“...to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
— “Starlings in Winter,” Mary Oliver
Folks tend to ask me about the name of my practice. Some know of starlings, the prolific black songbirds that swoop and careen together in dark, mesmerizing clouds that can be both beautiful and brooding. A flock of starlings is a murmuration, a word that has also come to signify the particular type of coordinated, graceful movement starlings participate in. In 2012 George F. Young and his colleagues investigated starlings' "remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information." There is no clear leader or follower. They sense one another and move imperfectly through high levels of uncertainty, but together.
To me, this silent sensing and unity in the face of uncertainty symbolizes what the very best fit with a therapist feels like. No leader, no follower, moving together through something with a little bit of blind faith and lots of trust. There is a bringing forth of something bigger than ourselves as individuals, beautiful and also heavy at times, but held within the comfort of being in-step with one another.
I saw the two starlings
coming in toward the wires
But at the last,
just before alighting, they
turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that’s what got me —
to face into the wind’s teeth.
— William Carlos Williams, The Manoeuvre