Everything is Ghosts
Sitting and reading on my patio, I hear the chorus of the living. The Carolina Wren’s checkmark song echoing through the adjacent woods. The rattle of squirrels from three different directions. The frog-like warning of the Nuthatch. The kazoo-song of the Titmouse. I am a rational person, so to observe these lives going on about their morning indicates that these are morning songs of hunger, protection, desire, and territory. But I am but human, and rationality, as humans see it, is but a path created by just the human senses and what is rendered from those senses. But what if everything is so much more? What if rationality, as humans reckon it, isn’t enough? And dare I say, there certainly must be more?
What was the first death? To Google it, you receive two answers: Biblically, the answer is Abel. Earthly, the answer is “shrouded in mystery”. The fact that two western canon answers were provided goes to show how storytelling and science are the sole contributors in our reason and construct-making. And what constitutes death? Is it simply the cessation of mechanism?
The kazoo-voiced Titmouse approaches my closest bird feeder. The crest on their head is unruly like they have bed head or flew through a tunnel of wet leaves. Behold their mechanism. The talons gripping the small, red landing. The spasmic movement as if the bird’s body is living three lives at once. The bending of the neck to poke their beak into the cavity for a black oil sunflower seed. Such nervousness, excitement. Such awareness. My feathered friend here does not know what a book is, or a podcast, or about the drudgery of doing laundry. To Titmouse, books, podcasts, and washing machines do not exist. Humans can wax poetic and observe the Titmouse life. Once in the nest and with not much else to do, perhaps Titmouse sees stories in the patterns of the nest. Perhaps they wait for their favorite nocturne to echo through the trees. Perhaps a certain twitch or stretch of their wing feels so good and it wasn’t until that very moment, in the dark nocturne of night, that they finally have time to do it.
It might be fair to say that animals do not realize that they must die. They know that they can and as the process begins, they know that they will. The ill cat seeks solitude under the bed. An elephant matriarch trumpets to the rest of the herd possibly to indicate that one of their own is dying. It is because of death and other circumstances that a group of elephants is called a memory. Death makes room for more life. Death promotes evolution. Because of death, this buzzing, feathered handful of life graces my morning.
So long ago (9,205,128 of my lifetimes ago), during the Carboniferous period, an abundance of plants and trees arose in a warm, tropical climate. However, there were not enough decomposers to break down the vast amount of vegetation—specifically the lignin (what gives plants their woodiness and structure). This led to a huge abundance of vegetation that would not rot. The wood piled up and up, was buried, and with heat and pressure became coal. This period prompted the evolution of white rot, the problem-solving fungi we see today. When I look down at a fallen mulberry from the mulberry tree, I thank white rot. When I look up at the mulberry tree’s wide-spreading crown, I thank white rot. When I walk over to my gardens full of lettuce, green beans, and tomato plants, I thank white rot. When I look at the border of woods near my home, I thank white rot. When I look at the wooded ridge on the other side of the highway in the distance, I thank white rot. When I walk along the river that is simply a channel of water following the easiest path, I thank white rot. When commuting on the highway to go to work and looking down at the hills and ridges and horizons, I thank the white rot that breaks down and renders vegetive life into ghost.
Titmouse flies off into the wooded border, their life a long list of cautionary tales. One of the many differences between me and Titmouse is that Titmouse doesn’t sit on a perch and think about thinking. To be able to think about thinking, one is able to render stories. We use cautionary tales to teach lessons and even instill fear. Titmice live and learn, unable to scribe their experience. Life is started over and over again, bird by bird. They are winged narratives, unpublished poems. Unlike me, they do not have volumes of their thoughts on a shelf. Right and wrong is a life & death code, not a moral code. Humans come along and see the poetry in them. The sapsucker holes go from utilitarian to aesthetically appealing. We call wood-boring insect paths in trees “galleries”. Ant hills are a triumph. Nests are woven wonders. A single feather is picked up off the ground and pinned into a shadow box, hung on the wall.
To look around us, at everything, is to look at death rendered. Atoms do not cease to exist. Atoms are constantly being created. Atoms are mostly emptiness, a latticework of vibration. Everything we see is a temporary alignment of mostly emptiness. Every breath, a volcano, an extinct bird’s wing. I look down at my body and because I have a mind that can believe without seeing, I believe that this body is a ghost of birds, ancient trees, and kneeling elephants.
