For this piece, I drew on two main sources of inspiration, both of which I have used before as themes but never together. In his book The White Goddess, Robert Graves details an ancient mandala concerning high-flying migrating birds such as geese and cranes. He considered that their trumpeting calls were held to herald the coming of winter and suggest the Old European goddess in her death aspect (many British folk tales testify to this...), but paradoxically the common V-formation of flying geese suggested the V- or Y-chevron shape found in Old European statuary indicative of lfie and fertility. This death-in-life aspect of flying birds I have combined with a reconstruction of the bird maiden, told in myths from Ireland to Papua New Guinea, in which a goddess is disguised as a swan but marries a mortal man.