Blog Post: June 29th 2024.

This morning as a cold Sunday rain blows through an open window, I’m perfecting a guitar sequence I’d written in the garden the day before. I hear this methodical knocking in the quiet parts and stop. Lurking outside is this little shadow of a thing, a bird; a pigeon patiently pecking the glass and pacing up and down. 

After feeding him seed, as I have done for the last few days, I watch his sheepish partner, who always hangs back until I’m inside again. She, I assume a she, is hence much thinner. While they gobble down seed like school-kids at a grushy (an Irish tradition of throwing coins in the air at special occasions) I’m thinking about what pigeons offer the world. They don’t wake us with melodious songs; or rouse us to attack the day with bickering squawks like the corvidae family; nor do they glide in circles like seabirds, seemingly for the pure joy of flight. Pigeons are pointless, on the surface. 

As I ground my morning coffee—the smell of beans and petrichor already transforming me into a less sloppy guitar player—I’m thinking about the two pigeons. 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 that knows, and is enduring the worst of, each other’s daily patterns. The fatter bird—I assume male due to overconfidence—has in comparison a placating nature, while the thinner one frantically scans for predators (I’ve never seen falconiformes (diurnal—daytime—prey animals) anywhere near this area. My takeaway from watching these two beggars for a few moments is the affection they have for one another.

As the day winds on and my fingers finally retain the muscle memory to play the parts without error, I casually watch other pigeons come and go, always in pairs. If there’s one redeeming factor about pigeons, it’s their ability to form strong, monogamous (I’m guessing as you don’t see many pigeon condoms lying around, sorry) bonds.

My PC has been on all afternoon, with ads for technology flashing next to the lyrics of Fleetwood Mac songs on a lyric website. I have no real outlet in this ground floor flat to escape the anxiety that centres my world, the light box displaying pictures and letters that so consumes me, or some desperate part of me. It’s very much like a pigeon tapping for seed.  

I Google pigeons for a few facts, likely distorted facts rehashed so often that, by proxy of an internet form of Chinese whispers, the true nature of the bird species is misunderstood by internet buffs. That’s the thing with experiencing stuff predominantly online, life becomes a nebulous, almost alien thing. Just taking the time to watch a couple of bum pigeons reminds me of thoughts I had as a kid, important, grounding, stabilizing thoughts. We are too preoccupied with the stuff we are fed, be it online, our friends, family, associates or other, that we forget the personal world we experienced and learned about as kids. Life was more about exploration than anything else, and we discovered the basic laws of the Universe, even though we might not have been fully cognizant of it at the time.

Quietly in the background, competing with the pattering rain, plays a playlist of modern guitar folk—huge washy reverb-laden male vocals and emotive, upfront acoustic guitar plucking. Without music, for me anyway, I could very easy forget certain aspects of the experience of ‘feeling’. Humans are creatures of habit, and we tend to become what we do the most. If it’s working all day and consuming entertainment at night, internet trolling and downing wine and chocolates, it’s who we become, but it’s not who we are explicitly. Feeling is what separates us from  being a simple computational machine of muscle and bone. It’s feeling that make us fallible, and if we’re not cognizant of losing touch with feeling, forgettable. 

We need music and the natural world to remind us about where we’ve been and what matters. Music will always be a saviour for me, but it really only fills one corner of my emotional spectrums’ needs. To be a fully fleshed out human, I need to feel the world around me; good and bad; significant and insignificant, to be reminded of those Universal laws. 

The world is filling up, and even with the help of robots and AI to do a lot of the donkey work, the need for resources is increasing, and so is our collective anxiety. This sense of desperation to keep us in the life we have grown accustomed has us working as hard if not harder than our ancestors. Since the advent of handheld computers and thus a lack of reflection on all the other aspects of human existence, humanity has endured waves of mental illness. 

Humans, and potentially all living things, are like instruments. We need tuning; reminding. Sometimes we need to replace the strings—my guitar never stays in tune with old strings. 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. Getting stuck inside the mind is a sickness with no real cure other than getting out of one’s head, which many of us do with entertainment, alcohol, sex and drugs. But it’s not what we need. We’re a jigsaw. We need to see overlooked things; what’s missing from 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 a reminder to focus on mastering my goals; to be calm and to quit when my abilities become limited by my desperation to succeed. There are apocryphal tales in everything if you look, and they root us in reality. Reality anchors us to the basic laws of the Universe, the most important being love. I was reminded of that by two lowly pigeons. They have meaning and its the most profound of all; that love is the only thing preventing humanity’s self-destruction… 

Or maybe… actually, on second thoughts, maybe the pigeon was knocking, as a neighbour, to ask me to stop playing that bloody guitar.