THE GUESTS. Eurasian Bullfinch

Before starting this story, I deleted many words and even the whole sentences. I wanted to look for a very specific beginning, because this story was not like others I had ever created and you would soon be enlightened why.
The past and the future are always in your present. I believe, it may sound a bit weird but everyone of us are time-conductors, moreover, we are able to combine various periods of time, finding their similarities and relapses. It depends on our insights, individual perceptions, connections, feelings, emotions and personal life experience. Sometimes all these things may be so close and well known to you, even though, they belong to people you have never met before and still you feel so weird reading the story which is exactly about you. Therefore, the story always finds its reader because its author somehow guessed which were the main points of your life narrative.
This introduction was necessary to come up to the story I’m going to share with you. I hope you'll find something in common to yourself.
That happened this winter. I loved sitting by the window and just looking at the birds which were coming for sunflower seeds. I did that for almost one hundred days till the ground was covered in snow and the birds needed to be fed. I have not seen so much snow for more than fifteen years. And that was the first thing in this narrative which caught me at the moment and I felt like living the old times over again. Soon the flock of the small tits occupied a feeder and nobody dared to stir them. But the cold winter and hunger won: two weeks later other kinds of birds came and started competing with tits. Honestly, I was surprised by their politeness. Tits shared seeds and patiently waited for their turn to pick. And when the time came, the wind swung the feeder and all seed hulls flew into the air. Tits left the tree immediately. Perhaps, they decided to come back the next day. And they did. But the tree had already been occupied by a jay. It was a much bigger bird than a tit and looked a bit aggressive. That’s why all the tits were so afraid of coming closer and just were waiting until the jay would leave. But it didn’t. And again the tits stayed hungry. The next day a flock of sparrows came and landed on the snow just below the feeder. It looked like they had been analysing all that situation for a while and found a way to get the sunflower seeds without any dispute. Such behaviour didn’t demonstrate their courage at all. On the contrary, they perfectly understood their place in ‘the tree hierarchy’ and soon adapted to it. And after some time, tits also started picking seeds of the ground. Although, it did not add to their dignity, it helped them to survive.
Actually, this story wasn’t about the birds.
Staring at all these situations once again I imagined the old times of the birth of pyramids. Later, I started thinking about the fundamental idea of the pyramid and it occurred to me that the sparrows belong to the lowest stage of its hierarchy. And at that moment the thought crossed my mind that only people were meant to create rules for people like birds did it for birds and that it was never ending and still would happen for many ages to come. Like a huge carpet weaved from very thin threads with the picture of a feeder hanging in the centre.
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I dedicate this project to eight birds which visited our garden this winter.
I called them ‘The Guests’.
The behaviour of birds proved to me once again that harmony has much more leverage and it may exist only finding the ways of adapting to each other. And it might be a good lesson for all of us about survival in these troublesome days.
Dear birds, thank you for that and you are always welcome in our garden.
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The creative process
If you were attentive reading my story, you might have noticed the aspects which inspired me to depict the bird characters in this way. The profile view of the portrait, the highlighted eye, the pure construction of the basic drawing of each bird, a very thin brush and a watercolor line like the thread of a carpet.
This project inspired me to use watercolor in a specific graphic method and to discover one more way of artistic expression. I called it ‘The Watercolor Drawing’.