I noticed a Pond heron on a tree on our garden today morning! The paddy fields and farm lands in our area have become nursery for rubber plants in the last six months. So the Son herons move inland at least for part of their time during the day,
On Saturday, I noticed the Cattle Egrets in the company of crows in the lawn of the college, where I currently work. They have moved far away from the farm lands where they are often around the cattle grazing on the ground.
These two sights about the two species of water birds, brought home the realities to which they respond by moving to places where they can get used to! During the monsoon battles do not graze in the open.
One can look at it as displacement. We can also look at it as movement.
I want to look at it as movement.
Most of rte manual labourers who work in the construction sites and farm lands in our area are workers from Orissa, West Bengal and Bihar. For about eight months of the year they are in our area and return to their home lands during the monsoon months when they do not find enough work. They are unfortunately referred to as migrant workers. But many view them as guest workers. They are used to moving and finding their occupation.
This movement in life is a special experience. We are called to live without being rooted!
From being dwellers to being pilgrims!
I have come to sense from different experiences in my forty years of professional life, that we move and get moved!
We move because we feel that the space where we have worked and grown, to be no more compatible with insights and perspectives which have formed our lives.
But we get moved because our presence makes others uncomfortable because of different work ethics and values we might represent, different from what is popular and acceptable.
In either situations, what the water birds do become an example to consider! They have wings to fly and places to explore. They move and find new habitat. They do not suffer from the anxiety of being displaced.
This to me is the journey of purpose that most people discover when they willingly accept the need to move. Whether they do it on their own or feel the need to do so because of unfavourable circumstances, the movement is for personal growth and for benefitting others beyond one's own earlier setting.
Following the event when Jesus fed five thousand men along with other women and children with five loaves and two fish, Jesus 'made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead Him to the other side, while He sent the multitude away'(Mat. 14:23). A movement after a spectacular event! The tendency to live in the terrain of good and comfortable experiences is the norm. But there is something beyond the experience of fulfilment that we so cherish which we want to cling on to!
It was while crossing to the other side in the boat, the disciples were caught in a storm and Jesus came walking on the water and entered the boat. The water became still!
For the disciples this was a movement forward. They confessed, 'You are certainly God's son'! A new consciousness!
All movements in life have this prospect of enlarging and deepening our consciousness of who we are and whose we are!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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