The Lorelei Manifesto…
02 May 2012 1 Comment
Drawn by me
As I sit here now, it is 7am. I had last night set my mental alarm for 6am, and intended to have already studied for an hour by this time. But after stretching, preparing breakfast, washing dishes and just being grateful for life, that hour is already gone. And I in no way consider it a wasted hour.
A lot of things have been changing lately, and many of these accdelerated after attending a recent Reclaiming Witchcamp in South-east Queensland. I was fairly happy before then, or thought I was. I had no real goals (beyond the goal I have had since early high school to eventually be an author), but I was studying a bachelor of health science in naturopathy, and had some vague plans that I might eventually go into research one day, to fill the horrendous gaps in knowledge that exist as the natural health profession struggles to validate its presence in the world of science, doctors and pharmaceuticals.
But after five days amongst rainforested mountains, lush waterfalls and idyllic farms scattered through sun-blessed hills, sharing time and space and energy with amazing beautiful people, I came back to a world that made no sense…
I came back to a world where people were so obsessed with earning their degrees they had to sacrifice some of the the very tenets of natural health the degree taught them to believe in. It is taken for granted that as a student, one must suffer periods of high stress and anxiety, scrambling to find the time to complete assignments and read dozens of research articles. So I sat there and thought that I would step back a little. Find and read articles and complete assignments at a more placid pace, one that didn’t leave me completely fried at the end of a day. And no studying into the evening past about 6 or 7. And what I am finding is that if one has no social life, little to no leisure, spends no time preparing proper meals, no gardening, no time helping others, maybe even skips the classes designed to teach them new things, one could probably get the assignments done to a decent quality. But naturopathy teaches that one shouldn’t live in such a way, that we should find harmony and balance, that stress is the biggest killer. That we should eat good nutritious food and take the time to enjoy it. That we should get enough sleep. So it seems one can either study naturopathy as a university degree, or practice it in their lives, but the two seem incompatible in a simultaneous manner.
And yes, uni students get a lot of time off throughout the year, but I honestly would rather study more slowly and have weeks at a time off throughout the year, not five months of absolute bludging/saving frantically against the poverty of semester, and the seven months of balls-deep anxiety and stress.
I came back to a world obsessed with science. And often poor science at that. As I started a recent assignment that required me to compare an antidepressant used for generalised anxiety against similarly efficacious herbal remedies or nutritional supplements, I turned to my giant textbook, ‘Herbs and Natural Supplements: An Evidence-based Guide‘. This is a book highly recommended by lecturers, and proports to contain “130 rigorous, evidence-based reviews”. So I jot down everything related to anxiety treatment in the index, then dig through the book while sitting in front of the computer so I can look up each study referenced for each herb.
And no joke, a good half of them only listed studies based on rats and mice, running through mazes or having anxiety somehow induced and measured, or in vitro studies on rat tissue receptors to herbal/nutritional preparations. Databases searches usually turned up more of the same, or some random human trial on 6 people for a week or something equally dodgy. And I got angry. Not only is it fucked that animals are tortured and torn apart so that we can learn what is ‘naturally healthy’, but that is not ‘evidenced-based science’, that is inference-based at best, and dangerous assumption at worst. If we are studying ‘evidence-based’ natural therapy, we should not be prescribing anything with such bad evidence behind it. If the evidence doesn’t exist, we’re not evidence-based. Besides which, I don’t believe in a wholly objective reality, so science and I sometimes have issues as it is.
I came back to a world that was disgusting. It was littered. Garbage was all over, choking the creek I live beside. And no one seemed to want to take ownership of it. In fact, my daily walk through the park showed that not only were people ignoring the mess throughout the drains and mangroves, some were actively adding to it, leaving their refuse just lying in the grass. And it tore at something deep inside me. Partly because of the harm it might do to the surrounding environment, and partly because I have been here for months, looking and thinking ‘I should do something about that one day’, and I hadn’t. I was no better than the others. One of my favourite chants learned from Witchcamp is:
Where if not here? When if not now? Who if not you; and I?
So I realised I had to just get stuck in and do it. Regardless of assistance, regardless of opinion, regardless of the fact I can’t finish it on my own in one day. And maybe someone will see me and take the example. Maybe one day it will spread and we can all take just a little more ownership of our world, not just tending the space between our fences and pretending the Earth will be okay.
I came back to a life I wasn’t passionate about. I was happy for the most part, yes. Even content at times. But was I really following my dreams, or just studying what was pretty interesting and pretending it was a dream? I’m lucky in some regards – I have an intelligence capable of almost anything, that is usually fascinated by any knowledge. But at Witchcamp, one of the ritual facilitators channelling the god Set asked the gathering “do you dare to live a life of passion?” Yes, I spoke, aloud, and in my mind, and in my soul. Yes, I dare to live my passion; I dare to make passion my quest, and to share it with the world. And thinking on it, there is one thing that constantly comes up: writing. Writing is my passion. Writing is the one thing I have carried for years. There is a series of novels nearly complete in my head, and the skeletons for several more gradually gaining flesh. Not only that, but I truly enjoy word games, making turns of phrase and puns, extrapolating metaphors, and do it often. I always carry a novel with me everywhere I go, and in many spare moments I will bring a few characters into the fore of my mind and watch/guide them through new points of a developing story. This has been the case since early high school (in fact, the mental story-making has been happening ever since I was a much smaller child), which means that in a sense, I have been daily training my mind to think in narrative for over a decade. I even think of my own life in third-person a fair portion of the time. It’s no wonder I struggle to read a journal article without my mind closing over – it’s an entirely different use of language.
But for some reason I never considered it worthy. “I’ll do this for now, get a basis in something considered ‘worthy’ (which seems to also means something that has the potential for a lot of money-making), and once I’m established I’ll see to getting these books out.” Later, always later. Someday in the future I’ll be that author I always dreamed of being. So now I am wondering why I am bothering to try and relearn the linguistic and literary skills necessary for the world of science, when I should be sharpening a way of thinking I already possess, and sharing it in a manner that might bring a little income. Getting my first book out will always take a huge sacrifice of time and resource – so why not find a job that’ll pay the rent, get it done now, and stop worrying about all the sacrifice I am making towards a career I never intended to spend my lifetime doing anyway, that was only ever a stop-gap between now and the life I wanted.
Which brings up another point: why shouldn’t ‘now’ be the life I want? I am so incredibly blessed in everything I have. Why shouldn’t I just take each day as it is, working when I need to, writing when I can, hanging out with my gorgeous friends and renewing frayed ties to my family? Why should I constantly worry about being worthy enough for ‘society’? Society, after all, is just a handful of people lucky enough to live the opulence we all crave. They crook the finger, and we all go scurrying to gather the scraps they tell us will make us as happy as they. They’ve written their own rules, invented our methods of living for millennia, and we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that we’re miserable unless we live up to those standards, and that’s “just the way things are”.
If I study, it will be because I want to, because it will further my development in the reality I wish to live. As it stands now, the current course I am studying does not fulfil that. Many of my daily life actions do not fulfil that. I have already begun a few steps to more consciously and conscientiously engage in my local world, and writing this is pushing me into the next step.
I was about to write that I don’t think this will ‘solve my issues’. That it will likely be a few years of struggle as I get this book out etc etc. But fuck that – that’s the same guilt-ridden society-craving drivel I always spout. So…
These next few years will be fucking amazeballs dipped in awesomesauce. I will have all the abundance I require in each moment that I need it, and shall accept with love and grace the gift of the moment. In times of scarcity, I shall remember that I have the skills to change it. I shall have goals but they shall not constantly define my ‘now’ with anxiety. I shall craft words and music for the enjoyment of myself and others. I shall work with the Earth and my kith to provide physical nourishment, and shall continue to learn her Mysteries. I will dare to live my life of passion, and make the best of my reality that I can. I shall seek such knowledge as befits this journey, in a method that is congruent to my perception. I shall remain malleable of form and purpose and open to validity of the myriad of overlapping and constantly changing realities, but shall not force myself into new shapes just because someone thinks I ‘should’.
I will spare all the love I can for my friends and family, and together we shall weave into the unfolding great spellwork of existence.
And of course, this could all change at the drop of a hat, because as much as we are the masters of our realities, life just does that sometimes.
If that isn’t enough, I don’t know what is…
Lorelei x
3 Month Hormone-free Update
15 Mar 2012 2 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: HRT, m2f, male to female, MTF, second puberty, transgender, transition, transsexual
It is getting close to a quarter of a year since I stopped taking oestrogen hormone therapy. The longer it has been since taking hormones, the better I am feeling about stopping. It is rarely any longer that with a sigh of regret or a pang of longing I think about the transsexual process or the female body. Well, there is always that longing of another sort (*wink) but the overwhelming desire to be in that body seems to be fading.
There are of course a great variety of factors involved, but I think chief among them has been working on my self-image and self-esteem. For me personally I begin to feel as if I fell into a trap for many years – thinking negatively about the male body. The trap being that having a male body, I would never be able to escape it. I never really assumed that surgery or hormones would ‘fix’ me or put me in the ‘right’ body, just change it’s shape to suit the aesthetics of my feminine identity. I was desperate for it at one stage though – so wracked with negative feelings about my male body I wanted something drastic to ensure it would never be able to fully inflict itself upon me.
So as the hormone effect has diminished and my body has achieved a new balance and lost most of it’s oestrogen-induced femininity, I have had to actually confront the reality of my body rather than working towards a medical intervention designed at veiling something I was not ready to face.
And I will make a disclaimer here. I in NO way think that my thought process and experience is reflective of any or all of the trans community. Each trans person is as unique of an identity as any one else in society. Many of them are genuinely helped by surgery and hormone therapies, because that is the truth of their expression. I think it is a truly beautiful thing to so empower oneself by drastic transformation of the physical form.
But for me, I am realising that while my female identity was the truth, it wasn’t the whole truth. Definitely not enough to pursue permanent physical alterations so that it could be the totally of my bodily expression. In fact it may have been in a way an attempt to escape from something, however much it did not feel so at the time. Looking back over that time and my current feelings I think there were two major processes that were happening:
-One was a lifetime of repression of that part of myself. I can remember times as a child wanting to play with girls, or own pink things, or dolls or teddies. I bore a strange envy for my younger sister that turned into a bitterness in my teens (and she unfortunately caught much of the brunt of my confusion and frustration, manifested by being an arsehole of an older brother). As such, when freedom of expression presented itself, it was almost like I had to live that part of myself as hard as I possibly could. The elation I felt at being able to express my feminine self I think gave rise to confirmation that this must be my true self. As the elation faded, I thought for a time it was because I was still too masculine, and thus for a time the overwhelming urge for surgery.
-The second was a deep shame of my body. This is something I have always carried. For this I in small part hold my parents the cause, but not as an accusation. They raised me the best they could, but in a rather conservative way. I also hold my scripture teachers partly to blame. With the fear of eternal hell accenting stern admonishments to never have sex before marriage, and even then only for procreation, I felt a deep shame and guilt over any sexual urges. All of this added to a feeling of inadequacy among my male peers at school eventually caused a shame and discomfort with my body and the parts of it used for pleasure and reproduction.
In recent months this is changing however. Forced to confront myself those shadowed pockets of myself, I have found that this shame and guilt is damaging and unnecessary. Well, I always knew it so, but it is becoming easier to embrace, rather than as just a concept. After working recently with some aspects of the goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis, I have happened across and accepted some surprising realisations that are spilling into my mundane life and not just restricted to moments of epiphany in ritual.
-The male body and it’s reproductive capability is a stunning, beautiful thing.
-Virginity is not only a pre-sexual historical event, it is a process of approach ones life and one’s sexuality with pure and loving intent.
-Having a penis or vagina does not limit one to only half of a sexual experience, or imply a set role in society or intimacy. Rather, it allows one the opportunity to be one part of a whole sexual and gender experience.
They seem like such obvious conclusions to make, but it has taken me a long time to reach it. In my mind a startling but reassuring harmony emerging: an acceptance and free expression of my feminine self, but without the compulsion to make it a permanent or solitary fixture of identity; and like yin to yang, this melodiously swirls with a growing comfort with my male body – a revel of strength and potency which is not compromised by the feminine accoutrements I have spent years gathering.
I am neither man nor woman; I am human, in my fullest current capacity.
There are of course still many issues. I expect that in months and years to come, relationships or life events will continue to alter my sense of identity and the way in which I express it. This harmony is not a self-perpetuating emotional entity, it is a conscious state of being that will take work to maintain, and require an open mind to continue invigorating and remaking. And I relish this continuing transformation. I am loving the shit out of life right now.
Sunset Passions
22 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: cosmos, deity, divinity, lightning, sky fire, Storm, sunset
A lighter prose today, inspired by last evening’s magnificent stormy horizon:
As I get out the front door to check the light is working, awaiting the evening’s dinner guest, a gleam of orange snags the corner of my eye and drags my head promptly about to the right. Leaning over the wooden railing that separates patio from open air, I gaze south-and-westward along the side of the house and see it – a trail of wispy salmon Summer storm cloud illuminated by the sunset.
The towering cumulonimbus have captivated my attention all afternoon, and this is no exception. Where is everyone?’I have kept pondering to myself. Why are the streets not filled with awe-struck humans? Why have I not slowly battled my way home through crowds of people staring skywards, attempting in vain to quash my own reverent wonder long enough to make any significant distance? What has been lost in this world that so much staggering beauty catches the attention of a scant few?
I race back inside. Grains are boiling, meat is searing, and I am desperate to stabilise the cooking for a few minutes so that I can go out the back to enjoy the brief moment of a perfect day’s ending. Tasks complete, I bolt out the kitchen door. My eyes seem ready to pop out of my head, as if to reach their viewing destination all the sooner.
And there it stretches – a vast sunset. It is small seeming in a relative sense, belying the true immensity of its phenomenal and continuous progression across the face of the planet. If one takes their eyes higher to observe as a whole the great vault of the heavens, one can get the slightest inkling of their own meagre size measured against the borders of infinity.
The Western sky is lit from North to South with fire. It burns with a luminous intensity against the sapphire sky behind, shining with the colour of a ripe tangello floating in a sea of purple-azure. It is a nasturtium petal balanced on the startling blue-green iridescence of a peacock feather. It is wondrous beyond the scope of mere language – it is a manifestation of desire and lust. It is the soul singing in the joy of a perfect moment.
I reach my hand skyward, in supplication, in reverence, in greeting, in tandem with some great force bearing down from above. I blow a kiss to the cloud flames. I extend beyond my hand, seeking for that unity of being. It begins to happen – as I look at my arm in the mandarin glow my sense of self momentarily fades. Removed from the humdrum of constant daylight yet awaiting the long dark, caught in the between space, in magic hour, I see between and beyond atoms and their forces. I see the great web, the strands of existence and mystery; I see how insignificant and small is my own manifestation against the massive forces playing out in the Universe, and yet simultaneously how vital I am to the web, to the binding of the strands bequeathed me by the grace of the Weaver to keep in confidence and trust, bending and shaping my own small wyrd as it unfolds into the eternal fractal of being.
The moment passes, and the skyfire is fading all too fast; imperceptibly slow but startlingly swift the brilliant orange flames burn low to a lavender pink, to cracks of radiance between long-burned embers. With a sigh of content I move towards the door, but then low amidst the tangle of palm branches I see it, a deep red burning to the North. This display is not yet done…
I clamber on the railing to see it all the better, and am of a sudden struck silent and immobile by the sight before me. As the light fades and oranges melt into softer twilight hues, a drifting storm-cloud catches the last of the long sun-rays, soaking them in. The towering and sprawling clouds are aflame with a deep passion. This is not the staggering, soft, wide-spread beauty of the orange fire before – this is more like the smouldering heart of Gaia Herself, the beating organ that pumps life and fire and vitality through the veins of the Earth, somehow reflected this moment in the violent dance of water vapour. As I stare in complete awe, a bolt of lightning flashes and flickers low between the burgeoning clouds, like a herald of the power it holds within, a force potentially greater than the petty nuclear weapons wielded by man. In that instant I am totally connected – drawn to the bolt of energy like a summons yet dismissed as a farewell, and my eyes and soul are anointed by the distant electricity like a benediction of mighty Zeus.
The deep crimson fades to a dull sunset red and soon that evaporates into the night. I am back within myself, back among the mundane world and it’s demands, and I toddle to the kitchen to finish dinner and marvel that we get to be alive for such moments.
Insomnia and Haircuts
21 Feb 2012 1 Comment
It is getting past midnight and I cannot sleep. There are a combination of reasons why – thoughts churning about the week ahead, the new semester of uni, tasks for the morrow, coupled with eating a dinner a little different from my usual that involved a lot of greens and raw foods and none of the mcdonalds I was craving and maybe stimulated by a few spoonfuls of peanut-butter with cacao for dessert. As well as this, I have been these last couple of days increasingly at odds with gender and gender expression, which tonight manifested in a drastic haircut that has quite sent my body into a confusion. I’m a week away from 26 turns about the sun and unsure how to approach this age. I think my mind and body are feeling fragile and frayed, and with sudden intuition I realise I will never get to sleep this night until my thoughts are conveyed.
There is a voice inside my mind that grows more and more insistent – it is an echo of the voice of ‘society’, but it is conveyed in my own tones. It tells me constantly about all the things I am not, namely, that I am now far less feminine than I have been working towards these past 3 years. This voice is pained and scared, and this is slowly leaking through into most of the rest of my thoughts. It is scared about losing itself. For 2 years my identity was closely bound to the use of the hormones and all of the expected and experienced effects, of building a life as a sterile woman whose focus of expression is very much on a particular physical shape. I changed my name, my title, my driver’s license gender and was making plans about future surgeries and social lives.
But now I am not taking hormones, and this identity is like a frayed roped slowly unravelling. It is frightened of change, frightened of being perceived less feminine, scared about the clothes I wear suddenly looking ridiculous and out of place, frightened of friends’ and society’s attitudes and of judgement about perceived back-pedalling. It is even too scared to ask for a hug – a long, deep tear-filled hug of release, because it thinks that over several years of changing ideals I have used up my allotment of sympathy as far as the issue is concerned, and must now remain staunch and firm and bear with grace whatever befalls this decision. I seem to find it more difficult to cry now, and there are tears that desperately need to be shed.
I just don’t know where I’m at. I don’t know where I’m headed. I’m like a deer caught in headlights, too scared to move away, yet knowing at some level that peril is imminent if I remain in this space. I spent so many years figuring out my identity and gender that I just don’t know what to do with the energy that once went into maintaining my feminine presence. In fact, it suddenly occurs to me that I was with my ex from the ages seventeen to twenty-three, and as soon as we divorced I moved to Brisbane and began working towards a change in gender identity. I don’t even know if I know myself. I feel like who I am has become a vague and ethereal concept, an abstract animating force driving a body it is no longer sure if it owns or is just borrowing. Or even if I am still driving the same make and model.
I don’t think I know any more how to present myself and relate to people socially. I’m not sure how to go about being Lorelei without being fairly feminine. I don’t know how to go about just living, just enjoying the body I have without making constant demands on its presentation as a ‘woman’. I don’t think I want to be a ‘man’ (although I think I mentioned in a previous post how good it has felt to more often use my natural deep voice). I don’t want to keep insisting on and putting energy towards being a ‘woman’, because my physicality (at least to my own eyes) is slowly making that more difficult to be received in a visual sense. And I am still not entirely sure why, but if you use the term ‘genderqueer’ in my direction I may punch you in the face. I have serious issues with that word I probably need to work on.
It is just all so much… I want to scream and run and lash out. I want to cut down trees, and break things. Sometimes I want to break bones or faces. I want to spend all my money on meaningless frivolities so that I am forced to live more meagrely than my desire and thus find a new outlet for my angst. I likely need a change of scenery or lifestyle. I’m trying to reinterpret myself using the same old patterns of living I used when transitioning these past years, and as the saying goes, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
I think that’s why I cut my hair – to try and break the cycle and bring these changing expressions and identities from concept into reality. And this wasn’t a small cut – this was a ‘come-home-from-uni-and-begin-hacking’ kind of cut, and I am now shorter by almost 30cm (or 12 inches for any reading in the USA), and it now brushes my shoulders rather than trailing a tangle of split ends halfway down my back. It feels good – really good – but I think it may take time to get used to.
Maybe this new household I have moved to will help, and the new social circles it will inevitably introduce me to. I’m just so, so incredibly scared. I feel like I have failed. I constantly dread meeting new people and not being a ‘woman’, but seen as a crossdresser or ladyboy or tranny or what have you. And by definition it cannot be denied that I probably am those things. I just wish so desperately I could exist without all this.
I wish being a woman were as simple as taking my body back and saying to God, “hey, sorry to bother you, but I actually ordered the one with the uterus”. Alas that is not the case, and I feel trapped in this battle between desires – between appearance and health, between vanity and vitality, between treating my body merely as a vessel to be modified by any means at will, or being more at peace with a body that is an integral part of the mind-body-soul manifestation and putting work into achieving a balance of expressing all three. I am no longer comfortable with the thought of using hormones or surgeries to fix the discrepancies in this balance, but it has left me quite bereft of tangible options.
Actually, that’s an untruth. There are myriad options. I know what I should be doing – the kind of mental exercises and meditations, the spiritual workings, the physical exercises and food choices – but there has been no real crisis or impetus for change and improvement. There is no longer a goal of physical appearance I am striving towards, there is just… the now. The present. That is perhaps what scares me the most. Before I could tell myself, “this won’t last – this is what you are building towards, this is what your life will someday become”. I lived a dream of the future, building upon foundations of illusion.
That has been taken away. I no longer know what to aim at in the future in terms of identity and appearance, yet I am not sure how to daily live in the now with what I have. I don’t know how to occupy that space in my mind which once ran a constant stream of images of the woman I would someday become, living with her lover in the forest. There is just space, a kind of repeating question mark.
I don’t want to hide and retreat from this difficulty. The lure of drugs and alcohol grows, and there have been moments when I desired to sink myself in a fugue of altered mind-space. This of course set off the warning bells. I have been gradually increasing exercise and daily habits, but am ever frustrated by the lack of instantaneous results and the constant worrying about how I am being perceived. As such, I will comfort people in the knowledge that I am seeking some counselling and support. I can (I like to think) see that I am in too deep at the moment, being swept away by an ocean current that due to recent experience is not just a metaphor…
And I suddenly get that feeling, that feeling that the beach event was less random chance and perhaps more a tangible wake-up to the dangers of untended thoughts and actions and the inability for a single person to overcome and integrate all the chaos that nature will provide. And that’s just it… I’m panicking against the current, throwing my energy in and getting nowhere, racing in vain against the fear that I’ll be swept away… but if I make allowance, if I struggle with the sea instead of against it, I’ll likely make it back to shore. I might get dumped and hammered and surface breathless and choking – but I was always a strong swimmer.
If you read my rambling stream-of-consciousness this far, I applaud you. It’s getting towards half-one in the morning by now. I’m feeling a little better for having worked through some thoughts. I think I may just take my significantly lighter head to bed, somewhat comforted in the knowledge that I am not drowning just yet..
Much of Something But Not Really Much of Anything at All
10 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
It is something in the realm of two months since my last dose of oestrogen hormone therapy. I honestly don’t really know what to say about. It’s like it just suddenly became irrelevant, a kind of revelation that I was chasing an impossible dream.
As such, in the past two months, I have been allowing myself to be more open to my expression as a human. It is not especially male, or especially female, nor is it especially between or neither. Probably mostly feminine (still wearing a lot of boob-tubes, because I reckon I’m slender and well-enough shaped to get away with it even without breasts) but trying not be excessively so.
Well, I may be getting gradually more elaborate with my eye pencils – but hey, whatever 
This week specifically I have attended a number of rituals for the full moon and for Lughnasadh. At all of them we did a lot of chanting and toning and voice/sound-workings. Often I’ll try for a higher pitched, what I deem ‘feminine’ range, but these few times I just let my voice work in it’s natural deep range. And it actually felt amazingly good. Like, incredible. It’s been so long that it actually takes a bit of effort to talk conversationally in a deep voice, but singing it has always been a struggle to maintain a quality feminine note. And it often felt a bit false. Even my usual voice now sometimes feels too put-on. Allowing myself the freedom, amongst others, to utilise my naturally deep for spiritual workings released a deep tension I wasn’t even really aware of. I didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than what was naturally shaped within my larynx. It was potent and powerful, and as I started singing in the kitchen this morning, I realised it is something I want to use more often.
I am loving the freedom that being off hormones has provided. Yeah, it has also been a bit of a stress not presenting as feminine as I would like to be, and occasionally I feel I might cave under the pressure of not fulfilling the body image of my heart’s desire, but that is shit that can be dealt with in other ways. For the world is an oyster, and you can’t get the pearl without being covered in some kind of bizarre snotty mucous.
Twisting and Turnings: The Lorikeet
10 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Ponderings
I was walking to the markets last Sunday morning with some friends, P. and S., and P.’s friend B., when we happened across a young rainbow lorikeet clinging to a tree trunk quite close to the ground. As we crept closer for a little look we noticed it only had one wing – though strangely enough it didn’t look in any way injured. As we watched it sensed our presence and attempted to climb the tree, but with only one wing it couldn’t quite keep enough balance to make it more than a foot off the ground before tumbling. The bird, although fully fledged, seemed to be not long out of the nest, and in the tree above were two other parrots who were hanging around on lower branches – that we surmised may be its parents. Perhaps the missing wing was just a random birth aberration, and in leaving the nest the bird had discovered it lacked the capability for flight.
We were obviously moved by its plight and vulnerability, and thought as the ones who had discovered it we had probably better do something about it. In it’s current state we were surprised it was still alive, and though with the amount of predatory nightlife in the area it surely would not last a day or two more. P. called a wildlife rescue service who recommended we take it to a vet or an RSPCA shelter out west of the city. At this point we gathered to discuss the options. As far as my friends were concerned there were two: 1) Take it to a vet/shelter and hope it survives to be adopted by someone, or 2) find some way to keep it ourselves. For me there were four options: The aforementioned two; 3) leaving it where we found it and allowing it to become prey for the first dog/cat/fox that happened across it, or 4) breaking its neck there and then and ensuring a slightly less painful and drawn out death.
Option three likely stems from my Pagan ways – allowing cycles to happen naturally, survival of the fittest and all that. Perhaps this bird would have stopped a cat from going hungry. Maybe nature intends for these kinds of injuries or mutations as a way of providing prey. It is not much of an argument, but I tend to always think things like, “if I wasn’t here, if humans weren’t here, what would naturally occur?” But anyway, humans are here, and we had found it, so interference was inevitable. Option four is seems callous and cold hearted, and it largely is. Yes, it may stem from a vague desire to see it suffer as little as possible or not be mauled in a dog’s jaws, but it still requires a certain fortitude to be able to disconnect one’s heart for a moment, and decide that another living being deserves to have its life ended. I’ve done similar things before when on hunting trips at a younger age, and ever since an epiphany reached during a stint of veganism I have felt the same way about plants that I do about animals – even pulling weeds makes me sad sometimes, and requires a concerted effort to see the weed as invasive and destructive. So, it was an option, but far less favoured than the first two, especially to my two other friends who, I do not think , could imagine leaving it to die or killing it at all.
And so we briefly debated the first two options. An animal shelter would likely be the course of action recommended by wildlife rescuers, but we reasoned that they would likely have a great deal of animals with no certainty of finding another home. Besides which, S. offered that she had a large birdcage, and we could probably look after it well enough ourselves. The following hours saw me become partially responsible for the upkeep of a lorikeet, which would never have entered my most far-flung imaginings for Sunday’s activities. I think the most difficult thing was naming it: among the options were Wing-it, Oprah Wingfree, Josceline, Pearl, Opal, Mpwelarr (an Aboriginal word for rainbow), Winifred and a few others. I still don’t think it has been sorted. Either way, the lorikeet I am calling Winifred now resides at S.’s house, and seems to be settling in happily enough – devouring honey soaked food mixes with gusto.
But I cannot forget that as I sat beneath that tree, holding the lorikeet in a sarong and waiting for P. to return with her car, I considered how easy and swift if would be to break its neck. I probably wouldn’t have done it, and I am glad I didn’t, for as we cleaned and set up the cage and spent the afternoon watching it adapt to its new environment, a kind of joy began to spread through me. A joy that comes from providing another creature with the best conditions for its circumstances, in interacting with an intelligent being of an entirely other species. A joy that comes from not pursuing the relentless cycle of death and destruction that humans are so well known for. It is in our nature I believe to nurture – in fact I do believe it is a big part of our calling, as guardians and custodians of the world. In some ways it makes no logical sense to care so deeply for another animal – part of an already large population of birds and on the brink of learning what position of the food chain it had been born into. But I don’t think we have to understand that urge to nurture and protect – and if we never indulge it, we become as heartless and relentless as the big companies destroying the world through pollution and consumer greed.
I for one feel an important lesson was learned as I stopped feeling sorry for and grew to love that little lorikeet in the course of an afternoon, and I am grateful for that.
Happy 2012 everyone!
