I recently took a trip to north Alabama’s Joe Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for several years, but the time just slipped away. I wanted to go in deepest winter to see the flocks of sandhill cranes that overwinter there every year. These large birds migrate every year in late autumn from very northern Canada and Alaska to points south, mainly Mexico, Texas, Florida, but here in Alabama, we get some of them, too.
And by some I mean many thousands!
I really didn’t know what to expect. I had looked up the birds and learned that they stand three to four feet tall, have with a wingspan of up to seven feet, and are a medium gray color with with a red patch on their foreheads. Their spindly legs are built for traversing the marshes where they roost and get their water and part of their diet.
An interesting side note on the return migration to their northern breeding grounds: roughly a million sandhill cranes stop to feed and rest on a stretch of the Platte River in Nebraska before traveling north again to their final destinations. That must surely be a sight.
And a sound!
When I got out of my car at the Refuge, I was immediately met with a cacophony of crane call. It was a very distinctive rolling bugle from cranes flying overhead and from their neighbors in the surrounding fields and marshes. I learned that their voice boxes are deep in their chests, and this allows them to have the loud, harsh call that carries to a distance over 2.5 miles.
Migration is a mysterious phenomenon to me. Scientists are still trying to understand how flocks, herds, and schools make the exact trip year in and year out. How do they pass this knowledge onto their offspring?
“Snowbirds” are human migratory creatures, but other than that, we don’t move on a regular schedule.
But maybe we can think of human migration in a more metaphorical way.
We all tend to stay on a prescribed, comfortable path. We traverse the same thought patterns and worn habits without making that decision to do so. These are our autopilot migratory routes. Getting out of those ruts and onto new tracks takes a desire and a conscious effort to do so. When we are stuck in the same old ways of relating to others, thinking about our lives, or ruminating on our past successes and failures, we “go” to the same places we have always gone to. There can be no personal growth if we travel the same trails all of our lives.
I have a pretty set routine in the mornings, as I suspect most of us do. To get out of that routine takes quite an effort. I talk to myself, telling myself what wonderful things await me if I just get out of this rut and do something different. That’s a fairly simple example.
The more difficult path for me to exit is my habit of passing quick judgement on people without giving them the grace to be who they were created to be. If they don’t meet my standards of behavior, I will dismiss them in my mind of being worthy of my attention. That is a trait I truly want to rid myself of. That path is deeply worn, and it requires much effort on my part to be more gracious. See, I do it to myself, too. My inner critic loudly says the the same things, pointing out my failures. It’s stuck in the groove of my life’s record.
So let’s jump off our tired migratory paths and travel new routes to new ways of thinking and being. Maybe then we can lay down new pathways—ones that more closely adhere to consciousness, truth, wholeness, and unconditional love. And if we make that transition often enough, we will have created a higher level migratory way.