What caught my breath was the leisure

Great Blue Heron NPS © Jim Roetzel

John Berger, in a letter to a Mexican resistance fighter, writes about herons he witness "coming home together" for the first time in the spring which he will use later in the letter as a metaphor for resistance fighters' work.  The delivery of the metaphor is exquisite.  Berger has such an ability to create/to build a scene using detail, "science," his OWN reaction and a precise naming.

There were two herons circling with slow wing-beats. They were low enough for me to see the black feathers like ribbons which trail from their ears. Grey wings, white throats. Whilst they flew around me one of them crossed the circle to be nearer to the other, and the other flew to meet the first, and like this both found themselves again on opposite sides of the same circle.

It was their first morning. They had come back. Ornithologists say that the male heron searches for a partner only after he has established a nest. In which case this pair was an exception. They were cautiously surveying the terrain together.

Yet what caught my breath, Marcos, was the leisure, the ease with which they were doing this. In that leisure there was a momentary yet supreme confidence and sense of belonging. Slowly they circled the place as if they were surveying their own lives to which they had come home.

This remarkable passage is preceded by a great set-up:

Apart from the heron, there's nothing special about the place: a pool of water, a small bog, a steepish slope. It's on the north side of the mountain and so gets little sunlight. One of nature's backyards, not recommended for its flowers. And here, on Wednesday, April 12th this year, spring came out into the open.

I didn't notice anything special at first. Then gradually I became aware, before I looked up, that something unusual was happening in the sky. Nothing alarming. Rather something measured and solemn. So I glanced up.