As I approached Adeline, walking to BART for a ride to the city, pigeons soared above the street, a great opening in flight. Then, in the count of one second, they landed on a minaret atop a building.

It was as though with a click, their flight collapsed from covering easily a thousand square yards of sky, a great open hand, to landing all at once, a synchronized perching on a small structure, a closing fist.

It felt like watching all the galaxies and star clusters returning to a single point, or watching in reverse the film of an explosion, or collapsing a Bach melody to all the notes played at once. Bam. It seemed like an amazing phenomenon that goes little noticed because it happens every day, a miracle of synchronized intention and movement among separate organisms.