Read the whole series on home here.
Our Christmas wreath is still hanging on the porch of our home. The bright red bow remains, but no longer pops bright against the winter greyscale snowscape. The evergreen boughs have turned brittle and brown, and the bow is now easily upstaged by the blooming geraniums, roses, peonies, and pansies opening to the warm summer sun. In late February, when I went to take the wreath down and place it in the compost pile, I found a nest built on the very top of the wreath, so I let it be. It was too high for me to see into the nest, but I watched as a bird came and went. We startled each other often; I would climb the porch steps, returning home, to be greeted by a bird swooping out and landing on a tree branch close by, where they could watch me, and once I was inside, return to their nest. This continued as winter turned to spring, and eventually the nest was empty again.
Sometime in late April or early May–as my morning prayer practices shifted from quilt-curled inside to the front porch swing–I got the step ladder and went to remove the wreath only to find a second nest, this one built in the wreath’s bottom cradle. I put the stepladder away, and left the wreath alone. Soon there were five small, speckled, beautiful eggs inside. Each morning, as I carried my coffee outside, a bird would swoop from the nest to the nearby branch, and watch me as I settled in. Then, they would return to the nest, eying me. I started talking with the bird each morning, asking about their nest, their eggs, promising I would do it no harm. My beloved and I began to greet the bird if we returned home after dark, letting them know they could stay put, that we could all rest with as much ease as this world allows.
I turned to my Birds of Iowa field guide, and came to recognize the brown thrasher that was now sharing the porch home with me. Brown thrashers are foragers, using their long bills to “thrash” through dirt or dead leaves in search of food. They are also exuberant singers, gifting the world with perhaps the largest song repertoire of any bird that calls this continent home. They sing more than 1,100 different songs, sometimes imitating other birds. They form long-term bonds; they deepen into and stay in relation. Their nests are often taken over by brown-headed cowbirds, who I’ve started to think of, perhaps unfairly and certainly anthropocentrically, as colonizers who let the thrashers do all the work to create home, only to swoop in and lay their eggs in the nests they did not build. I started keeping an eye out for any cowbirds, and chased away any I spotted. I learned, however, that thrashers put up resistance, and try to push out any cowbird eggs laid in their nests. They also, I learned–luckily for me from the field guide and not directly from the bird–are fierce defenders of their nests, sometimes striking humans and dogs who get too close hard enough to draw blood.
Y’all, has it become clear, how extraordinarily captivating was the multispecies drama unfolding on our front porch this spring?
Toward the end of May, I found myself in the midst of multiple whirlwinds of transition. The campus ministry where I chaplain was pushed from our long-term nest; the church that owns the building announced their plans to launch a new ministry by a name much like ours from that very space over the summer. So, we were packing and sorting and grieving and moving most of our things into a storage unit, and a few of our things into the space where another ministry, aptly called the Beloved Community Initiative, was generously allowing us to nest for the coming year.
One morning, when the losses were feeling particularly heavy, I went to the porch in the morning and found two tiny, translucent hatchlings on the ground, having fallen from the nest. At first I thought they were dead, and then noticed they were breathing, and then saw them opening and closing their little mouths, silently, breaking my heart wide open. Crying, I grabbed my beloved, and together we tried to discern the best thing for these two little ones. Eventually, gloved, we carefully returned the two hatchlings to the nest.
Every day, we would check on the hatchlings, becoming nestlings. Our nest, too, was in transition; after three long pandemic years of nestling in together, sharing the sweetnesses and also the challenges of so much constant togetherness, we found ourselves creatively repatterning to include more spaciousness this summer. When my beloved was traveling, visiting friends in a nearby city, I sent updates on the nests–ours as well as the thrashers’. When I was away, they did the same. Look at the little beaks, opening and closing! Five tiny bodies are moving with heartbeat and breath–all five are still alive!
I learned that if a baby bird is a hatchling–eyes still closed, no feathers, just tiny wisps of down–they need to be returned to the nest if they have any hope of surviving. I learned that nestlings–eyes now open, feathers just starting to emerge from protective sheaths–are also unable to make home outside the nest. Once a nestling becomes a fledgling–feathered, not yet great fliers, but able to walk, hop, or flutter–returning them to their nest is not recommended. Some songbirds, increasingly endangered, will push particularly noisy fledglings from the nest to deter predators, and avoid losing their entire brood. Survival can be complex, like that. Hatchlings and nestlings depend on the care of others to survive. Fledglings, however, while often still fed and watched over by parents, are learning to find their way in this precious, precarious world. I learned that brown thrashers fledge quickly, sometimes leaving the nest within nine days of hatching.
Eventually, while I was visiting friends in a different nearby city, the update from my beloved came: the babies are flying! I returned home to find one, single fledgling, fully feathered, peering at me through wide eyes, tucked in the nest. I settled onto the porch, and watched as it flew to the nearby tree, and perched on one of the branches that I had watched their parent perch on, in order to watch me, and keep watch over the nest.
It is mid-June, and the Christmas wreath is still hanging on our porch. We don’t know how long these fledglings may continue to return for a while, to rest. The wreath, and the nest, will remain until it is no longer in use. I do not love the rather impressive accumulation of bird poop, now decorating my morning prayer perch. I do not love the shabby, spent wreath, still adorning the porch. But oh my goodness, I do love those fledglings, and the way they have shaped this season, and how they are surviving, and what they are teaching me about nests, and nesting, and home.
Lucille Clifton wrote about “the bond of live things everywhere.” We know, some far too well, how these bonds can bind, becoming bondage, and brutality. And also, we know, through deep, ancestral wisdom, how bonds–repatterned otherwise–can set us free, both holding and healing.
We build nests, and we dream of the hatchlings that will one day fill them. We find ourselves in empty nests, through loss or violence or choice or the natural order of things. We fall from nests, and are pushed out of them. When we are lucky, and blessed, we may find ourselves gently returned to nests we were not ready to leave. And, sometimes we are not. And, sometimes we do not survive. But sometimes, despite extraordinary odds, and no shortage of predators, we do.
We protect our nests, and–if we are invested in collective life, shared life, the bond of live things everywhere–we dance with the complexity of protecting our nests and broods without neglecting or endangering the nests and needs of others.
Because we make home in this world by companioning each other, learning how to live with and for each other. We come home in connection. We find home in relation. We know we are home, when the live things everywhere are free to sing, and forage, and nest–held, protected, delighted in, able to rest and grow and fly.
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.