I am falling in love with this place. It is not hard to see why…

It is a place on the edge. Today the sun shone, but tomorrow is a different story. A big storm is heading our way, or so we are told by the man in the shop.

Already we are getting a feel for the people who live here. Some are born and bred islers, but many others have ended up here.

We had a conversation with one of the RSPB wardens the other day and I asked if he had seen ‘anything interesting’ which (despite my ignorance of most things bird) is an ornothological way of asking if there is anything rare to be seen in these parts. A silly question as the skies here are teeming with feathers. His answer intrigued me though, because he said that the ‘interesting’ birds only come in with a wind from the east, which blows birds over from Scandanavia and beyond.

It turns out that birds are not immune from the wind.

It turns out that birds, like people, are capable of being displaced, scattered, forced into alien places.

Birds can be refugees.

We are all outsiders elsewhere and birds are no different.

I was thinking about the deep connection thing again – how we are all part of The Christ, the god who loves things by becoming them; how the deepest part of all our individual beings is a one-ness with all things.

Or perhaps and am-ness that we share with all things.

It is easy to romanticise in wild places like this, to see the animals here as transcendent.

But they too have to contend with the wind.