“Perplexed is a soft word, charming. A dog turning its head to the side when it doesn’t understand what you mean when you say I love you. I was perplexed, and by this I mean I was stuck in the space between terror and awe. I wasn’t confused; I wasn’t weighing the options. I was startled by the incomprehensible—as if confronted for the first time by vinegar or polka music or a bright yellow. It was delicate, precarious, the eye of the storm. It collapsed, often and easily, into fear or confusion. It was constantly interrupted by self-pity and breakthrough pain.”
“What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
Pigeons and crows are barely animals to me. They’re like nature spirits for cities.
in north america it’s a little complex, actually. The pigeon populations we’re familiar with came as pets and domestic animals from the Old World. There are related birds in the Americas but they don’t prosper anywhere near as well in human cities.
City pigeons in the Americas are kind of like if the social and economic logic for pet and working dogs broke down centuries ago, so long ago that most people have forgotten about them ever existing, and yet pariah dogs still infested remote alleyways and garbage dumps and the like. Someone loved or depended on the distant ancestor of every pigeon you’ll ever meet on this continent, and yet odds are you - or people you know, at least - think of them as flying rats, pests.
Seagulls and crows are nature spirits for cities. Pigeons are by contrast a sort of human eusocial psychopomp, collectively bearing witness to human social structures changing and dying and being reborn, being witnessed by the human constituents of those systems with contempt and disgust when they’re not ignored as background elements, and yet remaining loyal and unchanged by time
Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it, but also the truth. Because who would believe the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival those who were never meant
