Aristophanes said the birds wee born of Eros, and the associations between birds and Eros and Aphrodite apparently pre-dates that.
My friends know me as a cat-lover, and it’s hard for me not to love them — most of the cat’s I’ve known have been very affectionate (even if they appear to have no logic behind whom they’re affectionate toward — which seems an Eros-like quality, if you ask me), they’re usually pretty huggable, and if there’s any better way to warm your lap than to plant a kitty there, I haven’t discovered it.
…but I also love birds, it’s a seemingly inexplicable attraction, and the only time I attempted keeping a bird, I was about seven or eight and it was a female budgie who died from a drafty window — regardless, between the ages of seven and ten, I read every book about parrots and pigeons I could find, and my “favourite bird” seemed to change every year from the age of six (cardinals) to the age of fifteen (peafowl — and in-between that: 7 = rock doves [yes, I was that specific, and I could tell you most species of doves and pigeons at that age just by looking at pictures], 8 = rainbow lorikeets; 9 = hyacinth macaws; 10 = grey parrots [I have no fucking clue what I found so fucking awesome about parrots for three years]; 11 = Dodo / Victoria Crowned Pigeon [tie]; 12 = Victoria Crowned Pigeon; 13 = lyrebirds; 14 = flamingos / swans). For the most part, I don’t understand the attraction of keeping birds, as it seems far more cruel to keep a bird in a cage than, say, a hamster or a ferret or to keep a fish in a bowl — but at the same time, I’ve been hearing a siren song toward keeping Diamond Doves, which I don’t see working out too well, with three cats in the household. My impulse buys (and the worst sort of impulse buys — things that you may not immediately need, but which are useful to have, half the time you really can’t reason yourself out of not buying it) tend to have little abstract or stylised images of birds on them somehow. And a lot of my favourite software has a little bird icon on my Start Menu — hell, I’d probably even change my primary desktop browser to Flock, if it had a compatible FTP client extension (or at least if the browser FTP option for my servers wasn’t so annoying — and yes, I know about FileZilla, and I don’t like it that much).
I was always the little kid in the neighbourhood who rescued birds from the local cats, and always collecting feathers when the class went to the local nature reserves — and always very insistent that we weren’t done in the bird-watching room at the park, or the aviary at the zoo, even when the other children were bored stiff.
I frequently remind myself that this could all just be coincidence, but when I feel Eros, or His Essence, or whatever you like to call it; when I hear his voice distinctly and get clear images of His face and body, I can’t help but think that these predelictions were planted into my consciousness by the Moirai, who He remains closer to than all other singular deities.
