REFLECTING 2017

It is raining in London on the penultimate day of the year. London as usual.

I have just bought a beautiful house on a mountain in Andalucia, Spain, a place that feels like home. My first few days in the house felt overwhelming. In some ways it seems unfathomable that I have arrived on that mountain, that I arrived here in London, that I am sending down roots into these places and learning the sway and turns of their culture and dialects. Life is unpredictable. I feel so much. Hope and fear. I pray, in the unorthodox way that I have learned to pray, that the path will continue to open, that the potholes won’t consume me.

I was holding on tightly to Spain as I left but as I walked into my flat in London, I remembered how precious and special this nest is too. 

There is fleeting fear.

Where am I?

Then I let go.

I am here. I am there. I am here. I am there.
I am reminded that love is not about attachment.

Moving characterises my story. May I come home to both places.

I sleep in a bed that seems to remember the shape of my body. I draw the curtains onto a grey London morning. No birds. I open the window and call, “Georgieeeeeeee. Georgeieeeee.” No birds come. I miss George and his pigeon family. I hope that they will come back soon. I have filled their bowls with seed. Eventually they will be passing by to go shopping somewhere else and realise that this shop is open again. They have been returning with me for 2 years now. I love them. I miss them when they’re gone: George, Gladys, Hoxton, Shoreditch, Angel, Hackney, Orgiva, Impi and Mini Impi.




It is the last day of 2017.

I am sending down roots into a mountain in Spain.

I am rooted in London.

I am an African - when facebook reminds me of this I feel sad, I miss home home and my African tribe.

For the last three years, as the years have turned from one to the next, I have counted.

2015 One

2016 Two

2017 Three

It doesn’t seem that long ago. I got sick three years ago. It was a strange illness. I fell hard. My body said no. My blood tests flared  in a way characteristic of parasitic infection but the little fuckers were hiding if they were there at all. The doctors, there were many of them, never really figured out what took me down. I lay in a hospital bed for a month. I had a heart attack midway through. I carried on lying in the bed. Listening to the beeping. Giving my blood to the seekers. No answers came. My blood tests normalised. I went home. They kept on looking. They looked for months and months. I’d start getting better, then I’d fall down again. Sometimes hard, sometimes gently, never as hard as the first time. Every time I was feeling better I’d think I was finding my way home and when I fell again it was … boring, disappointing, unbelievable, devastating, painful, infuriating, depressing … It was not okay. I was not okay. I didn’t understand. Nobody seemed to understand. They told me I was sick but they did not know exactly why. I wanted to know why. Exactly.

After several months I was referred to the Chronic Fatigue Clinic. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and ME are essentially the same thing, I chose to identify with the former term. I was very resistant about this. I didn't like the clinic, struggled with their regime and am sure I was not an easy patient during the time I lasted there. After a year I discharged myself. I wanted a clearer answer. After two years of finding my way up and down, up and down, up and down I self-referred to a private doctor looking for other opinions and answers. I'm sure this is what many of 'us' do as we grow desperate. I paid a considerable amount of money to run many tests in other countries. He concluded that my Chronic Fatigue was caused by Lyme Disease and other co-infections - a host of viruses that were sitting in my system and a subsequently knackered immune system. He prescribed a plethora of herbs and supplements and a diet that took lots of things out, like: wheat, dairy, sugar. This plan is fairly predictable and does help but my on-board jury is out about the benefit of long term supplement use and avoiding common food types without clear allergy. I'm better off of gluten for sure, but I lapse. I go back to food because there is small comfort in delicious. I'm not a glutton but I like the ritual and taste of food. Perhaps I'm doing it all wrong. When I'm really struggling I go back to The Regime and I stabilise.

My NHS doctor, who I like and has supported me immeasurably for years, didn't buy his diagnosis. This was confusing. She asserts that I have Chronic Fatigue, that it is understandable, okay and I can allow myself to have it and work with it. 

It is true: the collection of symptoms that make up my ‘condition’ characterise Chronic Fatigue – I fell hard, perhaps in part because I had pushed myself too hard, my body was auto-immuning, shutting down on itself, I host Lyme and Glandular Fever both common precursors for CFS, my muscles didn’t work without getting exhausted post exertion, my bowel went berserk – I had many strange symptoms that prolonged for months and sometimes reappear still: I tingle, I shake, I sweat, I shiver, I gasp, I blur, I ache, I rash, I drain, I can’t get words out, I have to lie down. I have to lie down. I have to lie down.

I disappeared into a narrow groove, the only place I could manage living in, spending a lot of time at home, alone. Part coping, part taking care so that I could try to cope.

Chronic Fatigue is not a label I wear comfortably, but it’s one I’m getting used to. I don’t know why, but I do know that my body said and continues to say, No. And I also know that it is essential that I listen to it now. There is constant dialogue with my body. I have moved back into it. I respect its messages and wisdom more. I am less headstrong in driving myself and other people along. I feel more like one entity rather than A Head and A body. I feel less heady.

I have learned to understand that if we don’t listen to and respect our bodies they will call us into line and ask for more attention.

So here I am, counting year 3.

The questions rattle over and over in my mind:

God how did this happen?

Why did this happen?

Why did this happen to me?

Why does this happen to us?

As this year turns over into the next, I remember who I was before I fell. Pulled by the bizarre collective churn of spewing new year intention I too imagine who I would rather be:

Thinner.

Fitter.

Prettier.

Healthier.

More alive.

Weller.

Driven.

Successful.

More normal.

I want to be who I was back when I thought I was fat but I wasn’t fat. The weight thing is so tedious and interminable. Especially, but not exclusively for women. Before I fell I had carved my body thinner and stronger with hours and hours and hours of hot yoga practice. I was addicted to it, because it was shaping me in a way that made me feel like I looked better. I was using yoga to get hits and fixes from my self and from other people. As I changed, people noticed and their regard was complementary.

It is true: I looked better. I felt better.

Sometimes I pushed myself through classes denying my bodies call.

I think I did too much hot yoga, in an obsessive, controlling way.
Searching for perfection, denying, sometimes hating, both my self and my perceived imperfections.

I miss hot yoga.

I miss that body and stamina and strength.

I miss the discipline of that practice.

But I really am not sure that the way I had attached to it was healthy or good or respected my body. I miss it but I don’t know.

I know I fell. My body won’t go back there. I can’t do that hard yoga any more. I want to, but I can’t. Yesterday as I sat on an aeroplane feeling fat, I was deeply missing the yoga practice and the body I had found in those stinky, sweaty studios.

It is hard to let go. I want to go back. I wonder if I ever will. I wonder.

I try to make peace with the fact that I am heavier and slower. I don’t look better. I don’t feel better. I look worse. I feel worse.

(We are taught to think like this.)

Head says go.

Body says no.

For me this is no play warfare:

Body.

Says.

No.

I have Chronic Fatigue.

About six months after the big fall, I was watching my muscle melt away, longing for the hot room and the physical and mental benefits of Practice. Sharing this with a Dharma Sista she suggested I go to Restorative Yoga. I went with all my prejudices. When I was addicted to hot and hard and results, results, results I would have said Restorative Yoga was silly, a waste of time and the people doing it were doing nothing at all.

Nowadays I lie on a yoga mat. Very still. With props under body parts. Practicing letting go. Practicing stillness. Listening to and learning to breathe. Surrendering to the floor and the shape I find myself in. Accepting imperfection as part of who I am, part of who we all are. Finding deep rest. Returning to every cell of my crooked little self. Re-storing. Some days I believe that Restorative Yoga has allowed me to keep going despite my self, it has saved me, cocooned me held me through the dark days of immobility and longing for a different shaped reality. It has allowed me to understand that I am still here, in this body and this body, is this body. I am still. Here. Sometimes when I am lying propped, opening, surrendering and at one, I notice that I am comfortable, pain free and okay. At peace with my self.

Remarkably, the more I surrender, the more I find my way. Not like I think I should be finding it, but finding it none the less. So much has disappeared through the weird passage of illness, but I am not gone. In some ways I am more here than I ever have been.

Midway through this year Michael Stone passed. It was a strikingly poignant passing for me and many people. Difficult, painful, angry making, confusing. Deeply sad, a great loss.

Michael was a teacher who made a huge amount of sense to me and continues to do so when I listen to his recorded teachings and practices. May we continue to benefit from his light, life and work.

He died from a drug overdose. He was mentally ill. He was having a manic episode that led him to opioids, in the peaking wave of the opioid crisis. Yes, it raises many questions. I don’t know the answers. 

First I was sad and angry. Then I had a moment of very clear awakening from his final teaching, his death. I knew two things:

I am going to try to be more open about my mental illness.

I am going to try not to use people, places or things because I can’t handle what I’m feeling. And to be more open about this.

I am mentally ill. I have been for over 25 years. I suffer from severe, cyclical, debilitating bouts of depression and anxiety. Medication helps to right me and keep me stable. One of the things I liked about Michael was his support of medication. I have met teachers that say you can’t meditate on mind-supporting-medication. That is bull shit. For some people medication is important to allow them simply to live. To cope. To find okay enough. Perhaps to choose to find a meditation cushion, to move into their breath and learn to stay with the moment to moment of their churn. Stability alongside the storm.

Medication is deeply stigmatised though becoming less so. In some cases it is dished out too freely. For some people it is lifesaving. There are times, now, when I don’t know why, but I do know that my on-board chemistry system cannot right my chemical balance and I need to take pills to get everything to fire correctly, so that I feel okay enough and can carry on with a functional life.

This is okay. I am okay.

Because they're so stigmatised, I endlessly wish I didn't live on mind-stabilising drugs. Sometimes I feel my self flaring and reacting like wild fire and I wonder if it is the drugs making me madder and sicker not saner and weller. Other-times I’m grateful for knowing they keep me level enough to do life. Lately I’m more on them than off them. Michael told me, it will get worse as you get older. He was talking from his own experience. It’s true of mine too.

I'm going through a phase of feeling like the word 'grateful' is losing its meaning, however, I am grateful for the insight gained from having to work with what feels like an overly complex mental landscape. 

All. Of. The. Time. 

It has taken me to so many wonderful things: art, therapy, writing, Buddhism, meditation, yoga, recovery, The Others.

Addiction is a complex, polarised, stigmatised thing. I am not a substance addict, though I knew long ago that I could be addicted to alcohol and I watch the way I use drink with a close, wisened eye. I am a process addict. I am an addict. My processes became patterned to act out. Searching for ways to make me feel more or less. Using to get hits. Using to fix. Fixing can mean: obliterating what was previously going on.

I use people, places, things, behaviours. I came to understand this after my body fell. In the deep stillness of not being able to do things to escape my self I realised that I had spent a lot of my life using something to fix on: love, work, success, failure, performance, exercise, drink, food, freedom, rebellion. Illness. 

Using to fix and escape hard reality. 

Heightening. 
Dampening. 
Escaping.

Over the past two years I have committed to working hard at not using and fixing. Whilst I shudder to say it into the world, fearing judgement and stigma: I am an addict. I want to keep some of my self secret, but I also want to find a voice for this so it is less hidden in the places that lead us to use and fix secretly or obscured from consciousness, where the most serious harm happens. I found Recovery, a tribe that I identify with and an approach that is changing my life. I found a lot of love, a lot of hope. I also found laughter. 

I am a person who could wear many labels. I don't want to pathologies myself with the burden of a host of them. Michael cautioned me about attaching too strongly to this type of labelling and then becoming bound by it. He talked of the benefit of Practice to engender clear seeing around these conditions. 

After his death I reflected a lot on that conversation. Was he right or is it better to identify more so that you can work with the condition more? Does this make more or less suffering? It is hard to know the answers. 

I know the insight gained from non-attachment, I have learnt this through practice and experience. I know that in addiction we attach too strongly and the aim is to become less triggered to grasp so fervently and tightly. Ultimately, to learn not to reach out for the thing, to meditate on it without acting until it passes as a no-thing. But in the strangle-hold of addiction, there is no consciousness, a short circuit is patterned into grasping so tightly you take yourself down. Down, not up. Sometimes I think we are all addicts now. And this is why as an addict you have to work at becoming conscious, tuned in to the intimate, visceral weave of life and spirit. Recovery and Practice walk comfortably hand-in-hand.

One day at a time, I am repatterining. I am recovering.

I want to encourage a modicum of honesty about these states we find our selves living in. Our society pathologises them, which encourages disappearing and disconnection and exacerbates the suffering. 

May we learn to embrace our full experience, pleasant and unpleasant, ugly and attractive, and find ways to work with it, live with it and welcome it to our rooms, cushions, conversations and life. 

May we welcome our imperfections 
into our hearts 
as part of who we are.

Whilst I struggle with my self, I’m okay with who I am. Sometimes I see my beautiful little light shining brightly. I have so much gratitude for what I have found in the falling and falling and falling… 

Many bright, imperfect souls walk with me and offer kindness, love, light, wisdom and laughter.




I am writing this firstly to make my own sense, secondly to allow other people to make sense, thirdly to allow movement. I have to write this all down, reflecting and projecting, to open to compassion, love and recovery. To feel seen and heard in all my twisted truths. And to allow others to feel seen and heard, just as they are, just as you are. 

It is the simplest act of connection:
I see you. 
I hear you. 

I realise how restless I am feeling and how the texture of wellfeeling is percolating through my experience today, urging me beyond the sofa into all the different studios I like to inhabit. I have become cautious about hope, but perhaps this is a new beginning. I am moving.

I want to move back 
out into the world. 
I want to move out 
of the 
stillness 
and solitude.

There is fleeting fear.
I let go.
I pray to flow more freely, 
beyond all the confines.

One day at a time

Breathing in, breathing out

Listening deeply

Surrendering

Surrendering

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

THE PIGEON DIARIES - episode three

To find out about yoga & meditation at THE FESTIVAL OF NOTHINGNESS click here.

I'm just finishing this episode to post. I hear little footsteps on the floor near the balcony door. "George, you really, really, really can not start coming in here!" He looks at me, turns and walks back outside. He jumps onto his feeding perch and croons at me, cooing and nodding, doing his little feed-me-feed-me-wiggle. He speaks human now, just like I speak bird.

episode three

Shoreditch grew with the zeal of that little rubbery grow-your-own-boyfriend avatar. Every day he was bigger and uglier. But the universe had landed him on the perfect balcony; I habitually gravitate towards strangeness, love subversion and become catatonic if shrouded with too much imposed “normality”. I’ve felt a little odd most of my life and I was going to love every cell of that ugly little goose with every ounce of my being regardless of what anyone else thought.

Ugly little 'ditch.

The aesthetic of okayness is so peculiar. It’s a segway but can I just say, who cares if Jeremy Corbyn looks like a nice little old man, not a politician. I certainly don’t. He’s cute, crooked and reassuringly normal. Many humans got closer to JC on his last campaign trail. They stopped objectifying him and saw past his little old man cuteness. Ka pow! 

I started to learn some things about Pigeons that I never would have, had I not allowed myself to learn to love the things I hate. I realised that if you get up close to something, it can rewrite your prejudices in the most beautiful of ways:

Pigeons mate for life. George and Gladys, those crazy, annoying Geese, they were going to be forever-ever partners. No divorce in Pigeon world. No affairs. No late coming out or transgender reassignment. Georgie and Glad are an item for eternity. They care about each other. They groom each other. They stick together through thick and thin. George protects Gladys and in return she’s loyal and faithful. They bring up their children together, completely together, no sort of maybe parent sharing. Real parent sharing. She follows him everywhere. She looks at him with kind eyes. He coos his heart out for her and puffs up his feathers and dances around like a dad on the dance floor. He might not love her, pigeons might not know what love is, but they go through the motions in a very human way.

Love.

They are territorial. No other pigeons were allowed to come and hang out on the balcony. This pleased me immensely; two were enough, perfect in fact. And now that George and Glad had moved in they had chased all the others away, which pleased me even more. Of course the neighbours didn’t know there were only two. To them there were probably still a million marauding pigeons defecating on my two square meters of real estate and its fringes, flapping their god damned wings like they thought they just could make birdnoise in the face of building sites, traffic congestion and internet-addicts. It was almost as if they felt entitled to be there.

The male guards the roost against other males. If it is a successful nest, other males will see it as a good place to live and try to usurp it. George fought them off ferociously. There is one in particular, I named him The Impostor. The Impostor never gave up. George and the Impostor fight everyday. Still. The Impostor is a veritable bully, he’s Donald Trump in my menagerie. He’s bigger than George. He has a quiff. His gait is noticeably different, he struts around with a superior air and coos monumentally loudly. I’m endlessly whispering to him, “shut up Impy, you’ll piss all the neighbours off and they'll make me get rid of you all." 

He listens for five seconds then starts over. Whenever a new bloke comes in to sniff out the nesting ground Impy appears and starts a fight. He’s not stupid, he recognises my balcony as prime real estate with a good supermarket that delivers fresh birdproduce daily. Impy can't seem to make it with the ladies, he brings new birds round to check out his stomping ground, but they never stay. I reckon in bird world he's like the human equivalent of a narcissistic ego maniac, potentially attractive for one second then repulsive for eternity.

George keeping 'Ditch safe from humans and other animals.

Only the men can speak. It sounds like a lyric from an 80s ballad or a line from The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s true though - only the men can speak. Lady pigeons don’t speak. They just walk and nod and look and fly. This doesn’t mean they can’t communicate with the men. They only talk in body language, or perhaps it’s pigeon contemporary dance. Sometimes Gladys leans into George and lets him scratch her brow, other times she pushes him out of the way so she can eat a few seeds before he’s cleaned the table. Familiar?

The men make a bloody racket. They love to try to tell the other guys who’s the boss, who’s house is the best, who’s got the best menu-del-dia or just to do one and go find another railing to perch on.

Voice was one of the ways I figured out that Shoreditch is a girl. That also means that Hoxton, rest his little soul, was a boy. Every brood has one male, one female. No way? Way.

(‘Ditch is now married to Angel. Angel is a boy. No gender bias names in Pigeon world. Angel is Shoreditch’s brother. She comes along later.)

Shoreditch TV, complete with a little beating heart.

Brexit happened whilst Shoreditch was growing up. I was so pleased to have Shoreditch TV to immerse myself in rather than the-flat-screen-of-doom. I am one of the people that hates Brexit. Hate is a big word but I  felt my visceral response to not wanting to be separated from the rest of the world just as I was finding my way in to it.

I heard the voice of people that felt they weren’t being listened to asking for something different to my bent. I didn’t agree with it but I could empathise with where their “out” came from. “They” wanted what “they” wanted “we” wanted what “we” wanted. “Them” and “us” wanted different things.

Rather than us and them I settled on thinking of them as another us with another agenda. That seemed fair enough, it wasn’t like I was going to be able to convince them all that I was right and they were wrong.

Then, I heard a person say to me, “there are too many immigrants, we need our country back.” 

For the first time in my life I heard myself say these words out loud, “I am an immigrant.”

The person answered, “not like you, you don’t look like an immigrant.”

I paused for thought.

She noticed me pause and attempted to explain herself better, adding, “you know what I mean?”

I didn't know what she meant. I could figure it out in my head, but not in my heart.

I hurt. I raged. I turned my heart towards my Pigeons questioning humanity and vowing to steer my moral compass mindfully forth.

Africa (is not a country.) 

Sometimes I think that if I was black people would understand me better. There are complex identity issues that come with being a white African. Once years ago I did some comedy about this: I recited the joke about the cab driver that asked me, "are there other white people in Africa?" And the one who asked me where I was from and when I said Zambia, he said, "where's that?" and when I said, "in Africa" he said, "you don't look like an African."

There are people that automatically write your story for you when they realise you're a white african. It's okay, I get it. In the beginning, white didn’t arrive on the beautiful continent with moral integrity and that will stain us eternally. 

Sorry can be a useless word sometimes, but I am sorry. I wear the shame and guilt of misguided lineages somewhere deep in my fibre. I am an African.

THE PIGEON DIARIES - episode two

(To find out about the FESTIVAL OF NOTHINGNESS click here.)

This story has been unfolding for about a year and a half. As I settled into the silhouette of "The Pigeon Woman" I've often wondered how the fuck I became her. She's not someone I had intentionally set out to be, unlike an artist, an aerobics instructor, a design strategist or a meditation teacher but I like being her. The Pigeons have taught me a lot about life, a lot about people, politics and a lot about pigeons.

I'm releasing the box set here an episode at a time, so if you're just joining in you may want to start at the beginning.

Look deeper.

episode two

Not everyone shared my growing fascination. Most people hate Pigeons. Why is it that Finches and Robins and Thrushes are okay but Pigeons aren’t?

Prejudice.

Discrimination.

Racism.

Xenophobia.

As I started to get to know them, I also started defending their rights. This nest and its inhabitants became a moral journey for me, an ethical incubator and a perfect equanimity practice:

Regard all things with equal measure and composure.

Hold difference with balanced regard.

Human rights are human rights, no matter what kind of human you are.

Bird rights are bird rights, no what kind of bird you are.

A bird is a bird, just like a human is a human.

Practise discernment, or curiosity even, rather than judgement.

At a fundamental level all sentient beings have a right to food, shelter, compassion and freedom.

If you don't eat you don't shit and if you don't shit you die. Shitting is part of living, deal with it and move on.

My little Pigeons were serving my Practice and my Politics.

As I become increasingly hooked on exploring The Antidote to Modern Life I spend a lot of time retreating from modern life. I have turned off all the notifications on my phone. I meditate a lot. I allow myself at least a 30 minute savasana a day. I read and listen to a lot of dharma. I live close to Buddhism. I practice and teach mindfulness, meditation and yoga. I endeavour to carve an ethical groove with my thoughts and actions. I work hard to live in all of my self, not just my head or my fingertips. I think my purpose is finally shifting to becoming whole rather than perfect. 

The one irrefutable thing I have learned in developing good Practice is that kindness sits at the core. Compassion: the courage to identify with the feeling-tone of other beings, with a strong desire to propagate a sense of okay-as-you-are, through mindful being, human heart and moral action. Not in denial of the dark side, but in conjunction with it. Dark and light are symbiotic things, they depend on each other to exist.

I gathered the compassion I was cultivating on the meditation cushion and shone it brightly on My Bird People.

Shoreditch was born first. Smallness has an amazing way of pulling the heartstrings of humans. He was tiny and yet given he had come out of an egg that was smaller than him, he was also kind of huge. It was like one of those new-fangled expanding memory foam mattresses that know how to grow big but once they've popped don't try to squish them back into small again. I felt the preciousness of his tiny life and, in what may seem like an over inflated gesture to some humans, I knew I must guard this tiny life with my own.

 The birthing unit.

I gave Gladys and George space. I didn't want to interfere with mama nature. I was terrified I'd fuck it up like humans can fuck things up. I peeked in from time to time to make sure ’Ditch was still there and twitching. He seemed to be. My heart swelled with the miracle of life born from the vast-grey-concrete-lands.

Hoxton arrived three days later. Bizarrely over those three days, Shoreditch had grown. So Shoreditch was tiny but Hoxton was tinier. It was still very cold. It was still winter.

I filmed Hox desperately trying to find a way under George's wing to get out of the cold. George didn't lift his wing and scoop him in. I waited for that parental gesture but it didn't happen. George is a pigeon not a human. I was still clucking from my maternal-nature-lover-eco-warrior remove. I thought Hox had just wiggled out and was trying to wiggle back in. I didn’t realise that George was pushing Hoxton out of the nest. He had chosen Shoreditch as the strongest one. He had decided to try to get one through rather than lose them both. 

I thought he was cute but he was dying.

I have never really been attached to creatures. I like some and others spook me, but I’ve never loved them. The next morning Hoxton was dead. 

Hoxton was dead and Shoreditch was wiggling next to him and George was eyeing me with his beady, fixed, “come any closer and I’ll peck your hand off,” gaze.

That was the first time I really hurt in the middle of me because I had become attached to the Pigeons. I felt the loss of Hoxton acutely.  A tiny, little, budding life, seeking refuge in my flowerpot, sidelined from the lifeboat because he was weaker. I felt somehow responsible: I could have saved his life, like I said I would, but I didn’t.

I hurt because little Hoxton died in my flowerpot. I was powerless to that sentence. Even if I had scooped him out and tried to shovel human mulch into him with an eyedropper, he likely still would have died.

I left him in the nest, bowing deeply, surrendering to nature’s churn.

'Ditch and dead Hox' 

George and Gladys ate him.

  

Shoreditch was an ugly little fucker, feisty as they come; hungry as modern-life-obesity. I showed a lot of people pictures of ‘Ditch. They all said the same two things:

Fuck he’s ugly.

I’ve never seen a baby Pigeon before.

And a lot of them said:

No one has ever seen a baby Pigeon before.

Although of course the last statement isn’t true. I became quite smug about being an anomaly human, another against-the-grain hashtag I could brandish.

Ugly little Shoreditch 

I fell in love with Shoreditch quickly. Some may say I was too in love with him. This is characteristic of my interaction with some beings: I believed him to be more than he was, pedastalling his little life as though he may save me or the world. I bestowed him with magical qualities, I made him more than a bird in a box, I made him into my cause, my fairytale, my side kick. All the children I had never had.

When The Pigeons arrived I was about a year into recovery from serious illness that had floored me. I left hospital and went into a long period of "chronic illness" that label you don't ever think you will own but once you do it's shakeable to everyone but yourself, you're stuck with it and only the other people with it will ever really understand that bad days are still bad days, even when they're invisible.

So it's not impossible that I projected the rescue I craved onto the birds. It's not impossible, but it was not conscious. I wanted to be saved from this life sentence and humans weren't up to the task.

I "anthropomorphised" him, a big word my brother taught me when he was trying to explain that people in England turn animals into people in a bizarre way, in a different way to our African home-tribes. So the pigeons were also a sign of my re-culturing. In humanising My Bird People I was adapting to the way of the indigenous folk to fit in more seamlessly, only I had missed a key detail: pigeons don't really count. 

To me Shoreditch was like a transitional object for someone that wasn't transitioning,  someone so stuck in their solitary life, they need to hold on to something with a pulse to make them feel more alive. At a time when humans felt out of reach, Shoreditch made me feel more alive. 

To be fair my growing attachment made me uneasy. I knew I was doing something unusual here but I had a compulsive interest in My Bird People that though weird seemed unstoppable. It made some humans quite noticeably uncomfortable. It made them want to change the subject or make a joke about how peculiar I was. Both of those things made me feel like there was something wrong with me, but a voice in my head said, “there is something wrong with them.”

A few humans understood my love and growing attachment to Shoreditch, George and Gladys. 

Swapping shifts was perfectly timed and methodical twice a day. Protect the new life at all costs was the protocol.

I made the irretrievable mistake of giving them a small amount of accessible food daily. Pigeons have a self-regulating mechanism that prevents them from turning into ostriches. They will never stop eating if there is food available all the time. This is not dramatic or an over-statement. It’s pure fact. Perhaps that’s why they shit so much, they have no attachment to food, they just know food. And part of their knowing food is knowing it must go in one end and it just comes out the other end.

For the Buddhist sangha in my readership, may  I remind you: Form is only emptiness, emptiness only form.

Because I loved them, I fed them too much. Us humans can be like that sometimes. We have strange ways of providing affection and trying to keep others close.

In my early thirties my brother gave me a “grow your own boyfriend” kit. It was probably around the time people started wondering if I was gay or if I would ever settled down, get married and have children. So far I am none of those things. Sometimes I think it is okay or even good. Sometimes I feel like I've missed the golden ticket and done life all wrong.

The kit consisted of a small rubbery man you put in a bucket of water. Overnight he grew into a bigger rubbery man. Nice idea but I couldn’t feed him or talk to him without feeling like a complete nutter, unlike with the pigeons. I grew bored with that kind of relationship quickly. I like the nuances of interdependence and insight.

Find out more about who I am and what I do: thinkingroom.org