Lost Companions by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Author:Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

And now comes the immensely popular book I referred to earlier, The Hidden Life of Trees, which makes clear to the lay reader just how much communication takes place from tree to tree, and how sophisticated their lives actually are.

The reason I bring this up is because I find it very hard to explain why I hate losing plants, but this newfound comprehension of their sensitivity and responsiveness might help. I miss them when they’re not there. It might well be that they, too, recognize that I provide them with water and care, and am making their life easier. They certainly make mine easier: I like to be surrounded by green growing things. Actually, everyone does. Even hospitals today recognize that patients do better when they are surrounded by green plants, and can look out on a green landscape from their windows.

When I was young, I “kept” birds. I put that word in quotation marks, because it seems to me appropriate. Birds are really not meant to be kept. They should be free to fly and meet their mates and live their lives as nature intended them to do. That said, there can be no doubt that we form very strong bonds with the birds that we raise, and it would appear that this goes both ways. Since many birds form pair bonds for life (that is they marry with divorce rates nowhere like ours), when they are deprived of a suitable avian mate, they have no choice but to form that bond with us. And they do. I had those bonds with “my” birds when I was young, and recently I was reminded by a remarkable book of just how deep those bonds can go. I am referring to Dr. Lorin Lindner’s Birds of a Feather: A True Story of Hope and the Healing Power of Animals. Lorin is a psychologist focusing on trauma, especially veterans and PTSD. She founded Serenity Park for parrots and military veterans with trauma issues in the 387-acre Veterans Administration Medical Center grounds in West L.A. That has now moved to The Lockwood Animal Rescue Center for wolves, wolfdogs, coyotes, horses, parrots, and other animals. The parrots were “relinquished” by their former “owners” or they were removed by authorities for neglect and abuse. Lorin, whose sanctuary I have visited several times, has a special gift for getting close to these parrots. I wrote to her and asked her to tell me how their deaths had affected her, and she wrote back as follows, one of the most profound accounts about the suffering felt at the death of parrots that I have read:

Just days before I was going to pick up my two Moluccan cockatoos, Sammy and Mango, to bring them home from where they were temporarily boarding, I received a frantic call from the caretaker. She had found Mango on the ground, bleeding.

With trauma, we often enter a dissociated state. Everything seems surreal. People sometimes describe a sense of time moving slowly or being outside of their bodies and watching their movements from above.

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