#just so impossible to imagine the bredth of that experience

[stormofdefiance]

An incredibly lazy wee doodle of barn swallows since I'm struggling to sleep and going back to my teenage ritual of drawing birds far too late into the night. Where I live, it will soon be time for the swallows to leave and make their bi-annual 8000 mile migration all the way to South Africa. Summer goes with them, and already my late North European nights seem to be turning dark so soon. A couple of months ago the night would just be a muted blue until dawn would crack with a skylark's song at 3am, and from now it will just be a couple of months until the black sets in before the afternoon ends.

It genuinely makes me want to cry thinking about these matchbox sized little beings throwing themselves into that endless blue all in pursuit of airborne insects, those small bodies making their way over the widening, waterless Sahara, that 40 day excursion that, by mid-October, will be over. How long a journey that seems, how short for a being smaller than my hand.

I'll miss them as much as I'll miss the sun until my late-March birthday comes along again and the spring sky is briefly interrupted by their sudden return, their tumbling bodies celebrating the world waking up again, back - somehow, dare I project a sense of sentiment, remembering - to the very same nests they'd left behind just months ago.