Bluebird – my take on Bukowski's emotions
Bluebirds are elegant, beautifully feathered, inimitable, rhythmic birds. Male bluebirds generally don’t reveal their beaks while they sing, unlike different songbirds similar to a Meadowlark. Bukowski picked a pretty accurate metaphor for emotions and, more so, one’s intimate relationship with one's feelings.
Spiritually, bluebirds are a sign of happiness, reflecting cheer and hope. Both ways, birds — are simple and contradicting. Complex in their nature, genuine amongst each other, and represented as transparent creatures.
Attending to the sounds of a bird singing is liberating, yet in all their spirit, birds couldn’t care less about generating supplementary noise within the environment, no matter how early in the day. A male will sing 1,000 songs an hour while seeking to draw in a mate, then hold off on singing throughout the incubation period.
Birds — they sing, exhausting and releasing the essence of their emotions and excitement, day in and day out. Yet, the mere thought of covering a bird’s mouth whilst it frees itself lives to be a cruel, disturbingly suffocating and suppressive act. Let alone a concept one would even begin to reason.
Yet, why is it socially accepted, an invisible tightrope weighing down at our oesophagal, clenching at our cords, drying up an utter?
This remains a disturbingly suffocating, suppressive and harmful act for us humans, too.
Although a pretty relatable feeling — merely a strange concept we have. Supression — being a ”Normal” concept living inside the most of us.
While we worry, our emotions are characterised or perceived as too big, too loud, too much, or incorrect. We worry if we express our thoughts, our intentions and perceptions will be doomed. At the same time, we shrink and judge ourselves at the very thought of them being illogical, irrational, stigmatised, and dark. Fear of the practicality of our life and falling into the entire disclosure of barely existing and exposing our truth may generate the uncertainty of someday being — abandoned, misunderstood, or shamed.
However, emotions, just like the bluebird, long to be expressed and then freed. From the suppression of our cage, we built on judgment and bias. Ripe sovereignty emerges in overcoming the peelings of our truth. To be free, we need to stay healthy, let go, move on, embrace who we are — and who we are meant to be, and finally, accept.
Ultimately, what an amenity it is to be naked, wholly exposed, and enveloped by the tenderness of our truth. Rarely endured, just when the world is fast asleep — are the existence of our emotions temporarily freed — resembling the sheer bravery of the short-term bluebird.
‘I haven’t quite let him die’ — expressing that under no circumstance will we ever be capable of ridding ourselves of our authentic selves. Even though it may seem as though it is deeply hidden – temporarily. It will forever live there, similar to a repetitive melody on repeat in the background, with no control over pausing it. However, he seldomly existed in feeling and expressing his truth entirely, but only hardly whilst the world sleeps through the night. The sheer concept of standing naked, fully raw in exposure to the words and experiences surrounding our skin, we shiver in the cold reality of the plausibility of possibly being recognized, acknowledged, maybe freed following this sudden exposure.
We immediately crave a blanket to insulate our truths for hours or even days. Eventually, there breathes freedom on the other side of recognising and standing faithfully to our genuine nature. And this alone is a delicious indulgence.
The bluebird is an intriguing metaphor for our heavyweight, difficult-to-digest emotions, similar to that Bukowski experienced longing to be freed. He also acknowledged the heaviness that emotions, too, can weep if not taken out now and then.
‘I’m too strong for him’—He wanted to release, yet he ended up pushing his bluebird deep, deep down, to the pits of himself, in shame of the so-called ‘practicality’ of this” life,” in the fear that he would appear incapable.
He intellectualized freeing his emotions, so he never did.
He feared the embarrassment he would endure from the crowd, and he shielded himself endlessly from any welcome vulnerability to the world.
Yet, it was only the fear of his own evaluation and not the masses.
Finally, an unuttered emotion weighs as heavy as a sober male bluebird aspiring to sing to attract his mate but travelling alone without his cords, with his heart weighing as heavy as the whole world on his feathers.
How meaningless is our existence if we ruthlessly shoulder and swallow our emotions, retiring to a shallow, temporary, mundane illusion of a world with closed curtains for the feared arrival of our truth?
Departing the possibility of perhaps being understood and loved for the above is independence.
Bukowski investigates a profound human fact.
If we remain vulnerable at our core and often try to hide this vulnerability with various defences, some helpful, others not so much, suffering may frankly be inevitable.
This suffering also impacts the quality of our lives and those we love.
However, when we reveal our true selves, something extraordinary happens. We discover immense strength in what we thought we needed to guard. This realization leads us to freedom, self-acceptance, and compassion.
Below, I have copied Charles Bukowski's poem.
It spoke truth to me and perhaps to you, too.
Only until I spread the wings and freed my bluebird.
. . . .
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him
I say, stay in there
I’m not going to let anybody see you
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks
never know that he’s in there
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him
I say
stay down, do you want to mess me up?
you want to screw up the works?
you want to blow my book sales in Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep
I say, I know that you’re there
so don’t be sad
then I put him back
but he’s singing a little in there, I haven’t quite let him die
and we sleep together like that with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to make a man
weep
but I don’t weep
do you?
