William Shakespeare

"There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow." - William Shakespeare

From the final act of Hamlet. The entire quote reads:

"Not a whit, we defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all."

Augury was the ancient Roman practice of divination through birds (the root of words like "auspicious" and "inauguration"). To illustrate the concept of an invisible design as visualized through birds, we chose a "murmuration," a flock of tens of thousands or more birds. Although each individual bird is simply reacting to the birds immediately around it, the murmuration as a whole becomes an organic, undulating chaotic structure, a living system with its own emergent will.

Even the smallest sacrifices are part of a grander design that we cannot fathom with our limited perception. Perhaps the "will of the Gods” that our ancestors were trying to divine was simply an emergent structure we might call a murmuration of humans.