Swooping

Far from being an empty void, the space around Earth is a jungle of invisible fields and tiny particles. It’s draped with twisted magnetic field lines and swooping electrons and ions.

With frigate birds swooping above and the high-speed dorado slicing through the water below, flying fish are, literally, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Around age ten, in the garden in the Philippines, I imagined my hand or a paper plane was a gliding and swooping spacecraft. In North America, I did the same thing with my hand moving through the mists in a horizontal grocery freezer.

I rarely dared to write there after dark, but once in a while, gripped by the need to type a fresh version of a certain passage, I would type by candle or kerosene lamp and be treated to their [bats'] swoopings through the room.

With a huge rush of wind a swooping eagle dropped from out of the night sky.