This Is the Cage, and It’s Killing You
None of us were born for captivity
“The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo” — Desmond Morris
When I was a kid, my neighbor had an owl
A barn owl, I think. She was white, and she was beautiful. Her heart-shaped face was jeweled with glittering black eyes capable of freezing small mammals in their tracks.
Our neighbor brought it around to show us one day. We were city kids. We’d never seen a bird so magnificent as the one that clutched her arm, occasionally flapping silent wings as it fixed us all with an arrogant stare. Raptors are like that.
She was a witchy sort of woman, our neighbor. An old-school hippie with a waterfall of long gray hair that made her look like some female druid. She had an obese cat named Woodstock, named after the legendary 1969 music festival. I don’t remember the owl’s name. Maybe I never knew it.
The neighbors built a special house for the owl in their yard. A tall structure of steel mesh, covered in black sheeting to give the creature some privacy. That much-needed darkness. It slept through the day, the way that owls do.
But in the suburban night, when street lights flicker on and curtains are drawn tight, the owl woke up to find the world that belonged to it.
Sometimes at night we would hear it calling, when summer’s open windows brought the darkness into our home. From the bedroom I shared with my brother, I could see the tall enclosure, though not the bird itself. But we heard her. We heard her calling into the blackness as though she couldn’t understand what fate brought her there, plucked out of the wild night sky to live out her days in an octagonal prison.
You weren’t born for a cage
There’s a reason imprisonment and confinement are the harshest punishment civilized societies can dole out. It breaks people. Owls are born for the dark beauty of the night, and we are born for the bright sun and the radiant plain and the whispering edge of the sea. As much a part of this world, though we like to pretend otherwise, as the birds and the flowers and the silver drops of rain that fall like molten glass.
