The Molting Wings

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The Molting Wings

Once a year, in early summer, a swan’s wings molt. The swan drops its wing feathers, and tears them out with its beak. The swan temporarily loses the ability to fly and enters an interval of vulnerability and reduced mobility. The clearing of the feathers, however, creates the opening where the new wings will emerge. This interval of vulnerability is the necessary precedent to the growing of new wings – the new wings will allow the swan to migrate at the end of the season, as the days grow cold, if the swan chooses to do so. 

Is this process of molting, not also perceivable as a symbol for patterns of our existence – or even in a larger way, are the molted wings a way to understand the fallenness of our life on earth; to see the whole of it as an interval of molting, of a vulnerability in human form, a soul’s wandering without wings? Without wings we are dependent upon grace to raise us. 

The swan I love and care for has grown her new wings in now, but I don’t know if she will be leaving this winter. Last winter she stayed, and I fed her as she endured the frozen lake, the snow and the ice. 

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