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Good morning. Like many others I have spent the last couple of days with my eyes trained upwards, hoping for my first sighting of a returning swift. Each year the beginning of May marks the end of their long migration from Africa, and each year I wait anxiously for a first sight of their safe return. And then, yesterday morning, I was rewarded with a sudden swooping flash past my window, the dark curve of their wings joyful against the blue spring sky.

In this country our relationship with birds is complicated. Millions of us tune into Springwatch, and we spend more than twice as much on bird food as the rest of Europe put together. But we also tear down hedgerows, net our buildings, and make liberal use of pesticides. Last week the Â鶹Éç reported on a 75 year-long study of Great Tits which found that the changing climate has pushed egg-laying up to three weeks earlier than usual. Birds are considered a good indicator of the state of wildlife in the UK, and their numbers have consistently declined over the last half century. As our ability to manage our environments increases, we are remaking the world in our own image. We can look around us and see where humans have intervened to protect and sustain ecologies, and where humans have intervened for the benefit of a few powerful people. When the world feels like it’s growing more chaotic and the future feels threatened, it is easy to give up investing in the fates of these other creatures – to see them as insignificant, or even a barrier to our own flourishing.

Last Sunday was the feast day of Julian of Norwich, a 14th century mystic who lived through hunger and plague, political upheaval and violence, and personal suffering. A woman who wrote in the vernacular, her life was insignificant in the hierarchy of the Church. But during an illness which brought her close to death, she had a series of visions about the love of God for creation. In perhaps the most famous of those visions, she sees a tiny thing in the palm of her hand, the size of a hazelnut. She is told that this tiny thing is everything that is made. Julian is astonished that something so small could keep on existing. But then comes the response: it lives, and will keep living, because God loves it. Julian sees that littleness and fragility are not at odds with ultimate significance. As the sky fills with swifts returning for another spring, I am reminded that it is not foolish to delight in these little creatures. Perhaps in doing so we might learn to love the world as though it is not ours to control.