Friday, September 30, 2011

corridors of sun-flies

its rare that we notice strange patterns in the behavior of little inconsequential winged insects. some days ago i heard this TED talk about how this random normal bird-lover living in Maldives noticed year after year the sudden swarm of dragonflies flying at a particular time of the year. and by questioning that he discovered the globetrotter dragonflies that fly back and forth the Arabian Sea with the monsoon winds.

as one thing leads to another, since then i've been noticing these really tiny flying things that i now like to call sun-flies. i notice these insects everyday in the hours of the sun swarming around in large gangs flying almost like electrons in a given cloud of space. they don't ever fly out of the limits of these cloud-like spaces despite a continuous flurry of wings and movement within. its amazing to watch one of these clouds, dynamic within and static in its spatial relationship with the outside. and each of these clouds surprisingly, is located exactly at the same spot at exactly the level of my face, every single day. not just that, each of these clouds is always basking in the sun and is in the middle of a pedestrian cemented path. such that i am always walking into these. and if that's not amazing enough, each of these swarms always covers half the air-width of the footpath, almost consciously leaving space for a human head to pass neighborly-by without scissoring the cloud. and yet if i am not mindful of them, my head walks straight into the cloud. and this, when the entire width of the path is equally sunny.

anyone else seen them??

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