Feather Plucking and a dose of reality

Didn't have an epiphany the other day.  How unusual.  Days, weeks, months go by without an epiphany so this isn't 'news just in'.  However, I did have an idea.   No, more of an understanding.  The idea has been around for centuries.  Like most things I can understand it logically but *knowing* is another matter entirely.  So, the understanding was just this - that life is a distraction from reality.  While living is an adventure, a wonder, an enchantment, an education and a damned hard one sometimes, it isn't real.  Or the living of it distracts us from what is real and the realness is to be divined not through living or thinking, planning or remembering but by BEING HERE NOW. 

Realized I spend most of my time in distractions whether it's here on the computer, reading a book, watching tv, even listening to music.  What is so hard about being here now?  Why do I find it so difficult?  It's as though I must continually tempt my mind away from its own reality.  Even while meditating (and I use the term in an offhand manner as my meditations are studies in trying not to try not to think), when I do touch upon that other reality (and I only say other because it's so foreign as to qualify for another dimension), I retract from it like a hand from a hot stovetop.  It's almost as though there's a vortex yawning before me, willing to suck me away if I will only yield and the desire to yield is why I meditate and my ego the gate of fear which keeps me stranded. 

Some housekeeping:  Richard is in the States. I suspect he's homesick but that's just a feeling I had while lying in bed listening to the morning melodies.   Mallory has a little green friend.  It's spring and I hear baby birds everywhere; some mickey birds in the big gums to the east of the horse yards, some lorikeets in the blooming silky oaks.  Bittersweet to see him being courted by a bird when there is no possibility of their being mates.  She even followed him to the deck late yesterday afternoon.  Have to put him into a cage and bring him in every night as his aviary isn't snakeproof.  She perched on the top and sang sweet songs while he made goo goo eyes at her - and peered around the edge of the drape to plead with me.  Wish I could be a buddy and help him out.

The biggest bird news is the sudden decision to feather pluck by Obama.  He's always been a very nervous bird.  He's the one that screams the most, that exhibits neurotic cage behaviours like weaving, that is the most frightened of me and the one that panics first when anything unusual happens.  Had noticed a few pink feathers on the bottom of the aviary but didn't think anything of it except that the birds were starting to moult.  Then went out on Tuesday afternoon and there were drifts of pink feathers everywhere and a poor denuded Obama.  He's plucked all the outer pink feathers from his breast including his legs, his shoulders and the grey scapular and median covert feathers.  Why after 5 years he's decided to pluck now is a mystery.  I've separated him and his mate Fern into the other half of the aviary.  Every other day I'm putting in fresh branches to chew and every other day they are allowed out for morning pick.  Can't have all of them out at the same time as it would be too difficult (read stressful) to try and return them to their correct aviary.

Don't think he's picked much since the changes so I am hopeful.  He really had only 2 days of determined picking so am trying to discourage the behaviour  before it becomes a habit. 

Got the heater going in here. Love old Queenslanders but they are not built for cold weather. Too many gaps, no insulation and, in this house, no curtains. Three degrees this morning. Bitter. Fingers just starting to thaw.

Couldn't sleep last night. Fell into bed exhausted at 8:30. Nights of insominia outnumber good nights especially since quitting smokes. Woke up at 1am. Too cold to get up and read a book so tossed and turned until 4, the last time I looked at the clock before 6. Then, when the most delicious sleep is possible, it is time to get up and feed everyone. I can hear Mallory playing with his bell in the next room. Tachimedes begins to do his vocal warm up exercises. Dimitri shuffles from one end of the verandah to the other and the outside galahs have quiet conversations with the wild ones. So I can't lay there and pretend I don't know everyone is hungry and waiting for breakfast, that the lorikeets will appreciate the warm nectar mix on a cold morning. That the wild galahs, perched on the overhead wires, don't really begin their day until they've had their morning wake up muffin at Glen Ellen.

One excellent result of the insomnia was the flash of a drawing I could try. Spent much of yesterday in abortive attempts to come up with an idea for the next work. Sketches on typing paper which came to nothing and met their fate in the compost bin. Funny how the idea came. I was in that hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking (have you ever tried to follow your thought processes back when in that realm? For me, impossible, as though an invisible curtain is drawn between the logical mind of sun and the fog-wreathed world of imagination, where I suspect the mind roams truly free, unfettered by physical rules and laws and regulations). Anyway, this image came to mind fully formed with such a jolt it snapped me out of that dreamy state. A good thing too for I didn't want to doze off and forget it or to remember later that I thought of *something* and not be able to remember what it was I conjured up.

Almost a week without a cigarette. No more morning coughing fits. No stink of cigarettes on me or in me, not in the house, in the furnishings, clothes or cats (yes, they stunk too - not to mention the years of second hand smoke - poor things, animal cruelty really). Trying very hard not to overeat. Not a problem during the day, have even reduced portion size, but at night, much more difficult. Eating fruit and munching pistachios, almonds and peanuts in shell.

Beating myself up for doing this, not doing that, mind like a hamster wheel spinning off dirty streamers of negativity. Walking the dogs yesterday I said to myself just Stop It! Stop It! Big sigh of relief. God, we're hard on ourselves. I'm hard on myself. I know I'm not perfect, far from it. I don't use my time well. I'm lazy and selfish and vain and all thos other labels I slap so freely onto my wrinkled forehead but I'm also quite okay. The animals are looked after and loved, my husband is looked after and loved, the house ditto, I turn out quite alot of art work, I still have an open mind and want to learn how to be with Balthazar in a way which is easy and comfortable for both of us. I give thanks daily for the good things in my life. I'm not sure I deserve them but I do appreciate them. I try and not think bad thoughts about people or things. I try and be mindful. I try and watch my tongue so that I don't score cheap shots by being 'right'. I generally try and be a better person than I was the day before.

I wouldn't let anyone else speak to me as I speak to myself. That book I never read, 'How to be Your Own Best Friend' is aptly titled. We aren't very good at it.

Haven't written about Dimitry in a very long time. Something has changed in that little feathered head. He (or I suspect She) is still timid and wary and easily frightened but she is also bolder, calmer and braver than before. I've put a cocky cage on the floor and feed her seed inside it. It was there for a month or so than I took it out to keep Marvin in while Terry lived in Marvin's aviary. When I put it back Dimitri was less cautious about me being nearby. Previously she'd leave the cage when I was 4 or 5 feet away. Now I am close enough to close the door if I wish. I leave when she goes inside to eat. If I move and she comes out I tell her to go back in and then leave when she does so. Want to gradually accustom her to having the door closed and then opened again while she's inside but if need be I can just close the door and move her - which is the whole idea. I want to get her off the verandah and into an aviary.

So she was a bit more confident when the cocky cage was returned to the verandah. The confidence also shows in the way she takes food from my fingers. She used to snatch and run even if the running was only two or three feet away. Now she takes the treat gently and slowly. I sit on the floor and feed her millet. After the first couple of times she hardly moves away at all but stands just in front while she eats. Get the feeling that one day she'll lower her head for a scratch. That would be an achievement, a break out the champagne moment.

I reread this post and think it's not written well enough for anyone else to read. I mean look at that first sentence or two. How boring. Why would anyone continue reading. Maybe I should delete them and go straight to what meat there is but then I realize, no this post is for me. When I wrote in journals I didn't write for an audience, I wrote for me. I wrote because I had to and it didn't matter whether it was worthy of some invisible reader. The reader was me. Writing a journal on a blog changes things, like a physicist changes the results of his experiments by observing them. Or, perhaps, reality tv shows have nothing to do with reality because the participants are always aware at some level they are being filmed. So, in an endeavour to be true to myself I'll leave the boring bits.