Birdwatching

 

Originally January 11, 2025

We came home from errands to the sight of hundreds of robins flying from our neighbor's Christmas holly trees and our maple trees. Apparently robins feast on the berries in the Christmas holly tree during the wintertime when other food is scarce. I immediately took my phone out and started taking videos and pictures, but they didn't come out so great, except for this portrait of the berries. Maybe God was asking me to take advantage of this. I decided to sit on our back porch and watch the birds fly from tree to tree, sometimes resting, sometimes feasting. We let the dogs out and their barks sent the hundreds of birds flying. They would quickly return, perhaps remembering that dogs can't reach the heights that birds can. The sounds of the chirps and wings made it all feel calm and made me feel present in the moment. Now I'm considering getting a bird feeder and binoculars.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Contemplating My Spiritual Practice

Image
I can't start this by saying "I think" because the reality is that I know. I have always found beauty and God everywhere regardless of how much my upbringing told me that it was only in certain spaces and that only certain people would earn the divine prize in heaven at the end of it all.  I know that I am interspiritual or a mystic. That has been hard for me to say. I wish I did not need labels, but I’ve come to realize that the box a label creates often helps me understand myself and others better. And once I understand it, I can work on freeing myself from it, or at least hold it more loosely. One of my first boxes was given to me. I was raised in strict, dogmatic religions, born and raised Catholic until age 13, and then Mormon from 13 to 19. In my 20s, I was agnostic and mostly followed the New Age and New Thought spirituality. I also explored Buddhism and Hinduism, and practiced yoga. By my 30s, I had incorporated African spirituality into that mix, and eventually, ...
Read more

A Dominican Adventure

Image
There’s no other way to explain the trip: it was an adventure. I had no idea how much planning, coordinating, and anxiety would go into what was meant to be a family vacation and research grant. I was excited to go. I’d always wanted to visit Samaná, a region steeped in history and culture that felt both familiar and foreign. Born and raised in Harlem, a predominantly Black historic neighborhood in New York City bordering Washington Heights, a Dominican neighborhood, I’ve long been curious about the ways these worlds intersect, not just in NYC but in the Dominican Republic itself. Samaná held a unique place in my imagination, having been intended as a Black nation in the early 1800s when it was all Haiti, following the Haitian Revolution. It was a trip of a lifetime, and I wanted my family to experience it with me. After all, I hadn’t been to the DR in 25 years! It felt like discovering it all over again. Our adventure began early, on Sunday, June 1. We woke up at 4 a.m. and began what...
Read more

One of Them Days

Image
The movie  One of Them Days  is funny, but when one of them days happens to me, I don’t find it funny. Although, admittedly, nothing in my day beats the craziness in the movie. Today was my students’ long-awaited trip for their civic grant project. We toured the mayor’s office and met him in person. That alone is exciting, nerve-racking, and purely exhausting. Trying to keep seven- and eight-year-olds quiet and orderly in an official government building is hard work, especially when they’re used to so much freedom at their progressive private independent school. Follow the tour guide? More like the tour guide shall follow me! I started the trip already tired, thanks to: The logistics of planning every detail of the trip. Being on your period. Seasonal allergies that make your throat unbearably dry. Questioning if it’s all the wine—or anxiety whispering it might be mold somewhere. Regular ol’ morning parenting, where everyone is grumpy, and no one wants to wake up or get going....
Read more