Bird-Prayers Skyward

How the breeding patterns of birds contain the secrets of art and creativity

On the other side of Lughnasadh, 

I am peach-plum-cherry-fed

and grateful.

The Loyal dog-star is

looking for a lullaby

while Venus confounds,

walks backwards 

laughing, 

raised up loose on leonine haunches. 

I am willing to be prey 

today and everyday.

Hatching the gift of a Blakean Fabergé egg,

deep in the sacred flooded gallery 

of my dreaming,  

I am shaking off the dysentery 

with bird-prayers—

here you go: 

It is a rare thing to make a bird. We can call it art.

First we have courtship. The male performs his dances, shakes his tail feathers, gathers pieces of the world up into a nest, all in the hopes of attracting a female that they may together create new life. They mate. She lays an egg. They take turns incubating the egg until it comes hatching time and the new life must peck its way out of its perfect container. This tender chick must then be fed and tended to; bird-prayers are lifted skyward. Winged strength is tested on the winds of this world.

The breeding cycle of birds is a beautiful means of organizing creative energy. As artists and creators, we can ask ourselves, “Where are we in the bringing forth of life?”

Art is a mating dance with the world. We move through existence walking down city streets, swirling through countryside, getting pulled into the Dreamtime by a scene in a movie, being moved to tears by a song or brought to our knees by a poem, somehow laughing in hospital rooms, cradling the funeral urn, lining up to get on planes and throw ourselves across the earth, making love, working dead-end jobs, cooking each other dinner—all of this is courtship. All of this is a heart-full attempt to build the nest that invites soul and life into our existence.

As artists, we are tasked with courting the world until we have gathered up enough of the raw material of life to make a nest inviting enough to attract Beauty and Truth. Sometimes we have to build nest, after nest, after nest. We might pass through whole seasons of our lives without attracting soul or life. We grow desperately lonely in that lack, but then that becomes a piece of the nest. Maybe the loneliness is the piece of the nest that was missing after all—that sadness, that longing the final shining bright berry in our Bower Bird’s nest, our cathedral of hope. 

Vogelkop Bowerbird, Anonymous