Northern Rough-winged Swallow : Creating in Constraint

Northern Rough-winged Swallow

This is a Northern Rough-winged Swallow.   They’re bug-eaters, and I saw him hunting next to a small pond.  After several sorties, I started to understand his approach.  The pond was centered in a cleared field, devoid of good vantage points.  This fence was the highest nearby perch, and he readied himself on it for each skimming trip over the water.  The fence empowered him.  I would have liked to approach closer to the pond.  There were things I wanted to see and to photograph, but the fence interposed.  For me, the fence was an impediment, a barrier between where I was and where I wanted to be.  The swallow and I both encountered the same fence, but its impact on us couldn’t have been more different.

Seeing a bird on a wire this way, I’m reminded of two iconic wires in Jewish tradition.  As a young man, I visited Dachau, the concentration camp two hours southwest of the village of Bayerisch Eisenstein.  Seemingly such a small thing, that fence, that denoted the difference between life and death.  It is hard to fathom how a wire, just a wire, could so powerfully constrain life.  One side freedom, the other death.  Decades later, my synagogue sits at the center of an eruv, literally a wire strung around the neighborhood.  In a legal sense, this wire creates a “shared courtyard” allowing greater flexibility on Shabbat.  Psychologically, the eruv represents free expression and safe observance of ancient Jewish traditions.

When we see a “wire,” a limiter, a constraint, how do we react?  Some people allow external constraints to define them; others soar above, using wires as jumping-off points.  Think of the poet who writes haiku or sonnets.  It is precisely the limits of the poetic form that imbue their work with special meaning.  Business leaders can tell stories about how imposed constraints - of time or resources - have actually made their teams more creative, more productive than they would have been with limitless inputs.  Like so many seeming paradoxes, “limits” disappear when we change our perspective.  My community and the Swallow have both repossessed wires, taking them as perches for successful flight.  So may we all.