Praytell

Friday, July 30, 2010

Migration of Pastel and Watercolor

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Winged Migration is perhaps the most beautiful film I have ever seen.  My wife told me I’d like it, and said she wanted me to see it, but at first I didn’t heed her suggestion.  It was a DVD, our computer was not much, and DVD players seemed complicated, so I kept putting it off.

Finally, I relented, allowing her suggestion to find its way home.

Over the next hour or so, I fell into its currents, its story, marveling with every new film of birds flying north, resting, nesting, and then once again flying back home.  The “together” nature of these migrations was, to me at least, sacred in and of itself.  Were the birds people I’d say they had courage, endurance, and purpose.  People must summon courage, must find ways to endure, and must find purpose in their lives.  Birds just do it.

Parts of the film were heart-wrenching.  After a thousand mile migration, ducks look for a place to rest and land in oil patches around a factory in Romania that is world-famous for its pollution.  Hunters bring down geese, seemingly unaware that their quarry had just flown several thousand miles.  In an instant, the geese fall from the sky that held them.  Lest you think I am anti-hunting, I am not, though I do not do it myself.  It’s just that once when I saw a bird, I saw nothing but the bird.  Thanks to this film, I now saw its migration.

Migration.

People migrate.

The Irish migrated to North America when famine stalked their land.  Norwegians migrated to Minnesota when the same happened in their country.  Italians migrated.   Poles migrated.  Germans migrated.  The Puritans migrated.  Each migration calls for purpose, endurance, and courage.

I have migrated.  Born in California (don’t tell anybody), raised in Colorado, touched by the coal fields of Kentucky, blessed by time in Switzerland and France, finding Maine a place to start a family, called to New York City, curious about southwestern Minnesota, finding home in Montana, and now Minneapolis.  All of it a matter of migration.

Migration.  Millions of Iraqis migrate from the violence of their country, in hope of something better.  Burmese migrate to Thailand in search of the same. The list, as you can see, goes on and on.  Lebanese migrate, Persians migrate, Liberians migrate, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Mexicans.

But so do the attempts to stop these migrations.  “This is ours, not yours,” we hear.  There is nothing has quite as much organizing power as the word “NO.”  Unless, of course, it is migration itself.

In Mexico, once, we visited a school on a barren hillside.  It was indeed desolate.  The school, a missionary endeavor, took care to feed the children knowing if they didn’t there would be no food at home.  Who were these people living on such an insecure edge?  They are the “parachutistas,” I was told.  One day, they simply appeared, seeming to have dropped from the sky.  There were some tensions.  Just whose land was it?  What about titles?  Deeds?  What about “passport control.”

But there they were.  Migrants.

Winged migration.  The painter in me, wants to note that shadows also migrate, as does the earth itself.   We migrate towards the light each and every day of our lives until we are finally home.

Migrants.  As human beings we are part of a winged migration that brings our very soul to the light.  Better to accept it than deny it or think we can stop it.  It seems to me that truth demands it.

Tags: " Migration to the Light, L. Pray watercolor, Migration, The organizing power of "No, Winged Migration

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