Gokotta (Swedish): the act of waking up early with the purpose of going outside to listen to the first birds sing.
February begins with a colleague’s observation that it’s nice to hear birds singing in the trees again. After the suffocation of winter, the birds have remembered their voices; the dawn’s returned to its former glory. The birds have been brought back from the dead. Now I am listening and trying to learn. I am trying to feel as resurrected as they are, as hopeful for the sluggish sun, as passionate for my place on the branch of life. What we hear as melody is the birds’ urgent purpose: to stake out a territory, to attract a mate, to declare dominance to other males. How lucky for us that this accident of evolution by sexual selection gives us such pleasure. It is a beauty born of a mystery: how do birds learn to sing? Do chicks listen to their fathers? Are the notes somehow sowed into their DNA? Young cavorting male birds-of-Paradise have to practise their dance moves. Do our blessed songbirds have to practise their singing? And what of the birds that do not sing? Do songbirds make all the other species jealous? Of course not, for this is a human emotion. They compete within their own species, in their own trees. There is no past or future for birds, just the singing of the now. The songbirds don’t need us to listen to their singing in the mornings. They don’t care if we smile or sigh or even interrupt them. We cannot better them; we will always be their students. Their singing is for me a memory of childhood and wood, of torn time mended and the spool wound back. A blackbird’s refrains and trills are reassuring. I am still a boy. An orange moon rises in a pastel sky over the western alps to be snuffed out by grey clouds. The birds erupt in excitement from conifers and silver birches, as they did when I was a boy. Even when a pigeon coos, a sparrow twitters, a gull cries - I am a boy again. The birds always bring me back.
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AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
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