The White Birds

A personal story by Soulsearcher. The featured image is an illustration, not a photograph of the events.

It was just another day after work.

At about six in the evening, I was driving to fetch a friend from work. It was summer, so it was still light, and there was almost no traffic on the road.

I approached an intersection and drove through a green light.

Then I looked to my left.

A truck was speeding directly towards me.

It wasn’t stopping at the red light.

There was no time to think.

The truck appeared to be travelling at around 120 kilometres per hour. I was doing approximately 35.

All I could do was take my foot off the accelerator and turn the steering wheel to the right.

Then came the impact.

After that, there is nothing.

I was unconscious and have no memory of what happened immediately afterwards.

The next thing I remember is people trying to get me out of my car.

It was smoking.

They had to pry the door open.

Three airbags had deployed, and fortunately I was sitting in a bucket seat.

My car had travelled roughly 100 metres from the point of impact and ended up wrapped around a pole.

When I regained consciousness, I suddenly felt terrible pain in my left shoulder and neck.

And then, strangely, very little.

Apart from seat-belt burns and an injury to my hand, I seemed remarkably intact.

My left hand had become trapped between the steering wheel and the shattered windscreen at the twelve o’clock position.

I was extremely dizzy.

I later learned that the truck had continued after hitting me. It took out two lamp posts on the other side of the road, struck and wrote off a Toyota Land Cruiser bakkie parked near a petrol station further down the road, and eventually came to a stop near the petrol pumps.

Looking at what had happened, it was difficult to understand how I had walked away.

Maybe it was the concussion.

Maybe it was shock.

But I remember feeling strangely calm.

I reached through the crushed metal around the roof and left side of the car and managed to retrieve my keys and purse.

Then I got out.

That was when the dizziness really hit me.

I sat down on the pavement.

And I looked at my car.

It was destroyed.

Completely crushed—except for the area around my bucket seat.

Blood was dripping from my hand.

And then something happened that I have never forgotten.

Across the road was a beautiful tree.

I found myself looking at it.

Suddenly, around a hundred white birds flew out of the tree.

They were unlike any birds I remembered seeing before.

They rose together, circled, and then returned to the tree.

I watched them.

Then they did it again.

They flew from the tree, circled, and returned.

And then a third time.

The birds rose together, made another circle and landed back in the tree.

After the third time, they flew away.

I just sat there watching them.

For a moment, everything else seemed to disappear.

The destroyed car.

The blood.

The people.

The noise.

The fact that only moments earlier I had been hit by a truck travelling at enormous speed.

There were just these white birds.

A woman who had witnessed the accident came and sat beside me.

I turned to her and asked:

“Did you see that?”

She said yes.

Then she told me something that has always mattered to me when I remember that moment.

She had never seen anything like it either.

So I know the birds weren’t something I imagined while concussed.

Someone else saw them too.

I don’t know what kind of birds they were.

I don’t know why so many of them were sitting in that particular tree.

I don’t know why they took off, circled and returned three times before finally disappearing.

There may be a completely ordinary explanation.

But sitting on that pavement beside the wreckage of my car, bleeding and dizzy, having somehow survived an accident that could very easily have ended differently, it did not feel like an ordinary moment.

It felt incredibly still.

Almost as though, for those few minutes, everything had slowed down.

I have never forgotten those birds.

Just as I have never forgotten the blue-white light from another experience in my life.

And just as, years later, I would never forget the woman who appeared beside my hospital bed wearing a large owl pendant.

Three completely different experiences.

A light.

White birds.

An owl.

And there is something else they share.

They appeared at moments surrounded by chaos.

And somehow, in each of those moments, there was peace.

I don’t know what that means.

Perhaps one day I will.

Perhaps I never will.

But I know what I saw.

And this time, someone else saw it too.

— Soulsearcher