I have always loved the idea of the phoenix. I’m a bit of a sucker for rebirth.
There is just something about the idea that after the fire, something is reborn from the ashes. Something new, yet something ancient.
Something that has been here a thousand times before – but not quite like this.
This is not my first blog. I have been here before, done this before. But not for a long time. I have been about four different people since then. I let it all burn away to ash. Tucked the last flickering flame behind a cold grate and left it to starve. But a phoenix doesn’t die, doesn’t flicker out.
In general, baby birds are born without feathers. (And a phoenix is a mythological bird, after all.*) They are not exactly beautiful. They are strange little creatures, mostly gaping mouths, waiting for their feathers to grow in. They cannot fly. They are missing some of the most key features that come to mind when people think of birds. And yet, they will get their feathers and learn to soar across the sky, despite their cold, pink, wrinkly beginnings.
I am starting anew. I know I have to make peace with the fact that it is not going to begin with the brilliant bird with feathers of fire, but with something too small and fragile to leave the nest. Something not yet as lovely as I would like it to be. Something still growing feathers. Something still squawking because it hasn’t yet learnt to sing.
The beginning is difficult- it is easier to say “I could do that” and dream, than it is to face the fact that you are so far from where you want to be. To create proof of your own inexperience and inadequacies, and then face it – flinching maybe, but not turning away – to find the next step from here to there.
Here’s what I can tell you, as a self-professed, practically professional beginner: you just have to start. It’s amazing what you can figure out after that bit.
So this is me restarting. It is old and it is new. Familiar and strange. It is coming home, somehow, in a foreign land.
{*And maybe a mythological bird is born in a blaze of glory, but who is going to fight me on the science of magic birds? They go out in a blaze of glory, per the myth. But something new emerges from that ash. A baby, in some way. And I choose the story of the scrawny baby bird phoenix. The most important stories are always the ones you tell yourself. I choose this one.}