#adventapertures2025: day 11

Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look
up into that blue space?
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions.
And don’t worry about what language you use,
God no doubt understands them all.
Even when the swans are flying north and making
such a ruckus of noise, God is surely listening
and understanding.
Rumi said,  There is no proof of the soul.
But isn’t the return of spring and how it
springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, but is
that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all.
And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it)
that the swans know about as much as we do about
the whole business?
So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly.
Take from it what you can

‘Whistling Swans’

Mary Oliver

I wonder if the Wise-Ones travelled part of their journey via known migration routes.  I think of the treks of the Syrian refugees fleeing their country to Turkey, or Palestinians fleeing to refugee camps in Egypt, or the Sundanese fleeing in multiple directions away from the dangers of guerrilla fighting, kidnap, child exploitation/slavery and enforced military service.  Who tells them where to go?  Are there physical tracks which are worn into the landscape made by those who have fled before them down the millennia?  Is the journey directed by aid agencies, or by word-of-mouth stories and urban myths that work and aid can be found in such-and-such a country or city?  What happens when those refugees face a closed border?  What routes can they travel, then?

Here in the UK the stories of the ‘small boats’, filled with illegal refugees and asylum seekers, is a political football, where government after government vow to ‘stop the boats’.  The British and French coastguards have to rescue countless crafts which try to make the Channel crossing in unseaworthy vessels, much like their Italian, Greek and Turkish counterparts have to monitor the small boats attempting to cross the Mediterranean.  I have no idea whether my Wise-Ones would have needed to cross a body of water as they followed the ChristStar, and what local guides they might need to have employed who knew the rivers and tides, the ebbs and flows in their bones.  One of my favourite traditional English Carols ‘I saw Three Ships’, which whimsically imagines the Holy Family coming into an English port on Christmas Day, is derived from older songs about the Magi arriving at land-locked Bethlehem in ships, (presumably meant to refer to camels, known as ‘the ships of the desert’ in some traditions). I can imagine the kind of starred seaways which might need to be plotted to get the Holy family safely away to England, as some myths have it.

“We think of migration as a moving away from something unpleasant, when it is just as often a moving toward something beneficial”, writes Scott Weidensaul … ‘It is also the pursuit of the sun; the Arctic tern, which nests at high northern latitudes and winters in the extreme south, enjoys a greater percentage of daylight in its life (and thus more hours in which to hunt) than any other animal on earth.’ He describes them as drawing ‘a 22,000-mile figure of eight on the Atlantic Ocean’. (From Amanda Thomson, Belonging, 108)

Reading this reminded me of a BBC Radio Four series from 2023, when the BBC partnered with a conservation team led by biologist Sacha Dench to make a radio series Flight of the Ospreys, tracking the migratory route of a pair of Ospreys from Scotland to their winter grounds in Guinea-Bissau.  Scientists know so little about how Ospreys navigate, and this was an opportunity for first hand tracking, and to see the ways in which the Ospreys tackled the huge challenges of avoiding prey, particularly over the open water stretch at the Mediterranean – including whether they flew at night and navigated by the stars as some other migrating birds are thought to do. 

A few years before, Dench had partnered with WWT to follow the epic autumn migration of the Bewick Swans, flying with the birds in a special paramotor from the Russian Artic to England on a journey of three months.  Dench observes:

From the air, a bird’s-eye-view, there are things you cannot help but see. Polluting run-off after rain, the absence of wetlands around intensive agriculture, the bubbles coming from pools in the Arctic, a sign of the permafrost thawing… Whilst I am aware of the climate and biodiversity crises as facts, to see these from above, on a setting of a finite planet, makes them very real. But whilst our impacts are clearer, they also look a bit smaller, and easier to solve.

The way one navigates, then, also might affect the way one sees.

Deep peace of the running wave to you,
Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,
Deep peace of the Flock of Stars to you,
Deep peace from the Son of Peace to you,
Deep peace, deep peace!

Fiona Macleod, ‘Deep Peace’, The Dominion of Dreams: Under the Dark Star (William Sharp,1895). 

 Listen to John Rutter’s setting of this Gaelic blessing here

I saw Three Ships (iPhone image)