It’s just a starling, darling

A little post about celebrating every day wonder

“It’s just a starling, darling”

She was told when she was three, as she admired a bird that wore a smock of pink- green oil puddle on its back and the speckles of a distant milk way on its wings.

“It’s only a slug”

She was told aged five, as she observed a tube of smoked glass come alive and toil through a carpet of fat diamonds.

And gradually, all the miracles she saw in the garden were reduced to ‘just’ and ‘only’, ghostly husks of the gleaming, wondrous forms she’d conceived in her mind.

Each bubble flattened, each hive ray of rainbow drained to a mocking pastel.

The liquid magic she’d placed in a glass and offered eagerly to grown ups, sucked dry through their arid desert straw.

And did nature look better for it?

For diminishing each bronze winged fairy to ‘just a moth’, each fragile ornate carriage to ‘only a snail’?

She grew older, and noticed people did it with themselves - the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the music they listened to.

“Just an old dress”

“I’m only having soup”

“It’s just a compilation”

Was the world better for it?

For using words and labels to simmer down each bright blaze and bleed of beauty to a cold cabbage water counterpart?

She decided to omit the ‘just’ and ‘only’’s from her own descriptions.

It was either………

Grand enough to wear…….or not.

Wonderful enough to eat…..or not.

Music worth celebrating ……or not.

.

She was either worth it……or not.

.

The world was not ‘just’ a world.

It was everything.

.

Life was either an occasion

Or nothing.

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As she sat sipping juice the colour of smashed rubies, wearing her prettiest dress that contoured her as deliberately as a ravine holds curving water, listening to melodies that roused sleeping angels from caramel heavens in her brain, she noticed a sweep of starlings at the window, studding the sky as peppercorns.  Moving in glorious synchronicity.

She began to write words that sparkled, letters dipping and diving as if mirroring the other-worldly granite kite she saw before her, and she suddenly knew what her reply would be, when asked by a child what something was.

It would be simply;

“What do you see?”