When nothing was going right, Angie McMahon started staring at the sky. Every day, she would drag her mattress into her front yard, put a cold washer on her face and lay there looking up; not moving, just observing. Lately she had been feeling that her life had fallen apart, that her body was shutting down, that she had to relinquish the illusion she had any real control over anything.
But above her, murmurations of birds would gather every afternoon, changing form – one moment a fish, the next a wave. Forced by a bout of illness to slow down and tune in, McMahon would watch the birds every day, noticing the cycles of nature that she hadn’t stopped to see before. As they morphed and swelled, left and returned, the birds began to reflect the things she’d been learning about life – that everything can and will change, and the only constant is reinvention, rebirth, reconfiguration.
