A Summer Prescence

A spring just would not be spring without the chimney swifts. A summer would not be complete without being able to see the trio flights and listening to their twittering chatter and a fall just does not wind down until you watch a funneling mass of migrating swifts go to roost in a chimney. In the winter I often reflect back on the chimney swifts prescence as I look up into a bare and naked sky. The winter skies just seem so void of life sometimes. Chimney swifts just seem to knit together the seasons as they spastically and erratically zip around.

I sit here now, watching the swifts, having much to say about them but yet struggling for the words that sum them up without sounding like a text book. I think the swifts are, for me, all heart and a wisp of a soul and sometimes that is just hard to dictate into words.

I adore the chimney swifts. They are a sign and a symbol for me of many things, but mainly for the vibrance of life...not in physical color but in all emotions and praise on high! I anxiously await their arrival in the spring which for here at home is around April 22. I keep my eyes to the sky but to no avail because it is usually my ears that detect their prescence first....and more often it comes to me like a memory until my eyes become firm on the vision. And although I know my ears can be trusted when it comes to this "angelic whisper", there is something sweet about the memory of a song.

To briefly sum up the heart and wisp of a soul of a chimney swift in my sparse and human vocabulary is to say that I adore its ever-seemingly happy and thankful moods, I adore its energy, I adore its passion, and I adore the way it connects to my heart and soul, the way it grabs it and does not let go. Wherever I am at, whatever I am doing--the chimney swift will always grab my attention! I am thankful for this "life is grand--don't let it slip by--take the time--live for the moment" opportunity. It is a life lesson.

The swift is the epitomy of summer--it completes it, makes it whole. The swift reaks of summer and of life~ of all life! I am struggling here for the words~ I feel it all swelled and bulging in my heart and the feelings overflow through my vision when I watch them, but alas~I think I have found an emotion which has no spelling, one that has no description or physical being. It is a prescence only...A bird of feeling only. A prescence among the ether world that slips into our reality....