Peter and Kingfisher
Where I sit by River Avon, I am delighted to often see Kingfishers flying past. On occasion their appearance and behaviour is remarkable: Kingfisher appears directly in response to my invocation or simply to my loving presence.
One morning I was quietly sitting by River, giving loving attention to all I noticed, including Kingfishers passing and engaged in fishing. Suddenly, Kingfisher arrives, flying low upstream close to the bank, passing within a yard of my feet hanging over the bank, then swoops up into the willow tree, circles around, plunges down again and wheels off upstream out of sight. As ki[i] passes close to me, I am caught by the characteristic whirring flight, then as ki rises in the tree the sun catches the feathers in a brilliant turquoise against the green leaves. Amazing, beautiful, special.
At first I rather sceptically questioned that this should be seen as an ontopoetic event, as I had not been engaged in overt invocation. Yet as Freya Mathews responded, ‘To me your kingfisher moment seems like a quintessential ontopoetic response! Your visit to River, your attentive frame of mind, your inner address, all constitute the invocation’.
A longer narrative engaging with Kingfisher is Cracked Open with Love.
[i] A note on pronouns. We agree with botanist and indigenous plant woman Robin Wall Kimmerer that to refer to sentient beings using the pronoun ‘it’ is not only odd, it contributes to the objectification of sentient beings. Yet standard English offers no alternative. Kimmerer suggests rather than it we use ‘ki’ singular and ‘kin’ plural to refer to other-than-human persons, and here I am following her suggestion. I also capitalize the names of beings as proper nouns, when we experience ourselves in active relation to them. This is at times awkward, and it is not easy to be consistent, but this awkwardness in itself alerts us to our habitual objectification of the world around us. (Kimmerer, 2017)