Vultures: The Center Will Not Hold
The force of nature remains beyond the reach of control.
Vultures: The Center Will Not Hold
Pre-dawn light is quiet, expectant, almost holy in the potential it carries.
I felt welcome as I entered the soft stretch of the new day.
Above, motion caught my attention. Almond-shaped lace patterns of moving darkness came my way.
The vultures are here. They return every year when the season transitions from winter into the brief desert spring. Their migration is the annunciation that winter is complete.
I counted forty-two flying over me, and yet I knew I was not close to being accurate. There were more, hundreds more. They came not so much in flocks as in waves, and the waves moved at different altitudes, some so high their specks looked like vitreous floaters, others so close we locked eyes. A client once told me about kettling, where birds create a vortex riding thermals and spiral while spreading, speeding together with a shared compass.
An hour passed before I could no longer stand facing east, counting birds with large wingspans. Dim dawn became white brightness. I had chores to do, words to write, a dog to walk, clients to sit with. Inadvertently participating in this ritual of migration imprinted me with confirmation that life can still be normal, that traditions in Nature do exist, and perhaps that today is special. Had I not stepped outside to say farewell to the night sky, I would have missed the entire force of Nature. The experience was both a security check that some things continue in ceremony and an unexpected gift to begin the day.
Watching the birds spiral in widening gyres, stratified by altitude, yet moving with shared instinct, I was reminded that power also organizes itself in patterns. Not all migrations are seasonal. Some are structural.
I was a clinical therapist working in domestic violence, victim witness advocacy, and complex PTSD for three years, serving 804 clients across 5,200 hours. Sexual abuse, emotional and psychological torture, and misogyny were not abstractions. They were daily realities. And yet I carried a belief, almost stubbornly, that when society provides the elements of homeostasis: food, housing, education, creative possibility, rule of law, access to dignity, people move away from cruelty. I believed that stability makes healing possible.
I once said that our experience of birth sets the level of pain and trauma we can withstand. If we survive birth, we can survive much else. I believed suffering, however profound, was shaped by lack, by limitation, by not knowing what choices exist to change one’s possibility.
But some systems are not accidents of deprivation. They are designed.
Reading about how Epstein used his power to exclude women scientists from professional advancement, not casually, but as policy, reveals something far deeper than individual pathology. His predatory crimes against children were already enough to expose moral collapse. Yet, the reach into foundations of education, technology, science, medicine, and government reveals stratification that mirrors those widening gyres. Some rise higher on thermals, while others are held below. Altitude becomes insulation.
Misogyny, at this scale, is not merely personal animus, it is structural exclusion. It is gatekeeping codified. It is power protecting itself.
At an archetypal level, the feminine has long symbolized generativity, embodiment, relational intelligence, and creative threshold.
Women conceive, host, and give birth to life. This is not symbolic. It is biological reality. What cultures attach to that reality, however, is symbolic and political. When power is defined as domination rather than participation, embodied generativity can become something to regulate rather than revere. Some men integrate this difference with humility and collaboration. Others experience the limits of their own embodiment as a loss of control. When that tension remains unexamined within the masculine psyche, it can project outward as systems of exclusion, as gatekeeping, as punishment of the very bodies that hold what cannot be commanded. Misogyny, at scale, is not simply hatred. It is anxiety organized into policy. When cultures organize themselves around domination rather than collaboration, those qualities are perceived as threats, rather than partners. The result is punishment disguised as hierarchy. Diminishment justified as merit. Exclusion reframed as neutrality. Misogyny, in this sense, is not primitive hatred. It is an attempt to discipline what resists ownership.
This is how systems spiral. Stratification becomes normalized. Defensiveness becomes entitlement. Power circles itself, reinforcing its own lift.
And yet, dawn still comes.
Stepping into the light this morning and watching the vultures arrive en masse was an unexpected gift. Winter has ended. Migration continues. The force of nature remains beyond the reach of control. Many women know this instinctively. Increasingly, many men are recognizing it as well.
The center does not hold forever. The gyre widens. As Yeats wrote in his own time of rupture, watching birds of prey wheel above him, things fall apart so that something else may reorganize. The center will not hold.
May the wider lace patterns of moving darkness come more my way. May I keep watching. May I keep stepping outside before the day fully declares itself, because ceremony persists, even when systems collapse.
written by Bren Littleton
Tin Flea Press c. 2026