Darting Beaks, Imploding Worlds
At one point this week, I was unloading my car in the middle of an unexpected rain. In one arm was our new puppy—brought home to give us sanity and company during our sheltering-at-home (and all God’s dog owners said…that’s comical). In the other was a load of toilet paper for which I’d traded a bottle of olive oil—a sentence that sounds like I’ve traveled here from 1914. In front was my son, half listening and distracted, already soaked from the bellybutton down, somehow.
When we got to our door, I reach for the mail: a single ad for Sirius XM sprouting out of the box next to a newly built bird nest. I was already stressed, which feels important to say.
As I grabbed ahold of the envelope, something terrifying happened. The fiercely beating wings of a robin, lunging from the pile of twigs, scaled my arm and brushed through my hair, sending chills to my kidneys. And when I tell you I screamed as if I was being stabbed by every single one of Caesar’s betrayers, I mean it.
My heart took a one-way ticket to my ears; my son’s eyes filled with water; my dog contorted his body like hell itself was being exorcised out of him; and my husband rushed to the scene to see how much blood must have been spilled in such a display of drama.
“Get rid of that nest,” I demanded, panting.
Later, as I was cleaning with Lizzo and Bruno in my earbuds, trying to become a better person, Luke noted, “You may want to sweep the sticks off of the front porch while you have the broom out.” Good call, I nodded.
One push of the handle is all it took for a mound of some mama’s hard work to disappear into our front yard. Left behind? A streak of oozy yellow and frail pink fragments of shell. I dropped the broom and ran to the edge of the grass, nudging leaves around to discover two intact, rose speckled eggs strewn about—family.
Feeling that tinge of regret that pricks the back of your ribs when you can’t take something back, I knelt down and began to gather the debris, fashioning a nest on the side of our flowerbed like I had never heard a warning about touching birds or birds’ things. I tumbled the thimble sized treasure into its middle. She probably won’t return, I know. They probably won’t form. Still, I tried because I was sorry.
I keep thinking about them, partly because I am a glutton for punishment and partly because it all feels poetic. Mainly, they have served me a metaphor for the damage that is done, not by fear and shock, but in the reaction to fear and shock. Which is not irrelevant for these days.
Good worlds collide. And sometimes no evil is to blame for our suffering; it is just what comes with the territory of a beautifully tragic, finite existence—wired to end and begin again. But patience—or even a moment of consideration—can halt a multitude of things, can stop the bleeding.
Love is patient, they say. Most of the time I have thought about this as it pertains to the will to tolerate something intolerable just a bit longer. But maybe it also applies to the moment that falls between threat and response, in that sacred window of consideration.
I cannot control what scares me—from darting beaks to a world seemingly imploding around us. But I can take a moment before tearing something or someone else apart, to wonder what is and what is not worth it.
Sweet little eggs. They weren’t nothing.