Infinity

I saw it with my eyes closed, in a quiet moment.

At first it was dark — nothing at all. Then a flock of birds split the darkness. They were fast. So fast I couldn't hold on to them. So I painted them flying out of the frame; they would never have stayed inside it.

What moves me about a flock is that no one is in charge. There is no lead bird. Each one watches only its nearest neighbours, and each one sets the direction, and from that the whole body turns as if it had decided something together. Thousands of separate choices that, from the outside, look like a single mind.