Justin Adams

Here in the North Wessex Downs they circle above the gently undulating chalk hills and streams. Rising on thermals with hardly a wingbeat, their amber eyes take in the whole pattern of the land. Woodland and field. River and ridge. Not fragments but the whole. I love being reminded of that perspective they carry.

Once they were hunted and poisoned to the edge in much of England. Their numbers fell dramatically. Now they have returned. Their steady recovery speaks of resilience when pressure eases, of life reasserting itself given half a chance. That quiet return feels deeply hopeful to me in these turbulent times.

The buzzard is also a great teacher of death being integral to life. They are hunters and scavengers. Nothing is wasted. They remind me that life feeds life and that this is not something to turn away from but to understand.

In old Celtic stories birds of prey were seen as messengers between earth and sky. I felt something of that during a wilderness vigil, after days of fasting and solitude, when I lay on the forest floor and watched a buzzard circling above me. Later it perched in a tree just above my head, looking down. In that stripped back state I felt my life as brief and porous. I felt the deeper presence of time, forest time. I was not separate from the living world. I was part of it. The buzzard seemed to hold that wider arc, that death gives life and life returns again.

Now whenever I hear their thin, mewing call, my heart lifts. I look up into the wide sky to trace the invisible paths it is soaring on, and at the same time I look down to the soil beneath my feet and remember that I belong to the Earth. What message are you carrying today?

The buzzard reminds me to see the pattern, not only the parts, and to remember that I am within it. I am honoured to stand beside you.

PHOTO: Zeynel Cebeci https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Zcebeci

PHOTO: Mark Medcalf https://www.flickr.com/people/57155487@N05

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