Letters to Viv: The Birds That Made Me Look Up

Turns out the birds and I are both making a comeback, and only one of us is doing it gracefully.

Letters to Viv
Open, soul-packed letters to the kind of human I write for: the curious, creative, exhausted by the hustle, and craving something more. I’m writing to you (and me).

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Dear Viv,

What caught my attention wasn’t the bird. It was the sound.

I was stretched out by the pool with my book, doing a grand job of nothing at all, which is still a novelty I haven't stopped marvelling at. Then this cry came ringing down from somewhere above me, sharp and strange and like nothing I'd ever heard, and it lifted my eyes clean off the page.

I looked up like an eejit, hand over my eyes, squinting into the sun. Two birds, circling high over the mountains, not a care between them. Big things, broad in the wing. My first thought was a hawk of some sort, then maybe an eagle, though what would I know. The closest I’ve come to a bird of prey is a dodgy chicken fillet taco in Mexico, that didn’t go well. For the next few days they had me. Every time that call drifted down I’d stop whatever I was at and tip my head back to find them, looking, I’m sure, like a woman who’d misplaced something in the clouds.

A bit of digging, and a friend who actually knows these things, set me straight. Red Kites. Rust-gold underneath when the light hits them right, wings stretched the whole width of the sky, floating up there like they’d made some private arrangement with gravity that the rest of us weren’t offered. Naturally, I went down the rabbit hole because this is apparently who I am now: a woman who turns up in Mallorca and, within the week, knows more about a bird of prey than she does about her own pension.

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

Here’s the fascinating part, Viv. There was a time these birds had all but vanished from parts of Europe. Their numbers fell away to almost nothing and for a long while you’d have been lucky to clap eyes on one at all. Then people stepped in, years of careful protecting and patient minding, and slow as anything, they came back. Now they own the sky over valleys like this one, swanning about as if they were never away.

I'm not going to sit here and compare myself to a bird, though if I come home from Spain introducing myself as a majestic bird of prey you have my full permission to stage an intervention. It's their comeback I can't stop thinking about.

What happens after all the rebuilding?

These last two years have been their own kind of rehabilitation, haven’t they? Learning to trust myself again. Learning to hear my own voice under the racket of everyone else’s. Learning to put down the life that looked grand on paper and pick up the one that actually feels right in my bones, even when it’s terrifying and when half of it makes no sense to anyone watching.

And the strange thing, lying here with my books and my siestas and my dinners that don’t get going until half the night’s gone, is that I don’t feel like I’m healing anymore. I feel like I’m getting ready. There’s a difference in it that I landed on this week. Healing has you tending a wound, careful and slow with your eyes down. Getting ready has you standing at the lip of something with the wind coming up to meet you.

Every time those kites come wheeling over the mountains, I feel it land in my chest. This low hum of excitement I haven’t felt in years. A sense that the whole lot of it has been carrying me somewhere. The hard conversations nobody got to see, the writing, the thousand small decisions made alone in borrowed rooms, all of it leading toward something bigger than the life I left.

Somewhere that’s going to ask me to use my wings.

That’s what’s so remarkable, watching these majestic creatures. They’re not flogging themselves stupid up there. No frantic flapping, or white-knuckling it, no masterclass called Seven Steps to Soar Faster and Monetize Your Altitude. They open their wings and let the wind take a turn of the work, which, for a woman who spent her whole adult life treating urgency like a personality, is a fairly revolutionary thing to sit and watch from a sun lounger.

So if you’re feeling restless lately, love, if you’re wondering when it’s your go, if everything’s gone strange and slow on you, I don’t think slow means stopped. Sometimes we’re standing still and calling it failure, when really we’re just gaining altitude. Learning the wind. Building our wings out of sight, long before anyone sees you fly.

Somewhere up above all the noise, there’s already a sound calling your name. You’ll likely hear it before you ever see its shape.

They came back, Viv. So will we.

XO,
Tanya

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