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AIR DANCER
I hatched on a high ledge
above a window at Quenby Hall. Sheltered
from the wind I faced the morning sun. My parents had
arrived a month
before, riding the jetstream on fine black wings northwards
from the
South African tablelands, over deserts and inland seas, up
the boot of
Italy, to this place, where insects rise from soft green
pastures fed
by gentle rain. The nest they built from a muddy riverbank
sheltered
me as I grew fat on the gnats, hoverflies, midges and
craneflies they
stuffed into my hungry mouth. At night my siblings kept me
warm and
snug and when we grew too big, we popped out to sit on the
ledge,
stretching our growing wings and feeling the movements of
air,
watching our parents swoop and dive and soar and turn and
come to
bring us tasty morsels; a fat-bodied moth caught out at
dusk, a blowsy
butterfly too slow! Too slow! And as I grew the sun warmed
my back,
the rain filled my thirsty throat, and my true home, the
air, lifted
and swelled and gusted about me, until one day I stepped out
into it ?
a high diver. I plunged. And rose.
I join my kin in a soaring dance, shouting our joy,
delighting in our
quickness, scything the air. We scoop water as we skim the
puddles.
Beneath us rolls a sea of green. Each blade of grass, each
green leaf
is a humble miracle, quietly turning light into food, air
into wood.
The slow fountains of trees pump nutrients and water from
deep
underground where their roots nudge and probe the bedrock.
Up the
goodness comes as their sap rises each spring into the
fullness of
this high summer leaf, to later drop with abundance on the
earth,
patiently, over millennia, building the rich dark loam that
feeds the
grass roots.
These same leaves are quietly exhaling the rich oxygen that
fills my
lungs. A kiss of life, it quickens my blood and drives the
quick
beating of my tiny heart. The air is living, nourishing.
Muscular. It
lifts and cradles me.
I am speck, set dancing. Not under the wide sky, but in it.
I need no
defences, no clothing, no houses nor money. I am always
travelling. I
am always at home. I need no map, no compass. I take no
luggage, no
timetable or clock. I know my way. When the times comes to
move on, I
know. We gather as the northeasterly wind rattles the
browning leaves,
swirling and milling, and together we rise and rise and
rise, beyond
the clouds.
Above me, stars turn. Beneath me, rivers run, seas churn.
Deserts
sleep and shift. Cities buzz and hurry. A trout noses
through weed. A
man closes a window. A weather front swirls. A seed pod
cracks. A
molecule of oxygen is released by an oak leaf. Ocean gyres
turn.
This is my family. This is my home. This is my lover. This
is my teacher.
Wren teaches me pluck. Trout teaches me how to swim
upstream. Worm
teaches me humility. Slug, patience. Mountain, how to
endure. The
clouds teach me that all things pass. The busy, singing
leaves teach
me that creativity is not one, single god-like act of
creation to be
finished and complete in itself, but is born of being
immersed in
'being', as one sparkling node in the great, self-creating
web of
life, of which I am just one, tiny, perfect expression.
Here the web has gathered itself up into a single point of
acute
awareness hanging in the sky ? Buzzard. Here, the web is
expansive,
heavy, dense ? a lake. Here the web is diffuse, a constant
exchange ?
rainfall and evaporation.
This web is my home. I feel its textures. It moves through
me and I
through it. I am a knot in its fabric, tangled together for
the few
moments of my lifetime and then dispersed. Carbon, Oxygen,
Hydrogen,
Nitrogen, Phosphorus, dance their eightsome reels in the
barn of my
body for a short time, and then move on.
But the dancing goes on forever.
Sam Clark, Quenby Hall
July 2009
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