Birds of Prey

Everything about life is so fragile, and the slightest variations concoct such vastly different conclusions. This disturbs me terribly, and has me focusing all too frequently on the details – and the details within the details. It’s difficult for me to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, as ironically preoccupied as I appear to be with it.

I change strains quickly. Now I feel a dreamy haze descend upon me as I’m emerged in a sleepy sense of obliviousness. There is so much going on around me of which I am completely unaware; so much too that I have, somewhere along the line, made a conscious decision to block from my consciousness, yet which my subconscious remains privy to and is still deeply affected by. I simply no longer know what it is that affects me so. Vague, indiscernible hurts that most probably stem from compassion. Compassion I am not using at all productively. Compassion unused is compassion wasted, and turns toxic in one’s system when it is not channeled into a creative outlet. It becomes tainted and turns inward viciously, causing psyche-soul blockages as it bogs one down in a quagmire of personally self-serving despair. Hence the ‘poor me’ complex. I wish it were easier to focus on the just, intrinsically good things that life has to offer.

The Coocoo bird (not sure if that’s the spelling, but it’s the sound) migrates from New Guinea to certain Australian coastlines [ours being one of them] in springtime. Many of them find good potential homes in the nature reserve that our house backs onto, so we are offered a front-row seat to the strange behaviour of these huge birds. They’re BIG, very big – like large, clumsy-looking dogs. Coocoos’ scour the tree tops for suitable Magpie and Currawong nests that they can utilise for their purposes, obviously being too lazy to make their own. When the Magpie/Currawong mother and father leave the nest to search for more sticks or soft things to cushion their homes with, their eggs are left exposed to the alert eyes of the Coocoo, who then descends upon the developing babies and tosses them out of the tree. The Coocoo then lays its own eggs in their place, and the Magpie returns to see a group of eggs it believes to be its own resting peacefully. She sits on them for the next few weeks and waits for her babies to hatch. When the eggs hatch the babies are giants, soon larger than their Magpie parents, but still as hungry and helpless as most infants. They make a wailing sound almost identical to that of a human baby crying, and they chase their parents everywhere demanding food and attention. The twist to this story? It often goes that the Magpie-mummy is so thoroughly exhausted at having perpetually met the demands of this hungry baby, that by the time the Coocoo is old enough to fend for itself, the Magpie dies. Bizarrely cruel but evolutionarily genius, eh? The Coocoo is essentially killing two birds (or several) with one stone [mind the pun]: It eradicates the baby Magpies, and shifts parental responsibility onto the Magpie parents who it ultimately kills by default, its own chain of production kept in perfect tact. The baby-turned-young-adult Coocoo then flies back to New Guinea only to return to Australian shores a year later, in order to repeat the process yet again
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Is life not utterly insane?