An encounter with a bird that changed me

A Letter to Myself, to the Earth, to Whoever Is Listening

That bird changed me.
And it enhanced my relationship with all birds, with all animals, with the entire living world.

I keep thinking about that moment, about that Rosella. About how sometimes the universe speaks without using words, and if your heart is even slightly open, if you’re paying even a fraction of attention, you hear it. Loud, clear and undeniable!

They say birds are messengers from the spirit world. You find this belief everywhere. Every culture. Every lineage. It’s whispered in Aboriginal Dreaming, in Celtic myth, in Sufi poetry, in Native American stories. I used to take it, let’s say, not too seriously, thinking it was just symbolic poetry, but that day, I couldn’t. It was too direct. too precise, too undeniable.

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I was drifting that day, on the puffing billy train, high, my mind sliding in and out of what felt like a trance. The edges between myself and the world were dissolving, melting into one vast breathing organism. Everything was spiritual in that state. Every colour, every sound, every glance carried weight.

Those days I’ve been reading for god knows how many times, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, sinking deeper into the text about the inherent spiritual dimension of the natural world, how we aren’t separate from nature but woven into it, part of the same story, part of the same skin.

And then, the train stopped.

Steel wheels, shuffling feet. The carriage doors slide open. People spilling out like water, finding cracks. I sat there, as I always do, waiting. I like going last. I like stepping into the world deliberately, in rhythm, when the energy feels right, not when the crowd commands it.

And then I saw it, as if I was a blind man all of my life and given eyes for the first time.

A flash of impossible red and purple, slicing the corner of my vision.
I see, and there it is.

A Rosella, though I don’t know its name yet, perched by the window, right there, close enough to touch.

And my chest stops, my breath stalls, everything vanishes. The station disappears, time dissolves. It’s just me and this being, this living ember, this spark from another world.

The colours… oh God, the colours.

The blood red body, fierce and soft at once.
The delicate black speckles across its wings, like constellations scattered on living fire.
And under its cheeks and on its tail, purple. But not any purple, a deep, impossible, liquid twilight, like stained glass cut from a higher world.

Its tiny black eyes, two galaxies, pulling me in.

And I’m gone. Completely gone, inside its feathers, inside its breath, inside the stillness between us.

I don’t want to “see” this bird. I want to enter it. I want to surrender to it with every cell of my body. I want to devour this moment, not with hunger but with reverence, like if I could just open my entire soul and let this being in, I would.

I lift my phone for half a second, snap one photo, proof for later, maybe, but immediately I feel it, that’s not the thing. The thing isn’t to own this. The thing is to be here. So I put the phone right away.

I watch.
With every atom awake and burning, I watch.

Because how often does the universe open its palm like this, placing something sacred right in front of you, without a single word?

And then, chaos.

People finally notice, phones whip out. Cameras everywhere, Click click click click click click click. No pause, no breath, no silence.

And then, as quickly as it came, the Rosella leaps into the open air, feathers slicing sunlight, vanishing back into its secret wildness.

I feel this flash of anger, not because it’s gone, but because they didn’t see it. Not really, they extracted it. They took the photo just so it spoils in their phone memory, they took the shape, but missed the soul, the being. Nobody surrendered, nobody drowned in the miracle. What a fucking shame…….

And I’m sitting there vibrating in my own head:
“Don’t you get it?! That was divinity, right there, right fucking there! in red feathers and a purple tail, and you missed it, no, you IGNORED IT!”

I’m spiralling, untethered. Ricky wants to hit the gift shop, and I resist. I don’t want “things“, I want silence. But I follow him anyway, stuck in this strange loop of thought, until suddenly…

There it is.

On a low shelf, this small stuffed bird, the same red, the same purple, the same exact shape, and before I even think, my whole body says yes.

I’m not an object person. I don’t like to cling to things, I don’t want to cling to things. But I pick this little bird up like it’s a map, like it’s a compass, like it’s waiting for me.

I don’t even know its name yet, but I know I need to, I’ve this burning ache to know. Naming is part of the transmission. So I take it to the counter, and the cashier says it:

“Rosella.”

And the sound of it lands like a soft stone in a deep well.

R o s e l l a a a a a a a a……….

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Hours later, I’m back in Melbourne, still carrying the bird, still buzzing. Over dinner with friends, I try to explain the colours, the stillness, the divinity folded into feathers, fumbling, knowing I can’t really make them fully feel it, but needing to try.

The next day, I searched. The Rosella’s spiritual significance, Aboriginal Dreaming. And what I find stunned and astonished me, to say the least:

The Rosella is sacred, it’s a messenger, it’s a messenger of love, its medicine is loving. And its aboriginal (Gunditjmara) name is, Yukuty.

“Aboriginal Dreaming stories involving rosellas are often linked to love, lifelong commitment, and transformation, with some tales depicting them as symbols of everlasting love or as the first birds to sing in the land.“

Not the basic flattened cliché. But love as medicine. Love as repair, as life force! Love as the force that mends what’s been broken, the self, the land, the bonds between all living things.

And I’m stunned, absolutely stunned, because that was the exact energy I was in that day, trying to heal myself, trying to heal my world, trying to touch whatever wounds I could with whatever love I could summon.

It was a bullseye. A perfect thunderous strike of meaning. The Rosella wasn’t random. It was a message, a telegram from the divine, from the fabric of reality itself saying:

“Yes….this Raheem…Keep going. You’re on the path.”

The Remembering.

Since that day, the Rosella has stayed with me.

I see birds differently now, animals differently. Because I know, in my bones, that we live in a speaking, living, breathing world, a world that breathes meaning, if only we slow down enough to receive it.

We’ve forgotten this language. Forgotten that the land communicates. That animals carry messages. That we are not spectators, but threads in a living cloth interwoven, inseparable, undeniable to each other.

We walk through divinity every day. And when God finally lands on the railing right in front of us, we take a photo and move on.

I’m not moving on.
I refuse to.

That day, I remembered. Today I remember,
A bird carried God in its wings.
That day, I was awake. Today I’m still awake because of it.

And maybe that’s why I needed to write this down, because if we don’t tell these stories, if we don’t trace the lines connecting us back to the living, breathing earth, we forget that we’re part of it. We forget we’re active living participants, not spectators. We forget we’re made to love, to repair, and to belong.

I think the Rosella came to remind me.
And maybe, somehow, to remind you too.