There's Something in the Air
Rob Kall
Yesterday, I was out at the CSA—the local, community supported agriculture farm- where I’m a member. It’s getting close to the end of the growing season. The night before we had our first major frost and you could see, walking past plantings, to the barn, which plants had been hit. The basil seemed hardest hit—leaves all dried and shriveled and blackened. The harvest was mostly root vegetables—celeriac, rutabaga, yams, carrots, garlic, plus what was probably the last of the leafy stuff—broccoli and broccoli rabe, kale, arugala, bok choy, asian turnip greens, and green peppers.
I took the share spelled out on the blackboard—2.5 pounds of yams, 1.5 pounds of carrots, a head of broccoli, two greens, three peppers, five garlics, one rutabaga… and then I checked the “U-pick” board. That tells you what you can optionally pick, on your own, in the fields. There wasn’t much left—just some herbs and flowers. And for the flowers, the board said something to the effect, “not much still alive, but optimists will find some.” I’m an optimist. I went in search of flowers. On the way back to the car with the harvest, I saw something catch the light. It was a spiderweb on some of the herbs in the herb garden. I drove over to the garden and started looking. There were plenty of flowers to find Then I heard a noise. I looked up and there were birds-- a lot of them. All of a sudden, the noise changed from a few birds to a rushing sound, a brief thrumming of the air. And the air was filled with thousands of birds. Thousands!. They were all flying at once, from one tree to another one a hundred yards away. The thrumming sound was being produced by thousands of birds, wings beating in unison, flying as a huge sky-blackening mass—an awesome sight to behold-- to see and literally feel the vibrations— ending almost as soon as it began. I pulled out my camera phone and caught the thinning tail of the flock. I stopped picking flowers. Took some pictures of the straggling birds that were following and then walked across the road to the trees where the mass of birds had flown, turning on the video function on my blackberry. I could see a few scattered birds flying from tree to tree in an area where there was a partial ring of trees surrounding a small field. Video settings on my blackberry ready, I walked to the middle of the circle of trees and it happened again. Suddenly, there was this whooshing sound and the birds started flying out of the grasses, out of the trees and again, the sky blackened. I had the camera going, but all it caught was a momentary pixilated shimmering of part of the screen and the sound. It could not have lasted more than three or four seconds. The flock spread out as it flew into and across a field to another stand of trees a quarter mile away. Within seconds, this huge movement of birds disappeared. There was a lot of magic in those few moments when all the birds were taking off simultaneously, when their wings, together caused the air to hum deeply for a few seconds, followed by an almost eerie silence broken by the few flying stragglers. It gave me an optimistic feeling and made me think that perhaps we’ll experience this kind of mass movement shimmering moment on election day, where millions will wake up and, almost in unison, send the US and the world soaring, on a new day, towards a better place.
Some thoughts; Before the massive flight of thousands exploded from the trees, a few early flyers took off ahead of the flock. Then a bigger number, maybe a dozen, winged from one tree to the next. Then, there was a tipping point and that's when the sky blackened and the air vibrated with the thousands rising at once.
Funny. No technology here. Just birds migrating south, due south, in the case of "my" birds. And there were "chasms"-- the open spaces between the trees.
We see the same kind of movements with schools of fish. These start, not with powerful leaders, but rather, it's my guess, with antsy, skittish critters-- the ones which are more sensitive to cues in the environment. This is nature operating from the bottom up. The canaries in the migrating flock start with a trickle then explode in the air, for a flash, then settle back into the trees, into the field again. And they do this probably thousands of times.
Is the process of waking up, of moving to the left or right really that different? But with humans, we don't really seem to have any clear leaders, but we do have the bloggers, today, to be the innovators and we have the media to transmit the message to the early adopters and early majority.
Listen. Can you hear it? There's a new, brighter future rising.
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, Impeachment, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.
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