Two Dead Birds

A bird (or two?), nested nearby on one of the trees of my neighbor, sings in the morning. On the roof of my dirty kitchen, however, one of my other neighbors ducks died, and it's remains have plagued us for days with a putrid and rotten smell. My senses are touched, penetrated by birds, and my consciousness responds by writing this paragraph today. But I am only affected because I chose to be. I chose to listen more to the birds singing. I chose to look for where that smell was coming from and tried to get rid of it. It could be that I hear the birds' song ones and not seek it or smell the dead duck but ignore it and I will never know it is a duck. There is so much cause for joy and suffering we don't notice because we can't or choose not to or we are limited in our compassion. We almost need to force ourselves to care, to say this is good or this isn't alright. The singing bird adds a minute or two to my life by bringing me out of apathy. The dead bird does the same. The cosmos simply does what it does unconscious of how that affects me, how it depends my life and adds to it. Now there are memories in my mind about these two birds and stories I could write (in fact, I've written in this journal). Life and a death come together as mulch to the imagination and the continued growth of the world, of language, of a life.