venture the terrain of a place foreign to my eye, but ever-familiar to the sight of my heart. My feet have never walked upon the creeks and meadows of this ground, but my deepest consciousness has its roots already established here from long ago. 

I marvel the Sun, sitting slightly higher in the noon sky than it was there. Still, unequivocally effulgent and enlightened. 

The earth is my home, and the universe - my heart, I remind myself. Words inscribed with ink on the tablet of my spirit. Words that I know hold greater treasuries of truth than all of the world’s diamonds combined. 

But surely, yet, my mind falls to them. The ones whose personification of love nothing temporal can compare. The nest within which my humble wings were formed, nourished, and prepared for flight. The space around which filled not else but utter glee and deeds of stainless kindness. Souls whose every step I reckon a miracle from the Divine, and my every step dedicated as supplication to His Loving-Kindness in their honour. 

How I miss them. 

It was in this moment that the blackness of the iris of my eye fell to the mirrored blackness of your majestic, elongated neck. Your eye looking directly into mine. Your crown and bill raised up with likened majesty and certitude; a certitude in something that I had yet to understand. Your mantle was of layered shades of brown, resting atop one another like the shores of the lakes we would visit in the summer. And your breast a defined white, pronounced proudly as you stood - like Benji.¹

Did you follow me? I ponder. Did you see the tears that fell as I waved them ‘goodbye’ and within it find a pond to live; near me, alongside me? Or was your coming a reassurance of that which leaves must inevitably return? The multi-directional, almost circumambulating, pathway of life. 

I look deeply at you; in you. Not merely your outward manifestation, but your inner symbolism. 

I wonder if the moment you lifted your wings, entrusting your departure to the Wind, you knew that amongst it carried the stories of millions of travellers? That within those invisible breezes of immeasurable potency drifted wishes, hopes, yearnings, thoughts, and aspirations? And, certainly, myself. 

I wonder if you knew where you were to ‘go’, or rather committed yourself to Faith alone? Flying without pause until a southern home called to you? Or, perhaps, your vision of the earth as your home brought relief, in that wherever you stopped the one tapestry of nature’s multiplicity of colours would shelter you in perfect refuge?

I trust in you. I trust that in you is a proclamation of a journey grander than the scope my eye can collect. I trust that with you the whisperings of my heart that came, will also return. I trust that where the seed of love is planted by the springs of utmost purity, you will, too, be found.

But on days that I am too deeply enthralled in the sorrow and anguish of their distance to remember that distance is a mere illusion, I will need to look to you in aid. 

That when the rose petals of my heart fall with the abscission of leaves in a now-bare forest, for my longing of them bears no more, I will raise my arms up in prayer with the synchronous ascent of your flight. 

“Carry with you, my heart!” I will plead, “Please deliver them, my heart!”

Though, you’re already off.

On a flight back north. 

 ¹ Benji is my family’s dog, who possesses a distinct white chest amidst his light brown hair.