Fall Equinox 2025: Homing

Hundreds of millions of birds are on the move, have been migrating through Alberta for several weeks now. First the landbirds (warblers, sparrows, flycatchers, vireos, hummingbirds and others) who left northern Alberta in early August. Next the shorebirds, the raptors, and the waterbirds. The last to go (as late as November) will be the waterfowl: the ducks, geese, and swans. You can follow them in real time here.

Homing is a verb, the homing instinct an action: an ability to return home from a great distance. Usually associated with animals: salmon, caribou, especially birds returning to their place of birth. Or in this case, their winter shelter, a geographic memory from before the parting of the continents.

I wonder how much we humans still have that instinct? To find our way home. And what does home mean in the 21st century? Do we know our origins?

The last couple of years personal circumstances have challenged me to rethink the meaning of home. I’ve also been listening to the stories of many (human and more-than-human*) displaced this past summer by wildfires, especially Indigenous people. It has almost become an annual ritual in some parts of the country.

There is a place, a piece of land that I go back to in my mind and sometimes still in the flesh, that place where I grew from a child into adulthood. A farm, north of Edmonton. Its creeks, swamps, fields, bushes; some of them gone now. Where I first connected with the more-than-human world. Where I had many of my formative experiences. There have been other places since where I’ve bonded too, maybe over years or only a moment, where I’ve felt connected to everything that is. That is home to me. Sometimes a particular air current, a scent, the right slant of light, a piece of music, a conversation, an image will bring me back there.

My current physical home has so much of me in it: the wall colours, the window coverings, the flooring, the art, the greening courtyard out my front window. There is a balance and a beauty to the setting that visitors often comment on. But the feeling of “being at home” is much more than this. Feeling at peace in my own skin, home as a place of peace and sanctuary, a place of welcome. Home as a staging ground, a place to rest, renew, and draw energy and spirit for relationships, for work, for creativity. Home is in my relationships. This is my habitat. What about yours?

At one time, before settlement, there were probably hundreds of billions of birds in skies at the fall equinox. Just like there were millions of bison on the plains.

As we approach the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation or Orange Shirt Day for survivors of Indian Residential Schools, let us remember the relationships that bring us home.

*Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions:2014)