Winged Migration

Winged Migration: A story of innocence and courage in a world that is desperately hard. While humans work hard to find joy, migrating birds must work endlessly to find life. For them every single ounce of energy is more precious than gold, every deliberate action is an action of life or death.  Every ounce of focus is another moment of precarious survival.  For at the end of their crusade who are we to say how their days are greeted?

The Canadian Goose flies across North America, wings tattered and fully spanned. Their necks bow and pray to the moving air surrounding them.  Water currents in the sky hold them up as they push through the invisible layers we do not see. Until a lightening bolt.... A crack is heard shattering the soothing sounds of wings gently sweeping shallow air.  Three hunters shoot; pop, bang, crack. One by one these pristine beings fall from the clear blue sky into the cold icy water below, wings still sailing as they fall. Grace, gone, forever.

The Red-Breasted Goose travels south through Eastern Europe.  They are so beautiful, so sweet, they chatter to each other constantly in mid air. In their tender innocence and instinctual need they search for water, not knowing of the dangers of man kinds darkened waterways. They seem to be gasping for air in the white clouds of smelt oozing into the sky.  It is a scene from The Lord Of The Rings. The Trees have been plucked and thrown into furnaces to create agonizing machines; dead, thoughtless, heartless monsters of iron ore.  The once green earth turned into a swamp of death. The innocent and trusting birds stop unknowingly in a sludge filled pond. Curiosity on their face...what is this?  it smells wrong...it tastes wrong.  They try to move on, but are trapped in a maze of murky waterways.  One falls into the deep oil.  Her wings are covered and she can not move.  She tries to escape the thickened goo that holds her prisoner, but it only clings deeper.  A ransom for her love. She never comes out. The others fly away. Innocence is lost again to the pollution that seeks to expand over all of the darkened lands. The shadow cast by the loss of innocence.

 Birds represent innocence and grace.  They fly in a way that humans crave.  Humanity has lost it's innocence and grace, with wars, battles, killing and rape. We crave that which we do not have.  So we kill them, the graceful and the innocent.  And we eat them, thinking that in our mouths and hearts they will become like us. That we will touch the intangible, the thing we crave for than anything.  Grace.  When we have mercy for those above us, we will have grace given for those below us.  When we have grace, we live in adoration of all that is living.  For that is the way of grace. Harmony, respect and mutual consideration.

We should not cry for death, but we we should weep for our loss of trust and innocence.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301727/