Raised by Birds

A Silent Songline

Part One (Written in mid-March)

It’s like I was raised by birds. The humans left me out most nights in the sea wind, in the pines, in the moonlight. I was suckled by wolves, warmed by squirrels. An octopus roosted herself across my forehead to protect me. And the birds perched on my chest, on my belly, next to my head, sharing their songlines in tentative hope, the first language I knew.

My body was all wrong, of course; my existence was all wrong for it. I couldn’t sing birdsong, couldn’t run with the wolves, couldn’t twist and drift and hunt through the sea. I was unable to live the lives that were put in me by the creatures that raised me.

But those lives burned in me anyway, unlived, in many ways unlivable.

I could move towards them, let their life force animate my clumsy body and heart in new ways. It was always freeing and delicious, but always incredibly unsatisfactory, like I was expecting to soar but mostly just feeling the aerodynamics while I ran, feet slamming the earth over and over with all this mammal heft.

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As a kid, I was especially sensitive to connection — I think uncommonly so — and there was very little connection available to me. I won’t recount the whole set of overlapping situations, but I seem to have been pretty lacking in touch, talk, emotional connection, and most of the other things that I could sense very acutely in their absence.

It’s like my sensitivity skipped an octave or something. Connection was so all-consuming and important, and so unavailable in the usual ways, that my connection-urge glitched past the sparse human level and into some non-human levels. My training in connection was mostly in non-human realms: the forest I grew up in, critters down in the marsh, the clouds, the trees, what I can only call the local spirits, though that term feels clumsy and ill-fitting. More like the quasi-visible personality-fragrances that Reality emanates through everything.

I also learned to connect to the non-human parts of humans, was how I seemed to get by. Something like archetypal sight, or feeling people’s Guides, or intuiting the possibilities inherent to the way someone is put together. I can’t quite describe how I saw (see) people, but it’s something like that.

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I’m aware of my language leaning towards the romantic, but I mostly experience this whole thing a kind of dull pain.

I seem to connect to people on a level they don’t often connect on — but then I’m less able to connect on the usual, more squishy human levels. This becomes a problem, eventually. Sometimes it becomes an issue very quickly, sometimes it takes months, but it always becomes an issue. Especially when I meet another person who was raised by birds, another person who connects from the non-human parts.

You’d think we’d get along gangbusters, just hang out in the home realms and vibe together. Which we do. And it’s lovely. Truly, a top ten experience every time.

But we are all, in the end, humans. We have a bunch of squishy human stuff that’s hard to be with. And we usually both have massive gaps in our abilities to operate on those squishy human levels. And our gaps very often are different from one another, so we end up in very confusing (and sometimes damaging) situations. It sucks, to feel so so so at Home in a way I almost never get — and then to drop directly into a jagged, murky gap where neither of us seems to understand what’s happening or why it hurts so bad.

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Mostly, it feels like being a kid who was raised by some motley collection of animals.

• When I try to connect with the other humans, nothing quite fits, nothing quite works.

• When I try to connect with the ‘animals’, I’m the wrong size and shape and arrangement of parts, and nothing quite works.

• When I try to connect with the other kids like me, they were raised by different ‘animals’, or have different understandings of what humans are like, and we end up biting and scratching each other, unsure if the other is playing or hateful or what’s going on.

I don’t know where to end this. Hope, despair, anger? It feels like I was dropped into a disturbing and painful situation without being asked about it, and I mostly just resent the whole thing. I often have a hard time seeing how it can change in a way that makes things meaningfully easier or smoother.

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Part Two (Written in early April)

An astrologer looked at my chart a couple years ago and noted that I was born a week after one eclipse and a week before another one. When I asked what that meant, he replied “there’s no clearer way in which a person can be born between worlds.”

Which felt a little overdramatic, but I got the picture. It felt about right.

There’s a lot of blessings to being born between worlds, to being a human mammal raised by birds, by the many personalities of Reality. The blessings are mostly forced ones — things I’m glad to have once I have them, but that aren’t necessarily pleasant to get. They’re all born from pressure, from friction, from tectonic plates crashing and grating against one another. Desirable difficulty is still difficulty.

How do you hold squishy, tender, imperfect, often traumatized human relating in the same space as transpersonal, energetic, archetypal relating? It’s not easy. I’ve met very few people who can hold them both together. —I seem to be becoming someone who can hold them both together. It hasn’t been easy, and it looks like it’ll get harder again before it gets easier.

And yet. It does seem like I get the opportunity to develop those capacities. To fly with a bird’s-eye view while keeping my feet on the ground. And that’s a rare type of capacity to have. You don’t develop it unless you’re forced to.

I’m not sure if I’m making sense, or sounding entirely fae right now. This all feels pretty direct and practical to me, but I’m suddenly self-conscious that I’m just sounding like a flaky spirit-boi who got lost in the sauce. And maybe I am — but that’s not how it feels, and that’s not how things seem to be reflecting in my life. My relationships and decisions and life situations are getting more concrete, more direct, more challenging and into the nitty-gritty — and that’s all mostly coming from these kinds of realizations. From coming to grips with the way my system is set up, the shortcomings that are built into me, and the fact that both my shortcomings and strengths spring from roots that are difficult for many people to perceive, let alone relate to.

Or maybe I’m worried about nothing, and you’re reading this and thinking it sounds entirely reasonable and relatable. I have no idea.

I’m getting a bit better at having no idea. About a lot of stuff. I feel so clueless — it’s really quite astounding. Like being in the center of a gorgeous, all-encompassing ocean, no rescue in sight; just gorgeous, lethal barrenness.

It’s a scary thing, living between worlds. Most of you know that in your own ways, I’m pretty sure. When multiple worlds have a claim on you, they pinch and press and twist you, molding you into new shapes. The qualities of each world, and the relationships between them, become a determining factor in what type of being you become, what shape of creature you grow into. It’s not a thing to take lightly, or to ignore and hope it goes away.

There’s a deep, deep grief to recognizing and loving multiple worlds, while recognizing you can’t quite belong to any of them fully. It takes a lot of mourning, and that mourning is only really bearable and fruitful if you can also stay with the beauty and meaningfulness of each world — and of your own position between them. Of the process you’re subject to, the pain and fruitfulness of being sculpted and shaped in a way you would not have chosen for yourself.

I don’t know what I’m talking about — it’s really quite astounding.

I was raised by birds, and the beauty of that is really only matched by the grief of it, and the gorgeousness of that beauty-grief mixture is really only matched by the mournfulness of it.

Ignoring either side of this equation involves betraying the situation’s profound potency, and I feel unwilling to do that at this point.

I’m not sure if I’ll publish this. It feels like sharing a video of myself getting surgery or something. Which is maybe exactly why I should post it — when I only share the post-surgery reflections, it feels like I’m denying some part of the potency running through my process.

Or maybe like I’m propagating some wider, common denial of the pain that comes braided with these kinds of potencies.

And maybe I’m unwilling to do that at this point.