The Black Swan

A book review by Madhuri; “This book is a window, a door, a portal. Highly recommended!”

The Black Swan

Memory, Midlife, and Migration

by Anne Batterson

Scribner, New York, 2001

187 pages

A book full of surprises, revelations, and grace.

From the look of the cover I thought it would be a ‘meditation pastoral’, but instead it is a beautifully-written hymn of wild adventure and transcendent unexpectedness.

The author tells how she periodically has to leave her happy marriage to go on some vision quest of her own – in this case an autumn journey to bird refuges across the USA to watch, and commune with, the hawks, eagles, cranes, egrets, and other birds which land or swoop there.

She says, “I have always known a wild bird lives inside me. Have felt it gazing quietly through my eyes, tipping my head back to read the slender twists of mares’ tails, the mapping of the stars. And too, there are dreams that are not my own. Dreams of homing, of soaring high above the earth, silent as a glider, following the ancient bearings my body knows. When the weather turns in August, the creature frets and frets until it makes me feel edgy, deprived, skewed somehow – by the tilting of the light.”

Throughout the book we are moved into flight too as she describes, with stunning clarity and power, skydiving from 12,000 feet right into the top of a thundercloud (after sharing a mid-air kiss with her fellow skydiver!); and watching a rookie jumper being catapulted from 2500 feet to 30,000 by an updraft. The landing in treetops 50 miles away, the rescue by a local – all of this is told as if this once-in-a-lifetime adventure were only part of a life where flight and all its nimble freedom is her daily fare.

She speaks too of her parents, children, friends – and scary American sorts of dangers she encounters, like psychos in the woods with guns and knives, or locals full of threatening vibes when she’s driving alone out in some country place. You never know where this book is going! The last tale she tells, of the rescue of a pinioned black swan, is beautiful and grave, triumphant but fully cognizant of the transience of things.

The author is a meditator – she describes sitting in a Zendo, facing a wall; tells us that every New Year’s is spent with a friend, doing sitting and walking meditation all the day long. The power and breadth of this little book, the incredible scope of its flight, takes wings from this fact, I think – and simply from the fact that the author is an extraordinary soul – someone who is willing to claim her freedom, and to soar with it. (This, as it happens, only enriches her happy marriage a thousandfold.)

The book left me touched, opened, musing, full of both the space and the wonder of flight, and the sense of how wings bring joy and nourishment to roots. A water-bird feeds in mud and silt in the bottom of a pond, and then flaps with tremendous muscle to pull itself aloft, from where it looks down at an Earth made wonderful by distance. Such a bird is indeed a teacher to us all, and this book is a window, a door, a portal. Highly recommended!