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Dot’s shares the quote of the week.
Hatching is … exhausting work that requires thousands of individual pecks. Should someone decide to intervene, to take the struggle from the Bird and peel back the shell themselves, the Bird will die — because the struggle is not incidental. Not all Birds survive hatching, but a Bird relieved of its struggle arrives in the world loved into helplessness. The resistance of the shell is the making of those who break through it.
– Chloe Hope, Death and Birds
Dear Reader,
Daily readers of this newsletter know my love of Chloe Hope’s Death and Birds newsletter from which today’s quote was lifted. Hope’s reverence for feathered creatures helps me, at least, understand our world a little bit better and even love it a little bit more.
I didn’t know, for instance, that the act of pecking its way out of a shell is what prepares a bird (or, as Hope refers to it, a Bird) for a life full of challenges. That the exhausting work of breaking the shell builds necessary muscle. The struggle, she explains, is not incidental.
I’m not personally a fan of struggle. And when it seems that bad climate news is only mounting, I tend to fall a bit more than I would like into despair.
And yet …
Perhaps our struggle isn’t incidental.
Maybe the exhausting, peck-peck-peck of it — the composting, the biking in the rain, the door knocking to convince my neighbors to vote for a politician who cares about our planet — doesn’t mean we're losing. Maybe it’s exactly what builds the muscles we need to survive what’s next.
Dot doesn’t love this reality. Wouldn’t we all rather have someone peel back the shell for us? Hand us a thriving planet — no pecking required?
But Hope’s Bird doesn’t — mustn’t! — get that option. Neither, it seems, do we. The struggle is necessary for the muscle we need to face life’s (and our planet’s) challenges.
A bird metaphor, no matter how lovely, hasn’t erased my despair, but, for today at least, I’m feeling a little less interested in being handed an easier shell to crack.
Determinedly,
Dot
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