The sky is grey again for the first time in a season, and the swifts have returned – breathtakingly – from their continental journeys. Reunited above the terraced rooves of our coastal city streets a-slumber, arriving with the aseasonality which claims to be such a gift. A sunny sea-soaked weekend again and the joy of dipping in a still-bracing ocean.
I fell asleep in pure sunlight on a mat on the deck, waking not much later to this brooding lilac sky awash with the whisper of relief to the brush-dry grasses, crisp moss and I’m sure, our new arrivals from the south, however familiar the dry must be to them.
I’ve watched from all angles since they arrived (exactly two weeks ago), as if somehow full of the same wonder I had, all aghast on street corners, their arrow wings weaving threads of belonging to this place and to each other, so often in pairs, reunited once again under northern skies. My own love still afar on African shores, I felt a visceral pull to their sky dancing, unpredictable and joyous and born of a life of effort and action. Whether it was love I was witnessing perhaps I can’t know, but whatever it was, it seemed akin to it in a primordial way.
Place and time and rhythm threads ribbons as we walk a reality of uprootedness so profound, it also leaves me wondering at what I am seeing. Forging our own lives of effort and action we are left tunnelling through darkness in hope of escape, and yet needing to lay roots in the process and weave new narratives of belonging. Somehow our dance also feels joyous, messy and raw, but full of something I can more confidently call love.
A portal opened up in recent times through the skies. With my child and my own childlike wonder for company, we have discovered a way of being and observing which some call birdwatching, however it deserves a much grander title for all its many openings. A more potent spiritual remedy than many I have been given through years spent on the path.
The cormorant is one I have come to see more and surreally so, an observation which has begun to feel unnerving. Not knowing if it is through awareness that I am noticing, or if somehow they are being sent to me, a portent of something, with their long ash arch of wing, gliding over a pond, following a river bend or flying over the yard as I awoke today from my brief afternoon nap.
On a walk last week, just around a corner, in a clearing at the edge of the woods, we were met by a buzzard resting on the grass a few metres in front of us. It then performed a trance-like dance, across the field and around in cycles until the bridleway became more occupied by hikers, in a few minutes retreating back and away. To the canopy of the woods we had left perhaps, although it seemed to simply vanish.
Quite like these unfathomable creatures, I walk a path of shadows, but more than ever I know that I am not alone in this – however solitary a life it may be.
The sun begins to dim, clouds still promisingly thick above me. I wonder if I should wait to see the bats hunt. The night, the knowing cycles of these times, and a kind of love that brews in silence, a life lived in effort and action.
The Atlas Apothecary Sourcebook 