I was staying in the leafy outskirts of Daylesford in an Airbnb with majestic trees towering over the yard. In the hour before check-out, I had been writing about a surprising connection I had found between my poetic biography subject, George Sand, and psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung; both had an uncommon relationship with birds.
When Sand was forced to spend a number of weeks in 1823 in bed-rest, preparing for the confinement of her first child, she tied fir branches to her bed and covered it with a green cloth to make it an attractive haven for the birds who were suffering in that particularly harsh winter, at her rural estate at Nohant [1]. She had taken to her bed on the basis of advice from her family medical advisor, François Deschartres. The birds flocked inside for warmth and food. They perched on Sand’s feet, and some ate from her hand. Contrary to prevailing attitudes of her day, there was no hard divide for Sand between herself and other creatures, in this instance birds, leading me to call her ‘the Bird-woman of Nohant’. [2]
Jung also befriended birds, and one bird perched on his head for ten minutes as he sat outside his retreat at Bollingen, and another took hair from his head for her nest. [3] T jeu van den Berk describes Jung paying attention to …
… sudden or unusual movements or the appearance of animals, flocks of birds, the wind, storms, … as possessing symbolic relevance for the parallel unfolding of interior psychological realities. [4]
Back in Daylesford, I made adjustments to a poem I had started some weeks before, dealing with these themes called “George Sand converses with Carl Jung about birds.” I focused on the flocking behaviour of birds – feeling my way into the viscerality, searching for apt words to describe their ‘swirl’, ‘circle’, their ‘wheeling’ in the sky, their navigating dexterity as members of a large flock on the wing.
[As] I took [my] bags out to the car, a strange rumbly sound approached me. I realised it was a flock of birds, heard them before seeing them; wingbeats, a grumbly, whooshy sound, and their voices, energised, excited, exuberant. They hurtled into view, first the leaders, then the main body, pushing forward, dark shapes against the light, whipping across my field of vision – not very far above. They were Little Corellas; I could see their orange eye feathers. I felt both dwarfed by the hugeness of the space they took up and somehow strangely taken into it. Their arrival and departure happened very quickly, but I was caught, pinned to the spot by surprise. I was contemplating the connection between Sand, Jung and augurs. Then I myself was standing under, but somehow aurally enclosed within, a flock of birds. My heart started hammering, adrenaline fizzed. Energy surged into my nervous system, lighting it up. Is this really happening? …
The most striking element about this synchronistic experience was how it collapsed the usually hard boundary between psyche and matter – between my internal thinking/feeling self (Sand, Jung, and birds) and what was outside me, between me and the world. These two domains – inner and outer – had intersected simultaneously, “shrinking the space/time gap between them to zero”, as Payne-Towler describes a hallmark of synchronicity [5]. Immersed in ideas about augurs and words for flocking birds, my internal reality matched momentarily with the external reality of an actual flock of birds flying low overhead, seeming to swerve in my direction. Of course this could be dismissed as mere coincidence, but the simultaneity felt uncanny. It felt pointed. No-one else would have had that confluence of connections had they walked out while that flock of Little Corellas flew overhead, unless they too had been honing in on birds’ flocking behaviour. Such an encounter may have been impressive, as large numbers of animals en masse often are, but the experience would not have joined up internal and external realities rendering the experience personally significant…
Say it isn’t all about me
Say birds have agency
Say flocks have group minds
Say they turn them outwards, scanning the environment
Say they register planes of energy, vibration
Say they discern disturbances in the field, changes in air pressure
Say they recognise planes of resonance
Say my trying to find words to describe their flight generates thoughts and feelings
Say my thoughts and feelings vibrate at certain frequencies
Say these bird-empathic thoughts and feelings emit energy, create a plane of resonance
Say my thoughts and feelings are not confined to my physical body
Say my bird-empathic thoughts and feelings are a field or a plane
Say that plane is recognisable to the flock
Say they recognise me on that plane
Say it’s not personal; that beings recognise signals from other beings
Say they resonate to this plane
Say the flock swerves my way
This is an abridged version of an essay ‘Flocking birds synchronicity’ first published in Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025 and is re-published with permission.
Enrol in Anne M. Carson online workshop Writing Poetry: Synchronicity and Chance on Sunday 5 July and Sunday 19 July.
Notes:
[1] This anecdote and the following details are taken from Sand’s autobiography: Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand: A Group Translation), ed., Thelma Jurgrau. New York: The State University of New York Press, 1991.
[2] I explored these themes in an essay titled “The Bird woman of Nohant: exploring George Sand’s avian relationships” forthcoming in George Sand Studies.
[3] Jung quoted Beitman, “Synchroners”, 281.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Payne Towler, Christine, “Synchronicity and Psyche” Jung Journal, 14:2, 64-90, DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2020.1742556, 80.