Lacunae
There is always this image associated with nature that it’s perfect. Animals and plants fit seamlessly together into these ancient eco-systems, and only humans don’t know how to fit in, what to do with themselves or how to stop fucking this harmony up.
So it was quite encouraging to see this hapless male weaver bird not getting it right. There is a river at the bottom of my garden where I like to sit and have a quiet smoke, and I couldn’t help noticing this poor little critter, busy creating his useless nests, year after year. Every spring he builds four or five nests in a tree on my bank of the river and every spring, the female weavers reject his labours without fail.
Some of the nests are really well built, some are patchy affairs. The little dude is really active about promoting his works, good or bad, to the females. Advertising is not his weak suit. But time and again, they come to inspect the nests, quite reluctantly it seems, and then fly off, leaving him desperately twittering and bouncing up and down on the twiggy branches. Wifeless, eggless, futureless, hopeless. But still optimistic.
Across the river, on the opposite bank, other male weavers have established successful homes for their broods several times. It would appear that all this dude has to do it fly across river and set up some female-luring nests there. But he’s a stubborn character, and somehow he’s got it into his head that this tree will become the next weaver bird haven, if only the females would see some sense.
There are certain patterns in my head which repeat themselves: like records with grooves, which get deeper each time the needle gets stuck in them. Psychologists call these lacunae. I’ve learned, over time, to accept that if I return to these scars and pick at the scabs, they bleed.
So I circumnavigate around these painful areas in the psyche. Some wounds just never heal, I guess. But I never give up hope that one day, I’ll find a fresh path in there, or that I’ll be armed with some new knowledge, and when I leave … the wounds will disappear. And when my guard is down, I find myself back there, fiddling and picking at the wound. Like that weaver bird. Eternally optimistic. Never learning.
Ah, well. At least nature also fucks it up sometimes.
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