Heroes Not Zombies

You might need to zoom in to look at this photo more closely. It’s more than an image of blue sky. It’s one of many photos I’ve taken over the years of migrating birds. In this case, they are geese. Those Flying V formations always catch my eye, although to be honest, I usually look up because I hear them rather than them catching my eye.

There’s two things here which I believe are fundamental characteristics of Life – movement and change – in this example bringing these together to witness migration.

Life moves. Is any creature which shows no internal or external movement alive? I think it was perhaps the General Semanticists who first claimed the essential characteristic of Life was a “self-moving capacity”. A stone won’t move unless someone or some other force moves it. A heart beats by itself, a bacterium moves by itself, all living creatures manifest this ability to move without the application of external forces. Maybe the General Semanticists were not the first to coin this term but that’s where I first came across it.

Perhaps it’s a variation of that idea which led to the concept of homeostasis – the ability of living organisms to self regulate and maintain a balanced internal environment. Perhaps Varela and Maturana’s “autopoiesis” or “self making capacity” comes from there too? These abilities to adapt, change, repair and grow are all forms of movement.

But these birds speak to a larger form of movement – migration.

Many, many species migrate. Either in annual cycles or in spreading from their place of birth to new lands, often distant lands.

I was thinking about that as I watched the finals of the Women’s US Open Tennis tournament at the weekend. Those two simply awesome young women performing at the peak of their sport. Emma Raducanu, born in Canada to a Chinese mother and Romanian father, and living in the U.K. since she was two, playing Laylah Fernandez, also born in Canada, but with a Filipino Canadian mother and Ecuadorean father, and now living in the USA.

Wow, now there would be a couple of truly fascinating “Who Do You Think You Are?” episodes? Following the migrations, the movements and changes of those two teenagers ancestors would be quite a trip, wouldn’t it?

I’m just back from Scotland where I was visiting family. Although I can trace my dad’s family back a couple of hundred years in Stirling, my mum’s ancestors came from further north – Perthshire and the Orkney Islands.

When I retired in 2014 I decided to experience the next part of my life in a different land, a different culture, a different language, and emigrated to France. I’ve done that with the clear hope that this movement and change will develop me, enlarge my experience and consciousness, and keep sparking my “vital force” and, so far, it’s working out exactly as I’d hoped.

I’m not a fan of restrictions on movement. I’m not a fan of all the rules and bureaucracy which surround the modern concept of citizenship and how it creates an “us and them” with different rights and responsibilities. I’d prefer a system based on habitation. I think all the inhabitants of the same place should be treated equally, have the same rights and share the same responsibilities.

Maybe only then will we undermine toxic xenophobic hatred and prejudice which I find so anti-life.