired by a pigeon.

Pigeons are a common sight in my neighbourhood but one in particular has stayed in my thoughts since our paths crossed last year. This pigeon that was strutting across a grassy patch behind the bus stop caught my eye immediately as I got off the bus. Despite its common appearance, this was no ordinary pigeon. A bright blue takeaway plastic bag, the sort that’s typically used by hawkers, followed the pigeon wherever it went. Worried, I took a closer look and saw that one handle of the plastic bag was looped around its neck. My heart sank and I let out an involuntary groan. In that moment, my eyes met those of a lady striding by who, barely slowing down, said stoically, “It won’t be able to fly; it will die. You help it lah.” I responded almost pleadingly, in stark contrast to her stoicism, “I want to, but I’m scared…” She only half smiled in response and kept walking ahead, leaving me with the pigeon, still strutting, the blue plastic bag crinkling and swishing to its movements.

With ‘it will die’ still ringing in my ears, I approached the pigeon slowly, palms facing skywards. For each measured step I took, the pigeon took several quick hops in response to keep its distance from me. I sensed I was disturbing its peace more than the plastic bag was but in my mind my intervention was necessary and life-saving. I persisted, taking deep breaths to calm my pounding heart.

“I know you don’t like me coming closer…but I’m here to help. I won’t hurt you. I’m here to help…”

My words comforted neither the pigeon nor myself. The more I tried to advance, the more the pigeon seemed pressed to extend the distance between us. It started to add a little wing movement to its brisk steps and I sensed what small chance I had of catching it was quickly waning. In my nervous bid to get closer, I took wider steps and as I feared, the pigeon spread its wings open. I watched with bated breath as the next few moments unfolded in slow motion. Will it be able to fly with, quite literally, extra baggage? I was near enough to hear each laboured whoosh as it flapped its wings. Finally, gathering enough momentum and lift, the pigeon flew up…up…then away towards the block of flats across from us, plastic bag in tow. Though still worried about its wellbeing, part of me was admittedly relieved that I no longer had to catch it. The pigeon had proven itself capable of flight, but I remained convinced as the passerby was that ‘it will die’. I called ACRES and was told by the person on the line that as long as the bird is able to fly, it will be hard for anyone to contain and help it.

The next day, and every afternoon that week, it poured mercilessly. Whenever it rained, I thought about the pigeon and imagined water filling its plastic bag like a takeaway bag from the kopitiam, round with fishball kway teow soup. How would it walk or fly, towing a bag full of rainwater? How would it survive if it can’t get to food or away from becoming food? As rain fell day after day, my heart grew heavier as if it too was a plastic bag being filled and weighed down by rain. I lamented the pigeon’s poor fate to my daughters, bemoaned inconsiderate human behaviour, and looked out the windows to see if I might spot the pigeon and its bright blue burden. Then one afternoon, a little miracle happened.

In Matthew Maxwell’s How to Hold a Cockroach, the line ‘Then a little miracle happened’ appears eleven times. Each time, it is followed not by an extraordinary turn of tangible events, but by a radical shift in a boy’s lens. The miracles are in moments of the boy suddenly seeing something from a completely new perspective. A crack forms in an old perspective, one held for years, and if we, like the boy in the book, allow ourselves to peek through the crack, might discover a new way of seeing that we’ve never considered. Like setting a rock down in the path of a stream can change the water’s course, a shift in our perception can illuminate new paths and redirect a person’s life completely. What is growth if not a collection of ‘little miracles’, where we become aware of our blindfolds and gather enough courage to lift the veils that reveal new worlds.

That afternoon, my little miracle happened while, pigeon spotting at my kitchen window, I recalled the scene of the pigeon lifting off and taking flight. In my mind’s eye, as if a veil lifted, I saw for the first time how valiantly it soared through the air, the plastic bag lifting off its back and fluttering in the wind, like a bright blue cape. Up until then, I had been seeing the plastic bag as ball and chain keeping the pigeon imprisoned. This unexpected shift in my lens brought a smile to my face and some lightness to my being. I began to see the plucky pigeon in more hopeful light. It is certainly not my intention to romanticise its predicament; I had after all, spent the large part of a week mourning the pigeon’s fate. But I realise now that up until then, I had only seen the pigeon as piteous and helpless to its circumstances which brings to mind something I heard in a Moth StorySLAM by Joshua Arnold, a storyteller:

“But most people, when they look at me, they don’t get an accurate read of who I am. What they do is they see the (wheel)chair, and they remove me from it and they put themselves in it.”

I had removed the pigeon from the plastic bag and put the bag around my own neck. As a woman who has had to carry the grief of my husband’s death, I too, carry a version of my blue plastic bag. Don’t we all? I’m familiar with people seeing my bag and not me. I recognise the look, when my circumstances are seen through eyes of pity - my bright blue burden constantly filled with the weight of my widowhood and solo parenthood. It won’t be able to fly. Those eyes seem to say. In fact, my own grief in the earlier days after my husband’s death often stemmed from self-pity. I cannot deny the times my blue plastic bag has gotten swollen with grief, duty and anxiety, but neither can I ignore the many moments of lightness and overwhelming gratitude. Over these past two and a half years, I’ve come to see the bag I carry through different eyes. I’ve certainly chosen at times to fill my bag up with pity; other times, I cradle my bag tenderly until it’s no longer heavy; on occasion, I’ve gone about life forgetting it is there; and every now and then, the bag is a brilliant blue cape regardless of what others see. How dull and sad if I insist on seeing my grief through just one lens.

The question of how one sees has intrigued me ever since I attended a training by Pennie Brownlee eight years ago. “Just notice,” she said during our time together, and it has since become a lifelong invitation for me to just notice my lens - the beliefs I hold that colour the way I see the world. The gift in just noticing, is that I am not unwittingly tied to my cultural, societal and familial conditioning, and I am willing to question and unlearn views that no longer serve me. I started noticing my tendency to judge, to assign labels, to blame, to victimise…three decades of unobserved wiring that finally have a chance to be rewired.

It was through Pennie, that I was introduced to the book, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost. In her book, Jean Liedloff writes about her observations of the Tauripans during her expeditions to Venezuela to hunt for diamonds. Over five expeditions to Venezuela in the 1950s, Liedloff began noticing stark differences between her Italian counterparts and their Indian guides who were the happiest people she had seen, and though smaller in build were able to carry much heavier loads over much longer distances. When writing this essay, one of her anecdotes came to mind:

“I was reminded of my surprise at the Tauripans on the first expedition when, loaded down with about seventy-five pounds each on their backs and carefully crossing a ‘bridge’ consisting of a single narrow log felled across a stream, one of them would think of a joke and stop in mid-log, turn around, tell the story to the men piling up behind him and then proceed across while he and his friends all laughed in their peculiarly musical way. It never occurred to me that they were not suffering as we did under the circumstances, so their merriment gave a strange, almost lunatic impression.

I like to think of this anecdote as a metaphor for carrying loads through life. If we’re all going to be carrying seventy-five pound loads on our backs while balancing across narrow logs, I much rather be able to stop mid log to share a funny story and laugh with friends, than to do it begrudging life. That human beings can have completely different frameworks through which life is experienced is both freeing and empowering to me. It means that even under the same trying circumstances, we have the power of choice. It means that our internal experience may soften or harden depending on the stories we tell ourselves. It means that I may learn to carry my load with lightness even if it seems like lunacy to others.

“You’re taking on a lot, how are you coping?” a social worker from the hospice said when he visited us in Larry’s final weeks of life. The way he asked, I couldn’t help picturing heavy sacks stacked above my shoulders. He wasn’t the only one who saw me that way. During those months when we were caring for Larry at home, people often spoke to me as if they were ready to throw a life jacket on me to keep me afloat. I deeply appreciated the care and concern, and yet somehow felt a disconnect. For some time, I couldn’t quite place my finger on why I felt that way. But when I heard the social worker use the words ‘taking on a lot’, while gesturing so that I knew ‘a lot’ referred to my husband and children, the disconnect I felt became clearer.

Grief for me hasn’t been one big boulder; it’s many little rocks. On my journey with grief I’ve been gifted with little miracles, not so I can ‘move on’ or ‘get over it’, but so I can see with more curiosity and compassion. It all starts with just noticing - wading gently in my stream of consciousness, seeing and removing rocks that no longer serve me, moving some so that the stream flows with more ease, and being open to also seeing that some of those rocks are gemstones. I do it for no one but myself. Little miracles perhaps refer not just to new ways of seeing, but in having choice over how we see, and how we hold grief, love, death, sadness, joy…the whole gamut. There isn’t one right way to hold, but I love that I get to choose, as Viktor Frankl famously wrote:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”