The Sympathy of Things
West of my house, behind a row of poplars that protrude from the landscape like the masts of a ship, there is a complex of once-gravel pits turned into fishing lakes. Every year in late September, you can stand in my garden and watch the swifts and house martins whirring in an increasing mothswarm of fervent hurry. They are feeding, wheeling in the air after insects that will stock their bodies for a long migration to spend the winter in Sub-Saharan Africa, a journey of tens of thousands of miles.
Their bodies are tuned to the earth, the season. All this activity is stimulated by the change in the air and light, a rise in an urgency of behaviour that climaxes in their overnight vanishing act, an emptiness left behind with the arrival of October. Their travelling too is a feat that bonds their navigation to the very magnetic field of the earth, the homeward gravity pull of their body’s instincts to go and arrive. There is a suddenness to their appearance in March or April, almost overnight the lakes whir with them returning famished and joyous.
The word ‘sympathy’, in Greek ‘Sympatheia’, was a word once used in ancient philosophies for the intrinsic interconnectedness of everything. The very behaviour of these birds acts in accordance with the circling of planets around our star, the rise of sap in trees, the…
