The Rhythm of the Flock
When I was seven, my grandfather kept a small patch of land behind the shed where he raised a handful of geese. I remember the sound of them most—a frantic, rhythmic slapping of webbed feet against the packed earth, followed by a chorus of hissing that sounded like dry leaves skittering across a porch. My grandfather never hurried them. He walked with a long, smooth stick, not to strike, but to guide the air around them, moving with a patience that seemed to belong to a different century. I used to stand by the fence, watching the way they moved as a single, shifting body, convinced that if I stood perfectly still, they might mistake me for a tree and let me join their migration. It is a strange thing to realize as an adult that we spend so much of our lives trying to herd our own days, yet we rarely move with the quiet, unbothered grace of a creature simply following the path laid out before it. Do we ever truly lead, or are we just following the momentum of the morning?
Evdokiya Witwicki has captured this exact sense of ancient movement in her photograph titled The Driver of Geese. It feels like a quiet echo of those afternoons by the shed, where the world slows down to the pace of a steady walk. Does this scene make you want to follow where they are going?
