I watched ospreys today, fishing in the sea-loch on a slack tide. To be honest, I didn’t see them actually fishing, too many bent-back hazels in the way, but I did hear the shrieks, warning shrieks, a rasping ‘bugger off’ I hadn’t heard before. The gulls were wheeling, all high-pitched and taking up all the air, filling it with the squeals of schoolgirls on a home bus. My alert alerted. Damn hazels, always in the way of seeing clear, even when naked. Now that’s a talent, I thought. The chaos continued as I moved on up the track, my eyeballs almost falling out with all the futile looking. I knew there was trouble down there, somewhere. then I saw the lift of huge wings, the power of that 8/9 foot flapation, three of them with gulls like midges pursuing them. Gulls don’t even fish, I said out loud as I almost fell off a rock, my eyes, still fixed, now rolling. Creatures just don’t get it, do they, although they do. These huge birds, birds of prey are floating about like cruise ships in the skinny waters of a tidal flow and the little boats just don’t want them here. They win in the end. Amidst a great diatribe of birdswear words, the ospreys lift and slide away, cutting through the sky, hardly flapping.

I would like to hardly flap. I walked on, could feel my heart rise into a rap sort of beat as I re-met the ordinary. It thinks me. We get these bajonkers lifts, insights into otherness, and in the during of it, we shock solid. Then, when the gasp is done and the spin is over, there we are on the same track, in the same place, as if we never just visited Narnia. It’s a gift. Unwrapped it goes on forever like Pass the Parcel, when the size of the thing makes all eyes sparkle with anticipation until, at the very last a very small dinosaur, or car, or lip salve appears. Is it a disappointment? Yes, sometimes. It’s life and a learning. Tough but real. What is learned then is vital.

Our own tidelines are written over many, many tides, some when we were just learning and later when we are most vulnerable because of that learning. Thinks. Do gulls just harry, parry with and infuriate other birds just because they have beaks enough and don’t quite remember why they have them all, or are they just bullies? I stop myself there because I can’t believe anything or anyone is just just. I know the palimpsest of old, and I also know the truth of such a laid out truth, that it is constantly rubbed out and amended. And that’s a good thing. The ingress of old thinking, the restrictions, particularly for women but in no way exclusively, seeps like damp over a gazillion decades. But, and there is definitely a but here, we all have the power to egress, to say NO and then to take action.

Those big birds chose to lift, knew their power, held their voice, just lifted. I recommend it, no matter the gulls, the bullies, the ingress, the old rules.