Flighty Fancy

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I can't stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me.

- Firefly, title track.

Birds are lucky creatures.
Sure they are pretty much at the bottom rungs of the food chain, they are attributed less sense than what would fit in a teaspoon,and if they're are not eaten they are generally shot at and stuffed for no logical reason. Often they are cursed and pelted with expletives just for relieving themselves when they feel like it. And in recent history, their personal air space has been invaded by huge silver machines or idiotic human beings with a death wish jumping off these same machines (ungainly graceless things)with balloons furling out of their back.

But still, Birds are lucky creatures.
They can fly.

They don't need stupid parachutes,they don't have sit in stuffy,smelly,claustrophobic air planes or hang on to gliders like that tortoise in that folk story.They can experience the extreme freedom of breaking FREE.

The wind whips through their plumage, they have power that is purely theirs- not obtained through any transaction of pieces of paper. Even the crow, the ever irritating marauder of the canteen, in flight, is an admirable sight. There is more grace and abandon in the flight of a crow than in the rumbling,mechanical take off of a man made contraption. Man's effort is admirable yes, but he as in no way conquered flight.Because Man isn't really flying.There is no freedom in man's mechanical fliers. It is all control.There is none of that burst of euphoria as in the cheerful dip and rise of the sparrow. None of the soaring power of the eagles baiting with the wind. To watch a bird take flight is t watch a being break into harmonious freedom. They deliberately and successfully break the petty earthly bonds of gravity and leave behind inconsequential humanity for higher things. For the wind coursing over their bodies, for the power of total freedom, for the untamed abandon of full flight- which no human can ever truly have.

Birds are lucky creatures.