starlings

so no plan here.
it's just Boxing Day.
have an early fire going - a wee minute to decompress between continued festivities.
I guess (in lieu of having the girls about) I got the Christmas I was hoping for: many gatherings, old friends, oldold friends, new friends and newnew friends - music, warmth and a dial way down on stuff.

Was grateful, of course, that I didn't die on the freeway last evening - though I think I felt at the time it would be absolutely worth it. I simply had to pull over - right then. Near miss! whatever - look up, oh my god.

Oh what do i need to describe this: film, I guess, or music, or most like, a multiple, extended (self-edit)?

Okay. So for weeks now I've been wondering, and wanting to take pictures to document, why the hundreds of starlings that I've always loved as if they had something to do with me (like the wild oats, the crickets, snow when there was snow - all one loves), seemed to (did) congregate on the wires right over the freeway - not off to the side, right over the traffic leading west to San Francisco, east to the mountains, our seemingly grim car congestion thronging below. And - as I drove to work, there again, right over the freeway at its busiest part - this on the north/south corridor. They would sit there patiently. Always be there.
No huge statement. Just wondered that they preferred the traffic to the calmer phone wires available nearby.

Christmas Day Eve then. No one on the roads, but me (and the person I almost hit ---sorry, man!) Coming back over the river - the clouds billowy and a saturated sweetest pink over the Sierras, the sky then - speckled darkly, generously, with a fluttering ceiling of the birds I love (that are always, at this time of year downtown) - now I think because of the confluence of highways.

Then, over the highway the whole sheaf of birds suddenly lifts up, like they are all on one piece of giant paper. The sky lightens as they do and they curl away in a reverse wave - separating, taking individual paths. And then, from the east, a cluster, round like a giant hurled ball comes at me, straight at me, then disappears. I think they are gone (and have in the meantime, pulled over and almost gotten creamed by that pavement-colored sedan) - I look up and the birds have become a giant ribbon of birds, shaking out, inverting from top to bottom (invisible when they turn and slice away - DEEP black, a thousand winged shapes, black, shimmering deepest black when they bank and compress). How do they know: now turn, now pull together, now ripple out towards that actual twinkling Christmas star. How do they not crash and fall from the sky? The choreography and impulse and numbers staggered me. Definitely blackbirds in the thousands (that fifteen or so minutes of that later, when I came back around, had mostly all settled into two very tall utterly charming musical trees - tens of birds on every branch). Their animation and energy was thrilling. Shared, distributed. Compressed, dispersed, rejoined, turned, shifted, hopped, lifted - singing.

Oh goodness. Even as they settled into their vibrant, relative stillness, -their twittering silhouettes against the now pure electric blue last illumination of Christmas - words fail.
But they should.
Miracles are expressed in the medium of their mystery - in the fact that the birds really have nothing to do with us. Except that we can see them, love them, be amazed by whatever it is they are doing and how they know without direction how to do it - their spectacle of pure living which looked an awful lot like wild, joyous celebration.