A beginning...

Rooks - and all their corvid cousins, Raven, Crow, Jackdaw, Magpie - have always been metaphors and symbols for me. Of course, exactly how those symbols manifested has always shifted over time - both for time itself, and the increased knowledge and awareness time brings, and for changes in mood, atmosphere, myself... Time was, it was Crow and Raven who spoke most deeply to me, seemeing to respresent some dark, solitary, romantic artistry that I thought (hoped) was somehow akin to myself - a very teenage fantasty, and somewhat wide of the mark, but perhaps very typical!

These days, it is Rooks who hold me. I watch them, these autumn evenings when the light is pale and the shadows long. They pool in the field opposite the house, collecting quietly like a dark lagoon in the centre of the field. They form a tight group, though sometimes a few birds fly up lightly and move over the group, alighting on another side to take advantage of a new opportunity to pick in the grass for food. As the evening gathers, the group quietens further, waiting... Then there is a barely perceptable ripple of excitement, a shiver of anticipation, and quite suddenly, the whole flock rises, a joyous cacophony of calls as the birds lift from the field and take to the darkening sky, their small bodies floating impossibly, sometimes wildly like rags on the wind, sometimes in more graceful, purposeful swoops and arcs. It is a wild and joyful, heartlifting moment to watch - this huge community of family moving together, delighting in their bodies, in their comrades, in their Rook-ness as they perform their outlandish aeronautical displays. Sometimes the display ends sharply as the group suddenly disperses and the birds stream off towards a Rookery to the north of here, other times, the cloud of Rooks lifts and drifts and settles in the trees opposite the house til dawn...

I once wrote, many years ago, and with little understanding of the real meaning behind my words, that Rooks are old, old friends. Old friends have the ability to root oneself - to be at once an anchor to a particular moment in time, and a firm, safe grounding from which to grow. And I had not realised, these last ten years, how that anchor was missing. Not, of course, that there were no Rooks - I saw them in their ones, twos, threes, wheeling alongside Jackdaws over the railway embankment at the bottom of the garden, perched, calling to unknown, unseen colleagues from the top of the telegraph pole... But neither they nor I fully belonged in that landscape, and so I gathered together what I could of ten years and left - 250 miles away to where the Rooks throng in their hundreds, to a landscape where they and I are held, rooted - home. Home in Rook Country.