Redtree Times

Gaining Understanding–At the West End Gallery

There is a bird and a stone

in your body. Your job is not 

to kill the bird with the stone.

—Victoria Chang, from The Trees Witness Everything (2022)

I spent much of the first half of my life trying to kill my bird.

But that bird is still with me now.

It sometimes soars high in the sky and other times chatters from the trees.

And sometimes it quietly rests in its nest high in those trees and observes its world.

The bird is my joy.

I still have that stone.

I still grip the stone tightly in my hand.

But now it only leaves my hand to protect that bird.

You have to protect your joy.

Here is another song from Ren, my current musical obsession. I promised myself I wouldn’t play another of his songs for quite a while, didn’t want to become a fanboy channel. But this song has been haunting my thoughts for a few days. It seems in line with the feel of this short post. Resisting the urge to throw that stone and keep the bird alive inside us is part of learning how to be ourselves, learning how to not fall prey to our reactions to the pressures of the outside world.

The song is How To Be Me. It is a live recording of a duet of Ren and the British artist Chinchilla. I didn’t know anything about Chinchilla before seeing this a few weeks back. She is very much like Ren in that she is an independent recording artist whose work is very eclectic, resisting the confines of being labeled. I have to admit that her long nails distracted me a bit initially. I think it’s the practical part of my inborn manual laborer identity simply wondering how those nails maneuver everyday tasks. But I now think they actually add to the performance. It’s like they reach out and somehow mesh her voice to his.

I think it’s a pretty powerful song and performance. You may see it differently. That’s okay so long as you remember to keep your bird alive.