I’ve just buried a bird. 

It’s the first day of my bleed and I’m in a lot of physical pain and I’ve buried a bird. 

I didn’t stop to take any photos. And I’m not even sure what kind of bird it was. The whole thing was over pretty quickly, a lot more quickly than I’d imagined, really. Just moments after journaling to myself that I would start taking responsibility for whatever needs doing, as it needs to be done, instead of putting it off until some other (never) later time when it’s usually too late. I looked over at what I had thought was some leaf litter or debris in the garden and I realised that it was a bird.

I thought about thinking about burying it. Then I realised that I would have to actually bury it, there and then, otherwise I’d be putting it off and hoping somebody else might have done it before I got back around to it again sometime probably never. 

Opening the garden shed into a face full of cobwebs, I shuddered to see all the metal-looking equipment that I didn’t even know we had – chains hanging from the roof rafters, shears stuck into the eaves, adult bicycles stashed in the far dark corner – and realised that what I wanted (just a small garden fork) wasn’t in there. So I closed it up again and went to find the fork and trowel in a plant pot on the patio. 

Fresh rain – and lots of it this month – has kept the ground soft and moist. So it was easy to dig a small hole in the bare earth with the trowel, disturbing a few worms whose grey bodies had perhaps never seen the sun’s light, and manoeuvre the dead bird into it after checking it would fit the size and length. 

Cradling the delicate, feathered body – whose neck was loose and whose eyes were gently closed – onto the trowel, I directed it into the burial hole with the fork as tenderly as I could. Realising that this was a sacred moment, I offered up a whispered prayer to my guides and guardians, and neatly covered over the grave. It was done. 

I didn’t know what kind of bird it was. A large-smallish brown one, possibly a young Thrush or Nightingale. 

Earlier today I’ve already said passing prayers for the Hare that lay broken in the middle of the road. And a few days previously I was furiously giving my love, apologies, gratitude and thanks to the young deer torn open at the roadside, whose thick metallic scent was tainting the air from spilled insides.

Today I’m with my own blood and I have buried a bird. 

And this passing cycle has been so visceral and dissolving that it’s hard to believe only a month has passed since the last. For a few days I believed I might be pregnant. And this time, at 43, I had known that I would keep it. No question. This being almost certainly my last chance. Not that I had wanted children, but this time I knew in my bones that I could. 

And yet I am bleeding. Another month done. 

And there’s something within me that knows, too, that it’s my own deep disconnection from the mud and bones of the earth – the sowing and the growing and the harvesting and reaping – that is at the heart of where my trauma lies. 

My deep resistance to the realness of life. 

My dislocation from the site of my own experience. 

My longing to be healed and transformed as I somehow find my way back to reconnect with the earth, myself and my words. 

I have big visions for this idea of Rewilding Writing – which I haven’t even touched on here – but I know that it’s deeply rooted and entangled with my need to reconnect with the Earth, and myself, and my ancestors and their stories. To find my way back to the wildness of words through reweaving myself back into life. 

And these feet of clay can only carry me one step at a time.