Cosmic Shifts as I Age
Author’s Note: This is a Memoir piece written in the First Person. This style of writing was made famous by Truman Capote’s true crime novel, In Cold Blood written in 1966. According to Lee Gutkind, the American author known as the “guru” of this genre (“Creative Non-Fiction”), it can be defined as true stories well told, utilising some or all of the features of fictional narrative, viz vivid characterisation, events, metaphor, dialogue and setting, while reflecting the true experiences of the author. This story was first published on Medium.
It was autumn in Sydney, my favourite season when the blue was at its bluest and wrapped the sky in a shiny package like a Christmas present waiting under the tree. I’d always needed to experience things rather than know them. So my new awareness was not a cognitive awakening like the one I had read about in Doctor Copernicus when I was in my early thirties. In the novel, the 35-year-old protagonist Canon Nicolas Kopernick was about to make his gigantic discovery: that the Sun and not Earth was at the centre of the world. He would then go on to write a book: On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres that would change the way astronomers thought about the heavenly bodies: published just before he passed away at eighty-one. It was so simple, so ravishingly simple, that at first he did not recognise it for what it was. (Doctor Copernicus: John Banville)
This was not the first time something similar had happened, like a sign from “beyond the veil”, mysterious and inexplicable with spiritual underpinnings. Aunt Eliza was doing poorly at the time and in need of a good story. She had warned me, obliquely, from the hospice bed that it would be my turn next. Physical demise sets in as three score years and ten approaches, she’d warned, and increases with the flitting past of time. I wondered if most people, as I myself did, continued to look and feel like thirty, at least on the inside, well into old age.
It was quite a good story, the one about the Willy Wagtail, if a little strange and out of left field for a person like my dear aunt who aspired to certainties. She was victim to the laws of medical science, including mercy doses of morphine at the time.
It was during the years of Covid in Sydney. My younger cousin, the gerontologist, had secured the bed for his mother in this sterile hospital, where many ghost-like souls slumbered in cane chairs or wandered the wards as if looking for something they had lost. Even getting inside to visit Aunty had been a rigmarole in itself. My esteemed cousin would say in response to my “tall stories” that it was cognitive decline as one aged, showing signs of frontal lobe shrinkage. Foretelling a need, he’d add, to slow down as the eighth decade drew nearer and nearer. With the help of morphine, Aunt Eliza had died peacefully as her ninth decade struck. A text book “dying” if ever there were one!
Yes, the first sign had been the coming of Willy Wagtail, little show-off in his black-and-white suit who had imprinted on me last winter. It would not have made such an impact if the bird had not spooked me by manifesting inside our closed apartment that evening. Hiding in the laundry closet before whistling to alert me of his presence. I had had to coax him out through the front balcony, usually shielded from the street by glass sliding doors. He had feathers, after all, I reasoned, to protect himself from the cold.
I had mimicked Willy’s call one day. It was nothing like “Sweet pretty creature” that Grandma on Mother’s side in the country had taught me to be the mating call of wagtails. Much more lyrical, at other times hissing and angry like an egotistical infant demanding to be noticed.
I would not have given it another thought if it had not occurred at the time of a young relative’s passing: So soon at just eighteen… It made me angry to think of all these youths self harming and not enough mental health support to go around. Like an ugly virus spreading its tentacles, spraying the most vulnerable with invisible toxins. The poor mothers feeling helpless…
But there had been other signs, making three in all, that most prescient of numbers. I had not recounted the other two stories to my aunt, who had expired in the meantime due to her advanced age and declining health. My adult children had not yet reached an age susceptible to mystical stirrings and none of my friends or other relative were open to hearing such “fabulations” as they would have called my tales. So I kept the following stories to myself:
Driving along the Prince’s Highway from the city in mid autumn, I had become aware of the vault of the sky above for the very first time. I heard or imagined an exultant voice narrating lines from several quatrains of The Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam, which I’d loved and recited from when I’d first read them many years before. They evoked the mystery of Persia during the tenth and eleventh centuries when magical Sufism was still in practice and before worlds beyond the seas had been discovered.
AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Starts to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a voice within the Tavern cry,
Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life’s Liqor in its Cup be dry.
I had a sense from the rhyming cadence of the beloved quatrains that some Persian astronomers might have known about the heliocentric theory of astronomy at this early time leading up to and during the Religious Crusades.
But my realisation was nothing like that of the good doctor’s: Copernicus’. No, mine was a sudden and visceral experience. The blue so bright, almost opaque next to the contrasting white of the shape-shifting clouds. And more than this, I saw how the azure filled the full vault of what I’d simply called “the sky” up until this time. Now it was all around me as I travelled south towards my daughter’s place: to the east, the west, in front of me, above the car and, if I could look behind, it was there as well. ‘It’s all around you,’ the voice was saying: It’s here and everywhere you can turn, surrounded on all sides as we are by the mystery of infinite space.’
The next day I had seen the first of the whales, boundless creatures sailing by with unshut eye, migrating north towards warmer climes for breeding. When they breached, it was as if they knew we landlubbers were admiring them, entranced at their dexterity, beauty and aquatic cleverness.
As autumn moved towards the greyness of winter near the beach, the green-and-white caps of the waves competed with the softening hues of the vault above. I had tried to swim up until the King’s Birthday weekend. It was becoming more and more difficult because of the rain and the bad weather. But I had managed once or twice and it was a rewarding experience when I did so. The temperature of the water was always warmer early on than that of the air outside: 20 degrees to seventeen. A strange thing in itself. Like the way the off-shore island moved position in relation to me just as the moon at night was wont to do as I walked straight along the beachfront. And the way the curve of the horizon showed itself when ships were either just in front or just behind it out at sea.
And now this. This was more than weird: Feeling water on the floor matting at night, as if my feet were walking in clear pools of liquid. And water under my feet when I got out of bed in the morning and placed my soles gingerly on the seagrass carpets. I had googled it for medical input: ‘The swelling of feet and ankles from fluid called edema especially in summer.’ But that was not the case for myself in mid winter now. The other solution was, as many had claimed, more esoteric. I’d read about how we were made up of eighty percent water. What was this water trying to tell me? Voicelessly? Was it the elements fighting back against climate change? Or was it something more poetic? Deeply mysterious whatever it was.
As if he knew I was writing about him, he whistled just now outside my study door. I whistled nonchalantly back and peeped through the window at Willy Wagtail on the plastic stool attached to the wall. He had left for a time each spring to breed but had come back afterwards and reclaimed his post. Always there when the weather turned cold and windy. It was a comfort knowing he was here each night. Fluffed up on his perch, little head tucked in, just through the glass doors to our bedroom.
Perhaps Aunty who had recently passed and my nephew, as well as our many ancestral relatives, all of them might be out there, just through the veil, praying for us to show a sign to them — or respond to their gestures so that they knew we were a least aware of their continued existence.
I saw now that the cheeky little bird was waiting for any chance he could to slip inside the unit when I turned my back, leaving the sliding doors open for a moment. It was as if he wanted to be a part of the family. Was he the spirit or the soul of the young relative who had so recently passed? I had just googled “Australian Wagtails” for the first time. In some Aboriginal cultures, they are seen as messengers, sometimes bringing news of significant events, including deaths. Others view them as symbols of good luck, happiness, or even a connection to the spirit world.
It was that voice again interrupting my musings, that lyrical voice, this time with a new and different message: About romantic love and the fleeting nature of time. Or was there something more spiritual concealed beneath the surface of the words?
Come, fill the cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly — and Lo! the Bird is on the wing.
…
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
And Wilderness is paradise enow.
It was so simple: I saw suddenly that my Willy Wagtail, with his joyful moves and steadfast devotion, was a symbol of love, pure and unconditional love, nothing more nor less.
I would sit on the back verandah next time he called to me and recount all the stories for him: the one about my sudden awareness of the vault of the heavens above, the dancing dolphins and welcoming whales, and that of water underfoot inside the unit at night. He would surely listen and understand the depth and sincerity of my experiences.
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