Dancing birds

 

Have you seen beautiful, colorful birds courting their lady love? They dance, spread their amazing wings, flick tails in fabulous patterns and let out the best of vocals to attract and woo their lady love. With a negligible exception, it’s the males who go into a great eye-catching show in courting the females. There is a thrower of charms and there is a receiver of those charms. So much for the scheme of this polarity!

That amazing range of play-acted maneuvers (under the impulse of hormonal throw of energy) is not what the male persona is under ordinary circumstances. The show of romantic heroism is an exception; just an ecstatic throw of mood and attitude to catch the female’s attention. These are momentary sprouts. They don’t define the normal traits of a common bird in its day-to-day life. For the rest of the time they are simple birds, doing normal things just like any other bird of the species. And I don’t think the female birds mind that. They are lucky that they don’t have memory like women to remember all this dancing.

The restless male energy is always looking for rest in the silent pools of receptive female energy. She too is looking for the wearied runner to walk home and rest in her receptive folds. It gives a meaning to her life. It fulfills her. It saves her from the restless void, the procreative emptiness brimming with the potential to manifest and create new life forms.

There is hardly any difference between a colorful bird pirouetting in dandy mode using the tail and wings and singing best songs and a man wooing a woman. At the peak of hormonal storm, he jumps to fulfill all the columns of female expectations. That’s natural. But that’s not what he is in the normal state. He is a normal guy otherwise.

Under the patriarchal system, the man has convinced himself to be far superior to the woman. It’s factually very-very incorrect. There is a deep-seated acceptance of his inferiority and to cover that the system of patriarchy was built up. And to justify his patriarchy construct, he is trying his best to fit in the chauvinistic slot from as many angles as possible. When he covets a woman and goes into the process of wooing her, he adopts an emergency ploy to appear the best in all slots. He is helpless and it’s all about bright colors, bright dance, bright song, best attitude, best look, best behavior, best hobbies and much-much more. Truth and genuineness take a backseat. Falsehoods creep in long before we even realize. And where falsehoods creep in, miseries entail in good measure.

O thou poor dancing bird and the still poorer man! But a lady bird can be duped. The dandy can afford to be normal after the deed is done. But not so with a woman. She has a brain and a nice memory. She remembers the entire range of colorful somersaults that you have been doing to get her hand. And that becomes her benchmark to assess you. Now how long you will maintain the crest of your best version? Of course you will come down to a normal self as the fever comes down. Then you appear such a poor guy, almost a cheater who pretended to be what he isn’t usually. I think a woman can be more forgiving if she accepts that the poor guy was simply doing a wooing dance like a bird in the Amazon forest. He is simply throwing his message to have a partner. The content of the message isn’t what he is in reality. It’s just a catchy title to draw attention, like an eye-catching book title and its cover. The title might appear attractive but the story is usually mundane, very-very common.

The bird cannot be dancing forever at the best of its colors and the best of songs. Naturally it will become a common bird after the energetic storm is over. The beautiful parrot turns a boring crow. But brother, why did you try to be what you are not. You gave your best in wooing her and that raised the bar of her expectations. And expectations breed disappointments. She expects you to be the very same beautifully cooing and majestically dancing parrot. She is right in sulking over the dull crow cawing boringly by her side. 

The irony is that we get habituated to take the wooing dance as the primary characteristics in an individual, i.e., we take the catchy title as the story itself. Isn’t that a mistake? The excitement and thrill that one gets out of the bird dance is addictive in nature. We need to learn to be comfortable with normal people around us. We need to give respect and love to the ordinary humanity. Sadly we hold high expectations from people. To fulfill those heavy expectations he is all valor, grace, dignity, bravery, stability, unqualified giving and masculine handsomeness; and she is all receptivity, feminine grace, support, acceptance, care and share—both sides trying their best. Effort beyond a limit breeds artificiality. This artificiality then ends up in stumping each other. After all, how long will one keep jumping at his/her best? Ultimately we have to get grounded. The boring normalcy sets in. The dreams vanish. The colors fade. The songs turn to ugly croakings. Angels turn to dark angels. Then both sides part ways; look for new partners, expecting the thrill of wooing exception to be the everlasting normal. No wonder most of us are a series of broken relationships.

That’s why it’s advisable to be just normal, the real self, even during the phase of courting a partner. Stay as you normally are. Honesty is a highly undervalued trait in the modern society. But primarily it’s the sole trait that decides whether we are carried as a miserable junk into the cemetery or a peaceful corpse looking at whom not many people get scared. I remember the face my mother after she had left her body. She looked angelic and so beautiful in her eternal sleep.

If someone accepts you with your dull colors, weird dancing and funny songs that relationship has a better chance of survival for a longer time. Truth always serves well in the long term. It may appear to let us down in the short term, giving us little-little disappointments and let downs. But it saves us from major collapses in the long term.

One may wonder why this guy is preaching about relationships. Yours truly tries to speak from his own experiences. Experiential knowledge is very near to truth. I did my own set of fabulous dancing for seven years—just once in life and with one person only. I can feel myself almost boasting about the fact. It simply means I have to clear more webs from around my eyes to see more clearly. It’s wise to learn from one’s experience.

Using my creativity I built up a grandiose avatar, almost like a shining angel, and became the crowning prince in her big eyes. In flying too high I burnt my wings. So couldn’t afford to fly anymore after seven years. When I landed on the plane of normalcy, she felt cheated on witnessing my normal colors and mundane songs; her dreams broken, her shining angel merely a common person like anyone around, no longer able to maintain her beautiful dream. There was a normal crow cawing around her. But I’m happy that these are the days of women empowerment. She was confident, self-standing and glamorous, with a smile to kill and eyes that could intoxicate a dozen men with a single glance. No wonder, I saw her flying away with a beautiful swan that was flying in the seventh heaven to fill up the slots of her expectations. ‘You idiot, you too will fall one day!’ I cawed from the ground. Even as a self-believed spiritualist I am happy that he too fell within a couple of years. I take it as a mark of victory for having flown more than him. I’m not bothered about other men but at least I viewed him as a rival.

Normal cawing has its own benefits. It taught me poetry. There were emotional storms in the tea-cup, which I amply cashed by forcibly trying to be philosophical in nature. Lost love, or for that matter any type of loss, is invisibly preparing you for many other gains in many forms. There comes a day when you actually feel gratitude for those losses in shaping what you later became. You realize that those losses were meant to make you what you are today. So I respect the past without any grudges, but I’m far happier with my present and give due credit to all the experiences I went through.

I also realized that maybe I had punched far-far above my weight in wooing and actually winning her. But how long you will keep the arena clear of rivals if the girl is such a head turner that there are at least a dozen men dancing to her tunes with their tongues out? To match her big aura I too had acquired larger dimensions like a porcupine spreading its thorns to look more imposing. All said, as a man I take full responsibility for creating those expectations. And as Buddha said expectations breed sufferings—at one end at least, if not both. Most importantly, I’m happy for her. Why should men have all the fun? The women have been subjugated for too long and they have lots to cover up in enjoyment and normal fun which we the men have enjoyed so far.

Thankfully, I seem to have spent all the wooing fuel in one go. Wise people don’t need to repeat the same experience to get the same lesson again and again. As far as beautiful girls are concerned, I am able to impersonally appreciate them like a flower, with a pleasant detachment. I connect more to old women with their motherly aura and saintly faces carrying the majestic wrinkles of age. Maybe losing my mother is a far bigger weight on my soul than losing the woman I loved.

These days, while watching the colorful birds dancing and singing in the documentaries to woo their ladies I become very conscious, even embarrassed. I cannot blame them. All of us are birds in the same way. But I always wag my admonishing finger and mutter, ‘Son, take care! You will have to pay for this!’

And now on a serious note. Retain your simple colors, ordinary steps and normal songs while wooing a partner. If he or she accepts you with your normal stuff that’s well and good. If not, give it a damn and laugh at all the artificially jumping love-birds—ranging from the birds in documentaries to the people around you—and go giggling about this funny game.