Storks

breeding ∙ familiarity ∙ home ∙ rebirth

Humans build nesting places
Storks deliver human babies

so we don’t have to talk about sex!

This perfect couple always meets again
But is mostly loyal to the nest
Heart is where the home is

migration ∙ urge ∙ crowd ∙ pilgrimage ∙ commotion

How does the stork find her way? With a map and a compass? She needs none of those things, for the Earth is no stranger to her. She co-evolved with it.

Migrations are “slow gestures of a living geology, improvisational experiments that gradually stabilized into habits now necessary to the ongoing metabolism of the sphere.”
David Abram

A migrating bird follows what she feels
temperature ∙ air pressure ∙ magnetism ∙ scent ∙ wind

And we can also feel which way to go, when we get lost at sea:

There was something, a mechanism, that allowed me to understand where the direction was, without seeing it. And it was almost like, when I just gave up fighting to try to find something with my eyes, I just settled down, […] I felt this warmth come over me, and all of a sudden, I knew where the moon was.
Nainoa Thompson

What else do we perceive when we don’t see?
Storks throw their heads back
and clatter their beaks at each other.
What is intimacy without eye contact?

Perhaps blind lovers are both more abstract and more concrete, perhaps they are both more primitive and more sophisticated, in different ways. Perhaps this is what they mean when they say that true love is blind.
John Hull