Risky Nests and Necessary Songs

 

                                                                           Risky Nests

The scatter of dried reeds on my front porch a few weeks ago was curious. The next day, small crumbs of earth. A crushed pine cone.

Someone is building something, I told my husband.

Several years running, a swallow has built her nest in a declivity at the top of the column that supports our tiny city porch.

I peered up there. Nothing. I stepped off the porch and studied the eaves. Nope. The gutter. Nada. Maybe it was a tunnel-dweller, burrowing underneath.

A week went by. We came and went, mounting the two steps up from the front walk, bending to pick up the mail or a package. We raked, gathered the many fallen twigs, bagged and tied, potted pansies.

The mystery remained. The occasional grasses, an invisible builder.

Then on Friday night, we had a rare evening out. I flipped on the small wrought front lanterns, which are rusting and chipping from their years of guiding us home at night. As we drifted out into the evening, I turned to be sure they were on.

There it was. We had totally missed it for looking in the wrong places. A swallow’s nest, tucked on top of the lantern, secured by nothing more than the shingles behind it, and the skill of her construction.

I returned to the porch and studied it. It was masterful, conforming to the shape of the lamp, sagging slightly at the sides, a few stray bits of weave loose as a school girl’s hair after a day of play. I rose on my toes to see the inner chamber, a meticulous cup of silk-like fibers – found I couldn’t imagine where. Soft and awaiting her soon-to-be-laid eggs.

How would this possibly work? The porch is continuous chaos and noise – people arriving and departing, deliveries, school buses, dogs and their walkers, to say nothing of the landscapers and their leaf blowers. Surely, she could have found a less exposed and vulnerable place to build her annual home.

                                                                          On Wings and Prayers

Birds are often my harbingers and teachers, guides to rebuilding, when I need to.

I may not have any idea at the moment what new life is waiting to emerge, but we live in a time when it is urgently important to re-construct refuges in which, even in the midst of chaos – natural and political – we can be safe, close to home, and warmed by the lights that have always lit our way into the world and welcomed us back.

I look again at the swallow’s nest.

In many ways, this was a safe choice; in other ways, a risky one. Her brood will be close to a solid structure, away from the wind and hawks. My home, my church, the books I love, the regular rhythms of industry and rest, solitude and community, have brought me this far.

Panic — for me, as for the bird — would be disastrous. Re-planting myself where I am not familiar with sources of intellectual, spiritual and actual nourishment, would be disorienting to the point of peril. Though others have made this choice, for me it is a risk not worth taking.

The risk the swallow has taken, however, is the risk of exposure. She hasn’t taken refuge in the rafters, where no one even knows she exists. For whatever reason, she is making herself known. True, she will be sheltered by her well-designed nest, but as soon as her brood is hatched, every predator who comes near the house will know she is there. Sing, no doubt, she will in time. Sing her new babies will, for sure.

                                                                         Necessary Songs

Which brings me to our stories in a hard time. To our nests, our risk-taking, and our songs.

Recently I read an article about the number of universities increasingly willing to speak back to the Trump administration’s attempts to control their freedom of thought, expression, and independence. The article described something called “social contagion,” whereby a courageous solitary act of principle over time inspires others to step up, join forces, and begin to shift the public conversation (and opinion).

What until now has seemed a scattered and incoherent response to the assault on fundamental norms and the law, is becoming more coherent. People are speaking their truth.

In this Christian season of Eastertide, we read stories of Jesus’s followers, scattered, frightened, confused by the event of his crucifixion. Many returned to “private life” – fishing, to their villages, no longer identifying with the movement that transformed their lives and world around them with healing and freedom from physical and social ills.

Three times in these post-crucifixion stories, a “stranger” speaks up – tells them what, in their heart of hearts, they already know or long to hear. It is enough for them to understand the critical importance of their bearing witness to their truth, in the face of oppressive empire and corrupt hierarchies.

I know that part of my journey this Eastertide is to find my own song in the chaos of the Now, to find those with whom I can sustain the values dear to me. A place in which to nurture a new hope that can only emerge from my efforts at a meaningful courage.

For the time being, I will use the side door going out and coming in. I will give the swallow as much of a home as I can, until it is time for her chicks to fly,