Heron wings

Sometimes a new vista opens up, a fragile whiff of freedom that's so welcome on the days when my limitations seem to define me.

In the middle of Manchester, where we were staying at the youth hostel, I met a heron. She buzzed me, flying low over my head on a darkening damp evening, Her freedom, her flight, and her perch high above the canal’s black waters felt like a thrust against the claustrophobia of a city centre in midwinter.

Photo by Jean van der Meulen

She’s stayed with me long after my return home, in a feeling of faint possibility and a sense of freedom. I can still see her wings and her soaring flight, still get that jolt of magic I felt when I opened the curtains the next morning to see her standing silent, on a rooftop across the square. It’s a physical feeling that’s welcome in this body that’s grown tense and closed and trembling.

Life’s been challenging recently, for all sorts of reasons. I got to a place of despair as my symptoms worsened in response to stress and exhaustion. My world has felt shrunken and dull, delineated by the need to pull back from any wild plans to socialise, or stretch myself beyond the absolutely necessary.

But those Heron wings haunt me. I can feel in their sweep a call to a life not just free of pain, slowness and stumbling, but wilder and truer than the life before Parkinson’s. There's a “YES” in their flight that's a counterweight to the constant “No” of my body right now.

So I’m mulling over my “yes” and my “no”. And what I’m realising is this; that I’ve lived life defaulting to “yes”, even when my heart says “no” or “hang on a moment I’m not sure”. For the most part that's because I haven't been at all present with my heart, with how I really feel. It’s also because I’m future-thinking too much, worrying that if I say no, I’ll miss out somehow. Or, heaven forbid, offend someone.

But as wiser souls than I have pointed out, you can’t say a wild, throaty, full-body ‘YES’ to the life that calls you if you can’t say a clear, firm ‘NO’. And if you keep saying yes when you mean no, the contradiction takes a physical shape. Tense muscles, armouring, a chronically settled hypervigilance. You cease being your own ally when you consistently betray your own inner voice.

Heron wings are calling me to a freer life. But first, I need to befriend my ‘no’, and surrender to my limitations as my greatest teachers.