When I was a child, in the late 1970s, the chimney on our house was not used for fires, we had an electric bar fire in the living room and then, when the money was available, central heating. One day I woke to a strange sound in my bedroom. Scrabbling, a kind of soft knocking and to my amazement the odd chirp. Somewhere in my room was a bird. It didn’t take long to work out it was under the floor.
It must have been a weekend as Dad was at home. He came and listened and then left my room to return with a crowbar. First he opened the large window to its fullest extent – and it was huge, big enough for an adult to climb through if need be – then he pulled the curtains so that only the open window was visible. He closed the bedroom door and asked me to stay flat against the wall opposite the window. I did as I was asked, full of excitement and wonder at what was going to happen.
Dad levered up a couple of floor boards then joined me against the wall. He put a finger to his lips and we waited silently. At first there was no sound at all from the floor. Then, once again, the scrabbling sound. A Robin emerged from under the floor and sat on the edge of the floorboards, just looking.
To me, at that time, Robin seemed to take forever to make a decision. Robin did finally fly directly to the window sill and sit there for a moment, looking around. Then, Robin looked at me. Black eyes, first one and then another. I had never been observed by a non-human, wild living creature before (at least not that I was aware of). It was a thrill of connection, not an intellectual one though. It was simply two living creatures with beating hearts and breathing lungs noticing aliveness in another. It was communication both above and below the normal consciousness, without bundles of words and labels getting in the way. I knew and so did Robin. Then Robin flew out of the window. Free.
Sadly, on further investigation, Dad found the skeletons of two birds under the floorboards. He quickly arranged to have the chimney capped, but I was distraught and cried my eyes out. Surely there could be nothing worse than being trapped, alone in the dark, life’s precious energy spent in desperate scrabbling and flapping until weakness and the truth of death claimed you.
As I got older, I realised that is how the majority of us spend our lives. We trammel and cage the wild joy of life, the instinct to run barefoot on the grass in the open field of a wondrous and complex self. We box and cage, erect boundaries and make rules until we are as trapped as a bird under the floorboards.
But in that darkness of the self lies the jewel of wild, free, instinctual joy; the fierce delight of being alive.
I hope this short blog post will inspire you to look for jewels that you have in the hidden spaces under the floorboards, your own beauty in the dark.