The Toucan: Creative Writing

It happened right in the middle of the Bolivian Amazon. 

In the courtyard of a modest B&B a young man lay swaying in a hammock, his mind weakly going over the events of the past 12 hours.  

As his eyes scanned all the various shapes that made up the cloud cover overhead, his body finally started to settle down. 

Sleep had evaded him; his stomach had gone violently rogue the night before and demanded his full attention. Attention which he was compelled to offer, again and again, right into the bottom of the toilet bowl. 

It was terrifying but strangely therapeutic not needing to think about anything other than the demands of the body.  Time has that extraordinary quality of seemingly appearing to move very slowly when it is in fact doing the exact opposite.  And so the young man realized as he watched a toucan soar with its colourful wings scraping the sapphire sky.

We all run out of time eventually. Playtime as children always never seemed long enough. Episodes of favourite cartoons, moments with people you love, long summer days filled with sunshine. They end too quickly, because they are filled with love and play. Other moments drag on for an eternity because they lack love and they lack play, but still contain expectations and demands.  They are obligatory tasks, a means to an end.  

Sometimes it takes 12 hours of violent vomiting to realise that your entire life has been one big involuntary action. And that it doesn’t need to be. For some of us, it is only in the aftermath of a cataclysm, or suffering, that we can understand how we have a choice. How we needn’t live at the mercy of forces we perceive to be outside our control, enslaved or obligated to a system that extracts from us our vitality and leaves us exhausted, looking up at the sky. 

Someone older and wiser once said ‘work is love made visible’. 

It is the brushing of a toucan’s wing against a sapphire sky.

The feel of silk as it quickly runs off your hand.

It’s in the smell of freshly picked flowers bunched up with string, and the sound of a piano sending you to bed.

It is in the clarity of that glass that you raise to your lips, and the very brick and mortar that sits above your head. 

The poet Gibran once asked:

'And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, 
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, 
even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, 
even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit’.

Oh what the human mind could achieve with love in his engine. Carve the Taj Mahal out of marble perhaps, or compose an entire symphony despite being deaf.  

Yes, we go further when our work is a labour of love. Fuelled by our passion we are unstoppable, we make an impression; we change the world. 

Time ceases to exist when we make that choice. But it is our choice to make, and ours alone.