• 12 Birds to Save Your Life: Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett

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• "Lend me not to another and I will be a quiet companion in all your wanderings. Wherever thou goest there go I, through the eagle's air and over the wide seas; through heat and cold, calm and tempest, and the changing years. When thou layest thyself down upon thy bed when the weary day is over read of me a little and thy dreams shall be sweet." (Isaak Walton)
• "Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words; And let me learn your secret from the sky" (Siegfried Sassoon)
• "Some days, when the shadow of the black dog grows particularly large, because it still does, I will wander up the side of a nearby hill and simply lie down in the grass. If I'm lucky, the skylarks will be singing."
• "(Like to the lark at the break of day arising) / From sullen earth sings hymns at Heaven's gate." (William Shakespeare)
• "After some hours walking and doing my best not to think, I found myself — somewhat damp — lying on the side of a lonely hill staring up at a leaden sky, while the gentle warm August drizzle seeped into my bones. No one trains you for receiving bad news."
• "The skylarks sang then, too. Glorious memories of safer, more secure times. What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that it released me."
• "Hares look and feel ancient."
• "-- I saw the ears of barley seventy or so yards ahead of me shiver. This shiver suddenly started moving with great speed directly towards me. I was gripped. And before I had time to react, a large brown hare crashed with a great thud into my legs and lay, stunned, at my feet. I looked at the hare. And the hare looked at me. We were as shocked as each other, I think. And for a stunned second or two I peered into those beguiling brown eyes and something indefinable stirred inside my ten-year-old self."
• "Teach me half the gladness / That thy brain must know, / Such harmonious madness / From my lips would flow / The world should listen then, as I am listening now." (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
• "It is enough / To smell, to crumble the dark earth, / While the robin sings over again / Sad songs of Autumn mirth." (Edward Thomas)
• "There was a thick clump of unruly woodland in one corner. And this is where my robin sat, bold as brass, observing me — inquisitive little thing he was. I can't pretend to you that he worked any particular miracle for me that day. Except to watch me. As I watched him."
• "On the flyleaf of every book (Denys Watkins-Pitchford) would quote an inscription his father once found on a Cumbrian gravestone: The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts. "
• "This season and those birds were a constant reminder that I might yet have that life again one day."
• "This is the sound of the universe, I realized then."
• "I went into the kitchen through our old back door, always painted a thick dark green, and the very same door that would have stood there since the house was built. I noticed for the first time in a while the ancient and dented brass handle, polished shining bright by two centuries or more of warm hands clasping it. "
• "If houses go through season, then this was the depth of winter for my home."
• "It was a crisp, cold winter afternoon. The sky was impossibly blue, with an overblown orangey sun filtering weakly through the trees, showing up their beauteous naked shapes in plain relief, and making the world look like it'd gone black and white."
• "Up on that hill I felt part of something way beyond my limited understanding and short tenure on this planet."
• "That I could think there trembled through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware." (Thomas Hardy)
• "The stars are not wanted now: put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun." (W.H. Auden)
• "When you hear a blackbird sing in the hedgerow or a song thrush in a suburban garden, you can draw solace from the fact that it is a sound that has lifted the spirits of people, standing on that very spot where you are right now, for many thousands of years."
• "But at the time I simply had no tolerance for his grief. I could not accept the form it took."
• "I've learned the hard way that you can never change people, not really, but I suppose you can try to understand them, for your own sanity if nothing else."
• "What is it makes us more than dust? / My trust in him; in me his trust." (Siegfried Sassoon)
• "I could feel the life had gone."
• "As I write these words I can hear that death rattle of the magpie outside my window. It pierces my skin, gets into my soul, and a small part of my inside tightens with despair for my thrushes."
• "It never ceases to amaze me how deeply engrained the birds are into the human psyche, hardwired into our culture, and what a powerful force they have been in the world's shared history."
• "After all, a magpie doesn't know it's a magpie."
• "They are nature's necessary adversaries."
• "There is a mist that feels like it is rising from beneath the ground. It breaks apart the weak sunbeams and gives my garden an ethereal air."
• "This is a single minute of a single morning, in a single autumn in a single year."
• "There was a constant voice in the back of my head, a demon radio station whining on and on, telling me all the things that could go wrong in my life, from the mundane to the ridiculous."
• "I saw it as a perpetual struggle against happiness. As soon as I scented even the most fleeting glimpse of happiness bubbling up inside me, I fought against it. I believed that if I accepted happiness, -- then fate would immediately deal me a smashing blow and snatch it away again."
• "I felt like there was no cure at all for someone like me."
• "There was a very large part of me — consciously and unconsciously — that wanted to push all the people near to me as far away as possible."
• "I was overwhelmed by my thoughts, my doubts and insecurities, endlessly and pointlessly questioning my place in this strange and increasingly unfamiliar world. Everything in my life that had felt so inalienable and certain, it turned out, was just a mirage. All the rock-steady beliefs, by which I had defined my sense of self in days gone by, had crumbled. No matter how depressed I'd felt in the past I'd always felt like my life had some kind of purpose, and I was pretty confident about where I fitted in the grand scheme of things. But that was just a load of bollocks really. It turned out my existence was without purpose and, worse, this grand scheme everyone talks about endlessly is just a giant hoax. It doesn't exist. It's just endless unplanned space. I convinced myself that there was no one who could help me or ever possibly understand. For some reason this made me feel like a total fraud. An act. But I had to keep people believing I was the person they believed me to be, this character I had created: the cheerful and philosophical man of the world — one of nature's old souls. But it was just a brittle shell."
• "But this night was the first time I genuinely felt there was no place for me on the earth and all those around me would be far better off if I shuffled off this mortal coil. I sort of collapsed gently into myself. And had I been given the means to do something about those thoughts that night, who knows? I was probably too pissed anyway. Shortly after, for some inexplicable reason, known only to me then, I turned all the furniture upside down."
• "I just did not understand any longer how to be happy or why anything mattered any more."
• "I needed to learn how to live again. Just to get on with my life. Like those sparrows. I simply could not allow myself to get that low again. It was the Night of the Blackest Dog and I really, really could not risk a repeat performance."
• "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves." (Alan Watts)
• "Like everything in life, once you get to grips with the fact that you matter — actually matter — and whether you like it or not you have an impact on those around you, people and nature, then it is much easier to cope when things go wrong."
• "Grief, like winter, leaves an altered landscape behind it for good and for ill."
• "I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made." (A. E. Housman)
• "Then we sit on Cowslip-banks, hear the birds sing, and possesse ourselves in as much quietnesse as these silent silver streams, which we now see glide so quietly by us." (Isaak Walton)
• "It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing." (Kenneth Grahame)
• "I feel unutterably alone and I don't know why. -- And I cannot explain this feeling of dislocation from the human race in a way that you could possibly understand. Mainly because I don't understand it myself. I feel completely out of reach and stuck inside my lonely brain."
• "Lying on that riverbank in Wiltshire I experienced for a few moments what it is like to be a living and breathing part of a wider whole — as integral to the scene around me as the willow tree swaying above or the grey wagtail bobbing peacefully downstream of me."
• "I came to accept that day grief is a lonely place and there is nothing I can do about that. Life is a lonely business, too. But I realize now that loneliness is part of the human condition and every single person on the planet experiences it, bar none. It is part of being human. -- I knew from that day on that nature could provide a way out of loneliness."
• "I take my gladness in the ... sound of the Curlew instead of the laughter of men." (Anonymous, approx. AD 1000)
• "What, have wings and stay here?" (Samuel Johnson)
• "I wanted the perspective that only boundless empty hills, and the haunting call of a curlew, could provide."
• "Life to them was — and remains — something just to be lived."
• "When I stood among those abandoned homes, looking out at the very same view that countless generations would have looked out upon, I didn't feel sadness or loss."
• "I would tell him that he is just a normal child, a flawed human like any other — stuffed to the gills with inexplicable sadness, inbuilt weaknesses and endless and unfathomable contradictions."
• "And without reverence we have nothing."