Love Without Attachment: I Won't Clip Your Wings

When people ask me how I got into birding, this is the story I tell from junior year of high school:

During the COVID shutdown, I used to go on daily walks with my family around the neighborhood. One day, when I got home, I noticed a baby owl on my front lawn. Quick Google searches told me to leave it be; baby owls often fall from their nests, and I was supposed to trust they have their mysterious ways of getting back up. 

I kept an eye on it for two or three days, but it still didn’t move. It only moved a little bit as the day went on to stay in the shade cast by my front lawn palm tree like a tiny trembling sundial. I decided to call the local wildlife center to ask what to do, afraid it would get snatched up soon by a hungry hawk or coyote.

They told me to bring it in, so I placed the little owl in a cardboard box and drove it over. The wildlife center took the owlet into their care and told me it was an orphaned Western Screech-Owl. It was very dehydrated and would need to stay for a while. They gave me a patient number I could use to call back and check in on it. I called every week for about a month, until I received the happy news that it was released back into the wild. 

From then on, my bird thing just spiraled. I started paying attention on walks and would come home and flip through a bird book to identify the ones I’d seen. I got a camera, an eBird account, an audio recorder. I was hooked. 

The reason why I’m reflecting on this though has nothing to do with nerding out about birds. It’s because I’ve been musing lately about whether love without attachment is possible. I know this may seem like somewhat of a non sequitur, so bear with me a little longer.  

When I was much younger, I wanted to be a vet. I also really wanted a cat or dog, but my parents wouldn’t allow it. I wanted something to love me and something I could love as my own, unconditional and lasting. The reciprocal adoration of pet and pet owner is a rare kind of simple and uncomplicated love. 

I decided I didn’t want to be a vet when I realized that I didn’t want to see animals be in pain or die. Little kid me didn’t want to form attachments that I knew wouldn’t last. It seemed that my aversion to sadness outweighed my desire to help the cats and dogs I knew I had the potential to love. 

The only pets I was allowed to have were hamsters. I had four, and I cared deeply for each one of them. I hid in my room and cried each time one died. It never got easier. Eventually, I decided I was done having hamsters. Four hamster deaths was enough, and I didn’t want to feel the grief another time.

So the next creature I loved was my baby Western Screech-Owl. My hands shook as I carried it in its box, my heart beating fast as we drove to the wildlife center. My only want was for it to be okay, for it to get a chance to return to the wild. 

For the first time, my loving of a little creature was centered around its freedom and its eventual departure from my care. My dopamine rushes from hearing about how it was doing over the phone was nothing in comparison to the thought that I saved it in time to help it go free and return to the place it would be happiest. 

Before my junior spring, the most grief I ever really felt came from my hamster deaths and lamenting the quiet absence of little feet pattering on a squeaky wheel. But the recent months were a slough of overturning of certainty, repeated and unexpected disappearances of friendships, routines, places, and once-fixed self-conceptions. 

Loss, I guess, is the visceral and inevitable flip side of love. But these recent losses haven’t contained any of the joy of letting a rehabilitated baby owl go free into the world, where in doing so I could trust that the owl in its leaving would go where it was supposed to go. All I’ve wanted lately has been to hold on, to get "before" back, to regain some semblance of steadiness to ground me as I try to settle back into the world. As much as I bring up impermanence as a framework for my life, I of course want the people I love to stay. 

When I’m birdwatching, the birds flit in and out of my plane of vision of their own volition, and I’m content with it. I try to snap photos of them to keep little moments for myself, but when they go, I understand. As much as I’d like to stare at a mockingbird all day, it has other places to be. To catch it and call it mine would be an act of cruelty. It doesn’t leave because it has personal grievances against me, it just goes when it needs to go. 

I love birds without attachment. Can I love people that way too? The people I love who are gone, can I hold them in my memory with kindness instead of resenting their disappearances or lack of explanations, instead of emotionally charged stories about how could they deprive me of the joy of their presence? Maybe their leaving doesn’t have to be some statement about my value as a person or the value of our connection, and I should trust that they’re flying off to where they need to be next.

Abstract musings aside, it also does not make logical sense to even try to control what anyone else does. To clip the wings of the people I love would not be an act of caring for or understanding them. I try never to ask someone to stay, though I try always to tell them when I want them to. 

Maybe it’s impossible to love without attachment (at least for me—I don’t think I’m that enlightened yet). Rooted in my affection is a wanting for a deepening of the love; I believe deep connection that builds and ripens over time is the richest part of existence. Simultaneously, it seems very possible to love without acting upon that attachment, to recognize that there is an equal and unspeakable amount of love both in saying “I want you to stay” and “I promise I’ll still be okay if it’s better for you to go.” 

As I test the waters of new relationships and discover fresh, rejuvenating sources of love, I actively decide not to sabotage or shy away from them, even when the impulse to do so as self-defense mechanism kicks in. I am afraid, and there is truth in my fear, but it has become a principle of mine to center my life and values around expanding my capacity to love, no matter how scary it feels.

Perhaps, sometime before too long, I will even get another hamster.

a fleeting, serendipitous moment captured in the form of a mockingbird photo <3