This little blackbird flew into our house on January 15 this year, and settled next to my nest of Orkney eggs, heralding both a synchronicity and a decision.
Birds flying into our house are not a common occurrence. Thinking back over a lifetime I can only recall one other blackbird flying in, one dove walking in around 1996, and a bush turkey wandering in around 1995. So this little blackbird really drew my attention, as did its placement next to the nest, as did the date. Stay with me, and all will be revealed.
When I was about six, a very exotic bird landed on the washing line in our English back garden. As a young child, I was utterly transfixed. This colourful bird looked nothing like the generally black and brown birds of our neighbourhood. As Dad and I got closer, I realised it was a budgerigar (a bit like a parakeet), and budgies, in my English world, did not live in the wild. They were pets, kept in cages, and, like parrots, they could mimic human voices, often building up quite a vocabulary of entertaining chatter. Our exotic visitor ended up in a cage in our living room, a fixture in our home for many years to come. I was never sure whether to feel happy for him, safe and warm in our house, or sad for him, locked in a cage, chatting to all of us and to his ‘mate’, his reflection in his mirror.
There’s much more to the budgerigar story, a tale I tell at the beginning of my new book, Bird of Paradise, which will be published later this year.
As you will have noted, there’s a bird in the title of my new book. Bird of Paradise is also a flower and a yoga pose, all of which is meaningful as you’ll discover when you read the book!
I’ll tell you more about the book closer to the time, but suffice to say it is about dreams, synchronicities, navigating life, and discovering your calling.
In January this year, a week before the blackbird flew into our house, the final edit was completed. The book was ready for its next stage. Since all but one of my past books have been published by traditional publishers, I started along the known route. The day before the blackbird flew into our house, I sent out emails to potential literary agents in the US.
My first thought, when I saw our blackbird, was a sense of coming full circle.
Blackbirds are not native to Australia. They are an introduced species, and only thrive in the more temperate Australian states, not in the tropics or subtropics. When we moved from the subtropics to temperate Hobart just over a year ago, I was delighted to discover ‘English’ blackbirds singing in our back garden. Budgerigars are native to Australia, while in England they only thrive in cages in people’s homes. My book began with an Australian non-native bird flying into our English life, and my book’s completion was marked by an English non-native bird flying into our Australian home. It’s too late to add a final chapter about this little blackbird, but isn’t that what blogs – such as this one – are for, to continue enriching the tale?
I have written about my nest of Orkney eggs before. They’re stones I collected from a beach in the Orkney Islands of Scotland some forty years ago, nestled into an Orkney basket, a traditional island weave. That story, and its many resonances and synchronicities, weaves throughout my new book, so the fact that the little blackbird chose to land by my nest was highly significant to me – though perhaps, for the blackbird, it had some vague resemblance to a nest, to home, to safety.
Clearly the bird was trapped. It didn’t know how to fly free from our room.
We helped set it free, and it flew, up and up and away.
I had the feeling that my book, Bird of Paradise, needed to be set free, to fly, up and up and away.
Over the next few weeks I noted how much longer the traditional publishing route seems to have become. Agents and publishers these days are more focussed on the size of an author’s social media platform and expect the author to bring their own marketing expertise to the publishing table. The more I looked at this, the more I realised that I had the expertise – my own and professional people I can engage – to publish the book myself, to free it to fly out into the world about a year earlier than it would otherwise take, and to have more creative control of the process.
So that’s what I decided to do.
As I sat down today to write this blog, I Googled to check my facts about blackbirds. One thing that jumped out at me – a fact I didn’t know – was that the ‘four calling birds’ in ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ were, in the earliest version of the song, ‘four colly birds’ or ‘four collie birds’, colly or collie meaning the colour of coal and being the English archaic name for blackbird.
By January 15 the twelve days of Christmas were done and dusted, but did my little calling bird call in to underline my calling, to free this new book about dreams, synchronicities, navigating life, and discovering your calling? So, you did notice all that calling, right?
There’s so much more richness to this synchronicity, but this blog-sized chunk is where I’ll stop for now.
I hope I’ve whetted your appetite for Bird of Paradise too! Watch this space.
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