Corporate swans

The swans are back. I think they're rented. Rented swans. They paddle across the man-made ponds here on our corporate campus every spring and summer, and remind me that this isn't all there is -- the grey cubicles, the button-down shirts, the insurance brochures, backstabbing, high-heels and proverbial corporate ladder. They bring a sense of...of...something. Nature, even though it's rented, contrasts with the everything man-made and modern. The building I work in was built in 1964, the year I was born. Typical, bland mid-centure architecture of concrete, glass, and beige brick blandness. Inside are cubicles filled with computers, stacks of paper, fax machines, telephones, and 5,000 people whose eyes are dulled by efficiency and busyness and the pursuit of something intangible and futile.

Last summer the female swans sat on their nests for weeks on end, barely moving. What patience. Finally, one morning I saw 6 gray furry heads popping up from one of the nests on the pond. Swan chicks start out grey or dirty white, and throughout the summer the shed their gray feathers and of course, turn into beautiful graceful swans. Sometimes I sit outside by the ponds during lunch and watch them paddle in a line behind their mother, mimmicking her as she preens and plucks at her feathers. I feel the warm sun on my face, and breathe the fresh air. To survive here, I have to have reminders of the outside world. Of nature. Of God's creation. And of the peaceful, quiet, patience of the mother swans. One day I saw one of the baby's curled up on the broad softness of its mother's back. How warm and safe it must have felt.