The Weight of Wingbeats

The air before a storm has a specific, metallic thickness. It presses against the skin like a damp wool blanket, heavy and expectant. I remember standing in a field as a child, listening to the sudden, frantic rustle of leaves as the birds took flight all at once. It was not a sound of music, but a sound of displacement—the air being shoved aside by a thousand frantic pulses of muscle and feather. There is a vibration that travels through the soles of your feet when the earth is suddenly emptied of its inhabitants. It is a hollow, ringing sensation, as if the ground itself is gasping for the weight it just lost. We spend our lives anchored to the soil, yet we are haunted by the physics of the sky. What does it feel like to trade the heavy, humid earth for the cold, thin silence of the clouds? Does the body remember the gravity it left behind, or does it simply dissolve into the wind?

Sanjoy Sengupta has captured this fleeting, kinetic energy in his image titled The Giant Leap. The way the birds carve their path through the air makes me want to reach out and feel the rush of the breeze they leave in their wake. Can you feel the sudden lightness of the sky?