Who are your seven?

Lessons from murmuration

We park in the mall parking lot, get masked up, and tumble out of the car--along with some books, water bottles, and goldfish crackers. Look up at the sky. Our neighbors are there unexpectedly. We say, “Fancy meeting you here!” Talk about their new cat and anime movies. Look up at the sky. We don’t shop. We don’t hug. We don’t really know much about what we are there to do, truth be told. 

And then it starts--first just a faint, small circle of starlings, formed in the shape of a shockingly symmetrical circle, soaring through the gray sky. Then more birds--hundreds, thousands, in a wide variety of shapes; sometimes they look like a ribbon on May Day, undulating through the air, sometimes they look like a cattail or a mangrove tree. Sometimes they combine to get bigger, separate to get smaller. A falcon comes and they close their ranks. The falcon picks one off anyway. The parking lot full of people gasps, as if they are tailgating at a big game and just witnessed a last second touchdown against the underdog team.

This is a murmuration. It’s a wonder. And we stare at it until the sun nearly sets. 

Later, my daughters (4 and 7) and I decide what our questions are and look them up. 

How many are there? Hundreds to thousands. 

Why do they do it? To stay safe (like a herd of zebras, obscuring the individual with the power of the group), to stay warm, or to communicate about food sources. 

How do they do it? Each bird pays attention to just seven other birds and moves in relationship to those.

I lay in bed that night thinking about that last fact. If only we had that kind of focus, that kind of wisdom. Not our 500 Facebook friends (a few of which turn out to be Russian bots), but our seven people. I’ve just read a beautiful conversation between poet Eve Ewing and organizer Mariame Kaba (h/t Garrett Bucks) in which Mariame said, “I’m so uninterested in narratives. That word that gets used often. Narrative-building. People that want to be all about narrative-shifting, narrative-building. I believe that when we are in relationship with each other, we influence each other. What matters to me, as the unit of interest, is relationships.”

When I first read her words, I bristled. I’m a narrative person. I’ve built a whole career around a belief that stories can change the world. And yet, in my humblest heart, I know it is people that, well, if not change it, make the world bearable. Which is much of what I’m hoping for these days. How can we hold one another in our grief? How can we pass out the life-saving stuff in ways consummate with the starlings, not the falcon? How can we stay warm and safe together? 

The starlings even have shit to teach us about staying together while apart. There are three aspects to their flight that help them stay synchronized without running into one another: attraction zone, repulsion zone, and angular alignment. They have exquisite proprioception for seeing where their seven are headed, while staying apart like magnetic poles repelling one another just so. They’re much better than people at this. The scientists tell us so.

There’s much I don’t know about this year ahead. (We’re getting better at not knowing, aren’t we?) But there is one thing I’m knowing better all the time, a knowing born of layers of grief (all these beautiful people keep dying)--what matters is not the stories we tell about ourselves, but the way we make our seven feel. And there’s a larger wonder in that--a thing that transcends the seven, even as it might sometimes feel small and insignificant. Or as Robert Powers writes in The Overstory, which I just finished: “What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”