At ten o'clock in the morning, I was working at my desk when suddenly there was a violent crash behind me, like a stone slamming against the glass window, shattering the silence in the office. I got up and went to check, the window was intact, and there was no figure in sight, and then I looked closely at the window pane, and there was a faint circle of irregular white marks on it, like dust. I was puzzled, put my face close to the glass, searched vertically, and saw a big bird lying downstairs, life and death unknown.
When I went downstairs, I found that it was a pigeon, slumped on the ground, with its eyes slightly closed and blood oozing from the corners of its mouth. The force of the impact, combined with the fall from a tall building, killed it. The evidence is conclusive, this is a traffic accident in the bird world, probably because the shadow of the sky is refracted on the floor-to-ceiling windows, so it mistakenly thinks it can pass through while gliding, so it crashes headlong. I held it in my hand, and my body still had residual warmth, and then I had to contact the property to deal with it. Back upstairs, I was immersed in the impact for the whole day, as if I was dizzy.
This pigeon accident reminds me of a story by anthropologist Edward Cohen, also about birds. One day, during his expedition to the Amazon River Basin, he was riding a bus through the mountains when he was suddenly hit by heavy rain and landslides, and the mountains on the side of the road looked like they were about to pour onto the car. He was terrified, completely lost in the imagination of danger, feeling disconnected from the world, and a deep sense of alienation and anxiety permeated his heart.
Even after escaping, he was still in a state of panic and kept thinking crankily. It wasn't until the next day that I was walking along a riverbank and happened to see a Donald Sparrow in the bushes, so I picked up my binoculars and turned the focus knob. The moment Donnay becomes clear in the camera, he experiences an unexpected transformation, the anxiety and disconnection suddenly dissipate, and the whole person comes alive again.
Cohen made a brilliant anthropological analysis of this, and he called the moment of seeing the Donaldfinch "re-grounded." The Donnay Bird led him to a larger world beyond the human mind and Xi, and in doing so, his mind and body were reopened. He called this anthropology "anthropology beyond humanism."
Just seeing a bird activates the connection between people and the world. In the park, we often see some people with professional cameras, pointing their lenses at the bird's nest in the tree, and then holding their breath to take a glimpse of nature
From industrial civilization to digital civilization, people and nature have always been in a deepening estrangement. Human society is like a closed information cocoon, in which we are busy, anxious, entertained, and joyful. That morning, I was busy in my cocoon when the pigeon hit the glass, and the computer screen seemed to be the only horizon. It wasn't until the sound of impact that a light-revealing crack briefly appeared in the cocoon. It dawned on me that there was a much larger world working in sync outside the window, like a parallel time and space. It was only under this extremely unlikely accident that the two interfered with each other.
In the time and space outside the window, the sun rises and sets, time shifts, dusk alternates with morning glow, white clouds are constantly changing and disappearing, kites flying and leaping in the waves, plants are rooted in the earth and grow secretly, and the wind is wandering around, they echo each other from afar, and together constitute a stream of life full of wildness. And the reason why seeing a bird can also heal the body and mind is probably because it makes people step back into the continuous flow of life.
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