She never ceased to wonder at the incredible power of birds for adaptation. These had flown perhaps a thousand miles from the South to raise their families in the northern prairie. Some people thought migrations were a habit left over from the Ice Age, but nobody really knew why birds migrated. Why didn’t they just stay in the South all the time? Perhaps it was their migrations that kept them hardy and pliable and able to survive drastic changes in the world. Perhaps people ought to migrate too, and never strive to put down roots at all. It often seemed to her that the desire of human beings to own land was the cause of all their troubles. Their desire kept them enslaved, from one generation to the next. Yet how would a human being know who he was, without roots?
Lois Phillips Hudson
The Bones of Plenty
Quoted in “Patterns of Migration” by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma on Topology
