Why Pigeons Will Save Humanity From Itself

Blog Post: June 29th 2024.

         This morning, as a cold Sunday rain blew through my open window, I was perfecting a guitar sequence that I’d written in the garden the day before. In the quiet parts of the song, I hear this methodical knocking on the door and I stop. Lurking by the glass is this little shadow of a thing, a pigeon patiently pecking the door pane and pacing up and down. I had fed him seed for days and now he has taken to waking me up for breakfast. 

I sit on the doorstep with a coffee and watch him and his sheepish partner, who is more cautious, always hanging back and is thus thinner. She—I assume a she as nature didn’t get the email that sex and gender is now interchangeable—mindlessly watches the confident male gobble down seed. She just has to reach out and take it yet she pecks and retreats, pecks and retreats. Once his hunger is abated, he copies her patterns and I notice other pigeons do this. 

I get to wondering what pigeons offer humans for us to feed them—besides their now defunct job as carriers. Even those other unfussy scavengers, seabirds, glide and dive, reminding us that there is pure joy to be found in life for free. Pigeons don’t wake us with melodious songs like blackbirds and robins do, nor rouse us to attack the day with the bickering squawks of the corvidae family. Pigeons, on the surface, are pointless creatures.

As I ground another coffee—the smell of beans and petrichor already transforming me into a less sloppy guitar player—I’m thinking about my two pigeon companions. They’ve been eating the bird feed fallen from the feeder and now they’re knocking at eight in the morning. ‘’Bit cocky for a couple of no good bums,’’ I say out the window as they scour the garden for stray seed. After, I watch them on their favourite part of the wall, embroiled in an intense closeness, like an old couple enduring the worst of each other, the fatter bird—I assume male—has a placating nature. She, in comparison, frantically scans for predators. It occurs to me, watching these two beggars embroiled in what appears to be deep emotions for each other, that their affection for one another, and commitment to their cause is profound. It’s a cause that appears to be more than a cold, calculating act of survival.

As the day winds on and my fingers finally retain the muscle memory to play the parts without error, I casually watch through the open door as other pigeons come and go. Always in pairs. 

My PC has been on all afternoon, with ads for technology flashing next to the lyrics of Fleetwood Mac songs. I Google pigeons facts, assuming they’re likely distorted facts, rehashed so often that by proxy of an internet form of Chinese whispers, the true nature of the bird is misunderstood by internet buffs. I realise that experiencing stuff predominantly online makes life less clear. An almost alien thing that we have to study rather than just feel out. Simply taking the time to watch a couple of bum pigeons reminds me. Brings back thoughts as a kid, important, grounding, stabilizing thoughts. We are too preoccupied with the stuff we fed our heads with, be it online, our friends, family, associates or other. We forget the personal world we experienced as kids. Life was about exploration and feeling. When we were in nature, we weren’t full of anxiety about what the latest fad was. There we discovered the basic laws of the Universe. We felt alive. We felt connected to something massive. Everything in those moments was real and sound and hugely important, even though we might not have been fully cognizant of the connection at the time.

Quietly in the background, competing with the pattering rain that has begun to fall, plays my playlist of modern guitar folk—huge washy reverb-laden male vocals and emotive, plucked acoustic guitars. Without music, I could very easy lose the experience of ‘feeling’. Great music is connected to those forgotten moments we had as kids. 

Working all day and feeding a rapacious hunger for stimulation at night, diverting those feelings by downing wine and chocolates, what and who do we become? Who are we explicitly? 

Feeling is what separates us from being a simple computational machine of muscle and bone, yet it seems that for most of our life, that is precisely what we aspire to be. Is it because feeling is the thing that makes us fallible? Remember, losing touch with feeling makes us worse than that. It makes us forgettable.

Nature reminds us how to feel and respond in a natural and normal way. Despite mulling over the idea of ‘normal’ for years,  I’m back at a place where I am clearer about what that is.  It’s a private thing. It’s grounded. It’s a collective understanding of our connection to natural patterns in life and its importance. It’s knowing that some things are sacred and cannot be fucked with. 

In a chaotic world of loudmouth stupidity drowning out what matters on this physical place called Earth, music reflects that inner, unfathomable interconnectedness we call normal. It’s the conduit that can often feel spiritual because it bridges the past to the present. It calls to us to return, in lieu of a time when we choose to actually spend our days thinking and feeling as freely as we did as kids. 

Music will always be my saviour, but it really only fills one corner of my emotional spectrums’ needs. To be a fully fleshed out human, I need the natural world around me. Concrete walls only remind me now how much I need to sit alone and do nothing. For the good and bad; significant and insignificant to become natural Universal laws again, and not programs running in my head. The world is full of politics and religion, ideals and ideas, conflicts and oversights, and it’s masquerading as ‘life’. When life is simpler, but never easy.

Even when robots and AI make our lives stupidly easy, even when indolence sets in and our already unclear understanding of the world is bridged once again by our creations, our collective anxiety will linger. There is always this sense of desperation in us that feeds our ambition, making us crave a life we have grown accustomed. It has us working as hard if not harder than our ancestors to validate our existence and reward us somehow. A lack of reflection on the simpler, deeper aspects of human existence, humanity endures waves of mental illness, which we dress up as culture, fashion and spiritual connection.

Humans, and potentially all living things, are like instruments. We need constant tuning. Reminding. Sometimes we need to replace the strings. My guitar never stays in tune with old strings, and it just feels better to play it when it stays in tune. 

Looking around, seeing the little things, trying something that feels weird, getting stung by a nettle, tasting a berry—even though it gave me a dose of the shits the last time—is what it’s all about. It’s not covering up your hair with a shroud or blue  dye, covering yourself in something that is unnatural. Getting stuck inside the mind is the sickness that tells you it is. It’s the same sickness that prescribes medication, drugs, sex, entertainment, sport and rock and roll instead of time in nature. Their actual cure is to get out of one’s own, which is hard to do when we’re a jigsaw, divided up more and more with each year and each new piece of (superfluous) information.

 
What we need is overlooked. The simple insignificant feelings from our childhood. They were connected to greatness. That’s what’s missing. Yet those feelings are still there, buried in the corners of us. 

***

Those two pigeons have come back for more seed this afternoon. I feed them as thanks for the reminder. A clumsy moth, which keeps trying to get through the net curtain, is focused on mastering a goal; to be calm and to quit when abilities become limited by desperation to succeed.

There are other apocryphal tales in nature when you look, they’re rooted us, us in reality. Reality anchors us to the basic laws of the Universe. The most important being love. I was reminded of this by two lowly pigeons. That laws of survival aside, the lowly may be the most profound of all. They remind us that love is the only thing preventing humanity’s rapacious need to define itself. A hunger to be something more when it is already clearly defined. Pigeons will be here long after humanity’s self-destruction unless we sit and watch them for a while.

Maybe the pigeon was knocking to ask me to stop playing my bloody out of tune guitar.