I came across this lady yesterday – while getting happily lost on the country roads. Bulgarian villages are never short of imposing soviet monuments. But this one, with it’s proud stork’s nest, took things to another level.

Somehow the nest captured, in all it’s domestic simplicity – branch by branch, brought by beak – the inevitability of giving life. Tenderness is to return, over stone, over swords, over conquerors. We all need a home and the urge to birth is as old as the world self. A sense of welcome? Perched on a sword…  That strange feeling of relaxing into paradox, of finding comfort on the edge,  of finding stability in perpetual flux.

I keep looking at her again, to see if her warrior’s face might have let a smile slip, might have softened unwittingly, from the life going on upstairs, from the births happening upon her hands – those powerful hands gripping the sword of will and liberation.

As the cold comes, the birds have flown south. Her resolve hasn’t weakened but I’d say she is now carrying a promise, and letting that blade trail in the wind…