Heroes Not Zombies

In the garden this afternoon I heard that distinctive sound and looked up in time to see a Flying V heading south to Africa for the winter. In France they are known as “grue”, and in English, “cranes”.

I love to hear and see them each year. They are such impressive birds, whether seen singly, or, more commonly, in flocks. There’s something especially mesmerising about their flight patterns, those not too rigid V shapes sometimes of just a handful of birds, but other times of hundreds.

Migration.

There are so many creatures which spend part of their lives in one part of the world, and other parts in far distant ones.

Maybe that’s why I feel so drawn to these birds….I, too, am a migrant. Having lived my first 60 years in Scotland, I’m now settled in South west France. A deliberate decision to spend part of my life in a different culture, a different environment, a different language.

Migration remains a hot topic around the world, as governments try to turn imaginary, invisible boundaries drawn on a map, into substantial, even insurmountable ones. But we humans move. We always have done. Even if you’ve never lived in any other country than the one you live in now, chances are your grandparents, or your grandparents’ grandparents, lived somewhere else.

The Right Wing myth of “blood and soil”, is an invention, something which requires a severe restriction of vision and understanding to swallow. The threads of DNA, of cell lines, of cultures and endlessly branching family trees show we all have countless connections with each other, connections which fly high above the imaginary state boundaries with just as much ease as those flying Vs of cranes.

Migration is normal.