MIGRATION
With fall’s arrival, turn skyward and witness also the manifest beauty of the clarion call of Creation’s magnificence—Canada geese—responding to an ancient inner compass urging them onward each year along the “highways in the sky” of their ancestors—wings beating in a symphony of rhythmic movement about silhouetted bodies in chevron formation flying across a harvest moon—breathtaking and astonishingly beautiful. Their plaintive honking melodies are no different than their ancestors of millenniums ago that survived considerable and sometimes rapid climate change—a testimony in adaptation!
Witness Creation’s beauty this spring as millions of waterfowl wing their way southward. Listen to their plaintive callings that some have called “the voice of the Pleistocene.” As Aldo Leopold said, “Their annual return is the ticking of the geological clock,” as they endured and watched as other species became extinct.
One can only ponder what messages they take back ever spring since modern man has occupied the New World?
They, who have come to us across the years and whom we are so exquisitely entwined with in this spiritual world, I wonder what they are telling us regarding the changing world around them? Ere long, I also wonder will their ritual calling and honking melodies be but an echo from the crypts of time?
It reminds me that on Planet Earth we are the only ones that remain of the ancient ones—alone now for the last 30,000 years. Our ancestors, whose essence consisted first of being a hunter, adapted by having to cope with relentless and endless environmental instabilities and disruptions. Remarkably, they were able to turn it to their advantage.
Will we do likewise and survive during this interglacial “long summer” that began about 12,000 years ago?