Thinking about HARMONY
There is a community of Canadian geese at a pond behind my mother’s house. All day they fly in and away, graze through grass, float on water. I hear them in the darkness too, their wing-flaps and low clucks coming through the opened window, noises likely spurred by a fox.
Whenever the group leaves the pond and when it returns, it seems to me that I am witnessing a kind of profound turn-taking. Each individual goose looks to be rising on her own time but barely so, as though for the briefest second just before another lifts off. Each one advances sequentially and congruently and pointed toward the same direction. Yet it’s a group ascending. Then, when the group returns to the water, each goose lands in a kind of single agreement, each bending down to the pond’s surface with a posture and procedure they’ve all come to depend on and share.
They are often boisterous and territorial. If anyone (or even at times, another goose) gets too close, there are wild honkings, threatening thrusts of beaks and a hurried pace. But I haven’t seen them hurt another. They clearly like to be left alone, autonomous. The only time I saw these geese fly away when threatened--rather than fight back--was when a massive, imposing lawn mower roared toward them. I imagined that to these geese, this intruder was an alien, an odd species, a strange-looking-thing far noisier and assertive. Frightening. Perhaps, leaving their place was the only choice.
I know my perception of these geese is anthropomorphic. I know I am interpreting what I see at this pond in a self-serving, personal way. Humanizing geese? Pretty unoriginal, for sure. But today, watching the geese, listening to them while I ponder the gaps that can open wide between us humans, these geese help me estimate a reaction. When human nature feels ambiguous and unconscious, when human behaviors look inaccurate and de-humanizing, I need to take measurements for the way communities can be at their best. So, I watch and think about these geese. They are purposeful creatures. They take turns. They move together with no mid-air collisions. They honk for each other.
Gayle (originally February 2024)
