It’s Time for the Geese to Fly Again

In Northern Europe, where I grew up, in autumn it is often possible to see wild geese flying south to winter in warmer climes. Recently I was reminded of this when I came across a talk I had given a few years previously in which I used the southward flight of the wild geese as an analogy.

In that talk I quoted the Danish writer Soren Kierkegaard who wrote about the wild geese that flew over his property every autumn. In particular he described one year when some geese landed on his property and rather than fly on, stayed in his farmyard and saw out, what turned out to be, a mild winter.

The remarkable thing was that the next autumn, as the wild geese flew over in response to the age-old southern call, the geese in his farmyard became agitated at the honking overhead as if stirred by some…