A review by lory_enterenchanted
Bird Cottage by Eva Meijer

emotional informative reflective

4.0

The piece we're performing is like a landscape: at first there's grass (and each blade of grass is alive), then water -- a river that turns brackish and then joins the sea; there is water all the time, in fact, sometimes calm, sometimes swirling -- then a line, a horizon or a coast, a still frame around all the movement, a fence in front of a transition that is both unexpected and expected; the landscape changes, becomes hilly, steep cliffs, rocks, depths, firm ground in the distance, mountains in the distance, and from the mountains you can see everything, or nearly everything, and you think you can see everything that exists, the whole world, and when you come down again it's clear that it's all endlessly intricate and detailed and complex, far more than you thought, and that what is in the smallest things is also in the largest: you're here now, you've been everywhere and you've never left your spot.

A meditation on nature and the way humans have distanced themselves from it, beautifully written and a bit sad. Len finds communion with the birds, but loses it with humans. Still, a powerful call for us to slow down and pay more attention to what is happening around us, not merely our greedy, selfish ends.

Because people are so full of their own importance, they don't see other creatures correctly -- yet simply to describe their behaviour with precision would place everything in a different light.

Birds think by doing, but perhaps that's what we all do.

The birds show me that time is not the straight line that humans make of it. Things don't come to an end, they just change form.