Bowing to the bowerbird
An offering
Do you know about the bowerbird? I’ve just been learning about this fabulous creature.
These birds live in Australia and New Guinea, and they create beautiful structures called bowers. The bowers are made from sticks and flower blossoms, stones, shells, colored plastic bits, tabs from aluminum cans—whatever fits into each bird’s aesthetics.
Yes, aesthetics. Turns out, bowerbirds carefully create unique patterns of color, texture, and shapes as they decorate their bowers.
Image: A small structure made from sticks, with white shells in front of it. Photo credit: davidfntau, flikr
At first, people thought the bowers were nests. Then, after some study, we learned that these structures were theater and stage to the birds’ mating rituals. But why? What purpose do they exactly serve? How do the birds create their particular patterns?
I love that.
The truth?
Sometime early in life I got the message that humans know pretty much everything there is to know about how the world around us works. As I grew older, I learned that actually, there were things we didn’t know—like whether the universe was expanding or contracting—but it was always framed in the assumption that we would know, eventually. That scientists would figure it. That humans have the innate right and ability to understand every aspect of the world around us with our brilliant minds.
I’m slowly coming to realize that this is just not true. This universe is vast, strange, and ultimately, mysterious. There are many things that we may never understand with our brains.
Like why bowerbirds create structures that seem to be as much about art and beauty as they are about procreation and survival. Or how some people can communicate with those who have passed on from this life. Or whether it’s possible to be in two different places at the same time. Or how the positions of the planets in the sky the moment we were born can give us insight into ourselves, our psyches, and the events of our lives.
Image: Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Photo credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University) - HubbleSite: gallery, release., Public Domain
And on and on. Gorgeously strange phenomenon, some considered worthy objects of scientific study and some dismissed by science completely—but all of it existing in a reality that we, with our limited human bodies and brains, will probably never be able to understand fully.
And that’s OK. In fact, maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s not something we fight, but something we accept with grace and wonder.
To be clear, I feel grateful every day for the amazing things that scientific thought and exploration has revealed or made possible.
But I am adding to the chorus of voices who are saying maybe we don’t make rational thought and scientific knowledge the one and only way to understand the world.
Because for all the amazing things that this way of thinking has made possible, it’s also caused a whole lot of destruction and terror.
I believe that this way of thinking is at the root of the systems that dominate our world, like structural racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism.
Maybe you can trace it to the so-called “Enlightenment” period in Europe, or even back to the ancient Greeks. Either way, it’s deep-seated in my culture: this idea that humans—namely, white men—have the innate right to understand, control, and exploit everything and everyone, via science and the subjugation of the “wild.”
Loving the mystery
For me, the work of dismantling society’s oppressive systems and their injustices includes shifting how we relate to the world and its mystery. I believe this is part of the work that poets, artists, cultural workers, and organizers are being called to do in this moment.
The truth of this world is rugged, unruly, and wild. It bleeds out of any lines we try to draw around it to define and explain it. Indigenous people, medicine women, poets, witches, magical queers, storytellers, and others ostracized for their difference and knowledge have always known this.
The earth, water, and air that surrounds us, the pigeons and the rats, the maple tree and carrot seedlings, the wild yeast and water bears—they are a part of us, and we are a part of them. Nature—in its full, messy, unfathomable glory—is indivisible from ourselves and our survival.
Image: The rocky shoreline of Rockport, MA on a sunny day. Photo credit: Tamiko Beyer
An offering
This newsletter is part of my work to reconnect with and deepen my understand of this truth, while I unlearn decades of beliefs and behaviors stemming from a world view that privileges rational knowing over intuition, white people over Black folks, heteropatriarchical ideas over queer femme wisdom.
I want this newsletter to be a celebration of mystery and beauty that I can’t explain but that I know is valuable and truthful. It is an offering of stones and shells, bits of plastic and aluminum.
Image: A bowerbird in front of a bower, surrounded by bits of blue plastic. Photo credit: Joseph C Boone - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
And it’s my way of sharing these things with you, in hopes that they bring inspiration and a little joy. A moment of reflection. Some further learning or unlearning in your own journey.
I see this writing as a small path, winding alongside all of your paths as all we work and organize, create art, read the tarot, garden, work with healing plant magic, tend to animals, show up on the streets and at city hall and in community centers and planning meetings and gatherings, working toward a world where we survive, where we live in better relationship with the world and its mystery.
A world where we bow to the mysteries of the bowerbird and simply honor the ritual of mutual respect and admiration these birds seem to have for each other, for beauty, and for the world that surrounds them.
Where we bow to each other, with respectful curiosity and with love.
Prompting
To use in journaling, writing, meditating, tarot pulling, etc.
Where is there mystery in your life that you feel resistant to? What would happen if you softened into the resistance? What might you learn?
Engaging
What else I’m reading/listening to/thinking about:
#GoodMuslimBadMuslim: Right now, I’m particularly grateful for Taz Ahmed and Zahra Noorbakhsh and their smart, funny, and necessary take on being Muslim in the world today.
How to Survive the End of the World: Autumn Brown and adreinne maree brown’s brilliant conversations are inspiring me to more deeply engage in the world as it is and as it could be with “grace, rigor, and curiosity.”
Salt Fat Acid Heat: I know I'm a couple years late to the party and everyone’s raving about the Netflix show, but I’ve been obsessively reading and learning so much from Samin Nosrat’s book.