Swans and Gulls

On Metro this morning I read from "The Outermost House" by Henry Beston. Beston was a naturalist and this book is a classic. The section I read today cataloged the flocks of birds he studied during the year he lived alone in a small house on a Cape Cod dune. Here he describes a flight of swans: "Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the solemn unrest of ocean -- their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals."

I rode the Metro escalator up into the cold gray dawn of Judiciary Square and walked east toward my office with those words echoing in my head. And suddenly there in front of me were scores of gulls, careening and crying as they wheeled in the urban sky. It was probably garbage that brought them here, but I'd rather imagine their flight as evidence of that "old loveliness." They're here to remind us that we share the earth, that, as Beston says of animals, "They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time..."